Ahead of Turkish President Erdoğan’s planned state visit to Berlin on Friday, November 17th, German MPs are urging Chancellor Olaf Scholz to sign yet another migration deal with the Turkish leader, who according to reports, is allowing migrants to board planes to Belgrade, from where they are smuggled into Europe’s Schengen Area.
Instead of having to scale border fences and evade police along Turkey’s border with Greece before going on to traverse the Balkan route into Europe, migrants can simply board a flight from Istanbul to Belgrade on Serbia’s state airline for a mere €122. Once migrants arrive in Belgrade, Serbian authorities do little to prevent them from proceeding northward, where Germany is often the final destination.
In the month of September alone, Germany’s Federal Police recorded 1,970 cases of human trafficking, 406 of which were detected along Germany’s border with the Czech Republic. In comments given to BILD, a spokesman for the Federal Police said that apprehended migrants “reported flying to Serbia and then being smuggled into Germany.”
From the Serbian capital, migrants are often packed in the back of lorries before being smuggled across multiple borders to their destination. A “significant increase in so-called container smuggling” along the Balkan route was recorded by German authorities in the third quarter of 2023.
‘Container smuggling,’ as defined by Germany’s Federal Police, is the “inhumane transport of people by means of vehicles in a manner not intended for the transport of people, with an associated danger to the lives of those being smuggled due to a lack of oxygen, dehydration, hypothermia or an increased risk of injury in the event of accidents.”
Reacting to the revelation, CDU MP and foreign expert Knut Abraham said:
These flights show that without Turkey there will be no control of the routes. Scholz must now immediately persuade Erdoğan to sign a new migration agreement.
Presently, it is unclear where exactly migrants are originating from and what sort of documentation they have. Whether the Turkish and Serbian authorities are complicit in, or just tacitly approve of, what’s taking place is also not known.
Andrej Mitic, the International Secretary of the Serbian national-conservative Dveri party, told The European Conservative he believes Aleksandar Vučić’s government’s failure, or refusal, to adequately police illegal migratory movements represents a “breach of the Serbian constitution and its law.”
Mitic went even further, saying that the Vučić’s government’s “complicity in human trafficking poses an immense risk to Serbian security, social peace, and to the country’s economy.” He added that the mainstream press in Serbia has refused to cover the ongoing problem, which has shielded the government from public scrutiny.
