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A human smuggler's love story [1]

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Date: 2024-03 

Hamid and Bushra met on Facebook in 2012 by commenting on a mutual friend’s post. Today they use social media to find clients as human smugglers – migrants, asylum seekers and refugees looking to cross the Turkish-Greek border safely.

“We laugh about it now,” Hamid said, “but that is how we met.”

Like many smugglers active on this border, Hamid and Bushra started out as migrants. “We learned this job by trying to make the route ourselves many times,” Hamid said.

But, unlike their competition, Hamid and Bushra are also in love.

For three years after crossing paths on Facebook, Hamid travelled the 340 kilometres from Casablanca to Tangier once a week to see Bushra. They decided to build a life together. But to do that, they knew they had to leave Morocco.

“I am Arab and she is Amazigh (Berber),” Hamid explained. “Even if we are both Muslim, our families wouldn’t accept us getting married.”

So they decided to go to Europe.

In January 2016, Bushra sold her gold necklace and earrings before taking a taxi to the airport. Hamid was waiting with two tickets to Turkey. “We arrived in Istanbul with €600 between the two of us,” Hamid said. “That’s what we started with.”

A couple in need of a job

Six hundred euros wasn’t enough to get them safely over the Turkish border into Greece. To cross the Evros river, they needed jobs.

They moved to Esenyurt, one of Istanbul’s most densely populated neighbourhoods. It’s where many migrants temporarily set up shop while they arrange passage. Hamid found work as a labourer on construction sites, and Bushra as a seamstress in one of Esenyurt’s many informal textile factories.

“It is here that lots of European brands make their clothes for cheap,” Bushra said. “I was sewing clothes, thinking ‘maybe one day I’ll buy this in Europe.’”

It took eight months to gather the money they needed to pay their first smuggler. He was a Syrian man with a good reputation for getting groups over the border and onward to Thessaloniki. The all-inclusive price was €1500 for both of them.

“Dealing with smugglers in the past taught me how to deal with clients now,” Hamid said. “Many smugglers overpromise, saying the trip is easy and fast. I try not to do that. I explain the rationale behind the price, and people understand it is risky for them and for me too.”

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/a-human-smugglers-love-story-migration-turkey-greece-border/

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