Human Trafficking Kills: 1,000+ ‘Unmarked Graves’ Across EU Migrant Routes

LAMPEDUSA, ITALY - MAY 24: Refugees and migrants are seen swimming and yelling for assita
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Oliver JJ Lane

A report in the Guardian newspaper on the growing phenomenon of unmarked graves across Europe highlights the exceptional danger migrants are put in by callous people smugglers, who grow rich on human suffering and hollow promises.

Large numbers of migrants have been buried without identification across Europe, with large groupings at busy migration route crossings, a report claims. At least 1,015 graves have been identified, says a report in the left-wing Guardian newspaper, which calls them “unmarked” in the sense those committed to them are unknown individuals.

Many of the graves cited are marked with plain stones, simple crosses, or even inscriptions referring to which migrant boat shipwreck the body is believed to have come from. Most graves mapped ring the Mediterranean, with a large cluster on Sicily and another in the Balkans, but others have been discovered on the Polish border with Belarus, and even in northern France at the English Channel.

As the paper notes: “across European countries the issue remains a legislative void, with no centralised data, nor any uniform process for dealing with the bodies” and that the 1,000 graves identified are just the “tip of the iceberg”, given tens of thousands are believed to have died.

Europe’s scattergun approach to mass migration, being both extremely permissive and restrictive by turns has created the tragic side effect of sustaining a high level of demand for human traffickers. The situation of many years standing is that border police in Europe will attempt to push back irregular migrants at the borders but once inside European nations arrivals are very rarely deported, and the existence of considerable black markets for illegal migrant labour, are draw factors for migration.

Unfortunately for those migrants willing to put their lives in the hands of the people smugglers who promise passage to Europe in return for thousands of dollars, too often the money paid buys not guaranteed passage to European welfare states but a place on an unseaworthy boat. Thousands have drowned trying to cross to Europe on the Mediterranean in the past decade, with tens of thousands missing, presumed dead.

While people smugglers demonstrate their callousness with deadly crossings of crowded unreliable boats, their violence towards their own ‘customers’ is often more direct too. As long reported, traffickers have tortured, raped, and killed those who paid them for a crossing, and fatal migrant smuggler gun battles are now an emerging issue in central Europe.

As argued now in the United Kingdom as migration returns to the front rank of political concerns by making it clear migrants who come to the country illegally will not be able to stay, the ‘pull factors’ drawing migrants north recede and the business case of murderous human traffickers evaporates.

This has been seen most clearly globally with Australia, which once was the target of a considerable and lucrative human trafficking industry which moved large numbers of people across open ocean on small boats in an attempt to force the national border. The trade was not only illegal, it was also highly dangerous, and one of the great humanitarian achievements of Australia instituting a hard zero-tolerance “turn back the boats” approach to people smugglers has been the death rate of boat migrants plummeting to zero.

As information published by the Australian government for would-be migrants considering parting with their cash to try and sneak to the country states: “If you get on a boat without a visa, you will not end up in Australia… these rules apply to everyone: families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled. No matter who you are or where you are from, you will not make Australia home.

“Think again before you waste your money, people smugglers are lying”.

As reported by Breitbart London, in 2017 Australia marked 900 days without a single migrant boat. At the same time, thousands of migrants were drowning in the Mediterranean in bids to reach Europe. As said by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said at the time: “If you want to stop the deaths [and] you want to stop the drownings, you have got to stop the boats… Effective border protection is not for the squeamish, but it is absolutely necessary to save lives and to preserve nations. The truly compassionate thing to do is: stop the boats and stop the deaths.”

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