Human cargo delivered to a cruel fate

Former military doctor Mohammad Hamrah lifts his shirt to show a long scar on his abdomen, the evidence of three unsuccessful kidney operations. He needs treatment in a Western hospital or he knows he will die.

A year ago, the 48-year-old from Kabul sold everything he owned and took out loans to pay the Taliban the $12,000 they demanded to get himself and his son from Afghanistan to the West.

The traffickers took his documents and brought him overland through Europe, though Hamrah has no idea how long the journey took nor the route taken. He says he had no choice but to keep moving with them.

Hours after the traffickers brought him over the Czech border and left him in the German state of Saxony, he was arrested by German border police. "I told them: `I left my country to save my life. I am a sick man, please help me.' They told me they would deport me back to the Czech Republic because I am an illegal immigrant," says Hamrah. "But what choice did I have? How can I be a legal immigrant?" While he awaits the outcome of his asylum application in the Czech Republic, he is a resident at Cerveny Ujezd, a camp for asylum-seekers 100 kilometres north of Prague. The run-down former Russian army base is home to 500 of the 6,000 people currently seeking asylum in the Czech Republic. In the decade since the Velvet Revolution, the Czech Republic has become a major transit country for illegal immigrants bound for Western Europe. It is also becoming an increasingly attractive place for traffickers anxious to get rid of their cargo.

As the number of asylum-seekers here continues to grow - 1,200 people applied for asylum in January this year alone, equal to the annual total for 1992 - so too do the cases of human trafficking.

Czech alien and border police report that trafficked people comprised 24 per cent of the 32,000 illegal immigrants detained at Czech border crossings in 1999, the last year for which figures are available. The largest flow of human traffic comes from Afghanistan, Romania and Sri Lanka. "Human trafficking has become a phenomenon by stealth," says Anna Grusova of the Czech Helsinki Committee, a non-governmental organisation working with asylum-seekers in Prague. She encountered her first case two years ago, but today the stories of trafficking in the Czech Republic are as regular as they are horrific. "Last year, five Sri Lankans were found abandoned by traffickers near a camp for asylum-seekers," says Grusova. "They had been tied up and their hands and legs were infected with gangrene and had to be amputated."

Human trafficking in the Czech Republic has increased since new immigration legislation was introduced last year. Unlike those in most EU countries, immigrants in the Czech Republic are entitled to work as soon as they apply for asylum and they are not obliged to live in asylum centres. However, the Ukrainian mafia is now trafficking people to the Czech Republic and telling them to apply for asylum. That done, the mafia bosses collect the people, confiscate their documents if they haven't done so already, and put them to work - legally - in brothels and on building sites for wages less than a quarter of what a Czech worker would earn.

The Czech government has a difficult balancing-act ahead: to maintain good relations with its non-EU neighbours but at the same time implement Schengen border controls to ease concerns about a possible wave of illegal immigrants from further east. The EU is putting pressure on Bosnia-Herzegovina to tighten its borders in another way, by threatening to withdraw vital funds for rebuilding the country's infrastructure. Sarajevo International Airport is dubbed "the springboard to Europe" in trafficking circles and the reason for the name becomes clear six days a week at 1.45 p.m., with the arrival of the Turkish Airlines flight from Ankara. Seconds after reaching passport control, the first passenger, a man in his early 20s claiming to be a tourist, is taken away into an adjacent interview room. Soon he is joined by seven other men and the questioning begins.

Last year, out of more than 31,000 migrants who arrived at Sarajevo airport, almost 25,000 are still unaccounted for and are presumed to have fled over the border into Croatia, Slovenia and Western Europe. At the same time, authorities estimate that a further 15,000 to 25,000 immigrants entered Bosnia through its land border with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The largest numbers of people disappearing into Bosnia are from Turkey, Tunisia and China. All they need to get into Bosnia is a passport, a return ticket and sufficient funds for the duration of their supposed "holiday". Patrick Telles, of the International Police Task Force at Sarajevo airport, says: "If you do a thorough interview, it's easy to determine who is genuine and who is not. The problem is we don't have the resources to do that and we only get 10 per cent of the people we could stop."

The problem is compounded by the fact that only four of the 400 border crossing points out of Bosnia are manned, a situation now being addressed by a new state border police service. Most of those deported are young men who have sold everything they had for fake documents and the promise of employment in Western Europe. Too often, though, they are dumped along the way, without money and with only fake documents, if any. In Sarajevo airport, the eight Turkish men in the small interview room wait nervously before being questioned in turn. Within half an hour, each is given a yellow deportation ticket and marched back to the plane they arrived on and sent back to Turkey.

Those who manage to get through passport control stay in hotels and safe houses in the run-down Pofalici district, two kilometres north of the city centre. Here they wait for the local traffickers to contact them. In a small, dirty cafe, a Bosnian man is making plans with two Turkish men. "Let's make a deal for tonight. We can bring you to the northern border like we said," says the Bosnian man in Turkish. "And the money?" he asks. "You can have the money tonight," says one of the Turkish men. "There will be five of us . . . " ". . . At 2,000 marks (£800) a head," says the Bosnian, finishing the sentence. The deal done, the three get up and head out into the snowy street, looking suspiciously in my direction.

Non-governmental organisations fear that a common EU policy on immigration, due in 2004, will simply seal EU borders and not address the problem of human trafficking. "EU governments need to accept the reality that we need controlled immigration and that sealing borders is not the answer," says Lucie Sladkova, head of the International Organisation for Migration in Prague. A common immigration policy would need to recognise human trafficking as a serious, growing crime, she argues. "Before 1989, people who brought others over borders to the West were heroes," she adds. "Now they are criminals and they must be punished."