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Criminals at Sea






The smuggling and trafficking of human beings has increased through the world, owing to the globalization process and other factors. The problem is exacerbated in size and seriousness by the growing involvement of organized crime groups. The smuggling of migrants by these organized crime groups disrupts established immigration policies of destination countries and often involves human rights abuses. Containers are rarely inspected on their journey, and provide easy cover for smugglers to transport drugs, weapons and people, especially to European ports, which attract tens of thousands of illegal migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia each year. Dozens of stowaways have suffocated in containers. Stowaways smuggled onboard commercial vessels by human traffickers can cause unforeseeable problems, too. Turkey was a prime transit route for human traffickers for many years. Law enforcement efforts, however, seem to have started to pay off recently, as southern European authorities report that the traffickers now prefer Tunisian and Libyan routes to transit their human cargo instead of Turkey.

On November 21, 2001, the U.S. Navy stated that it could extend the antiterrorism campaign to counter piracy, gunrunning, drug and human trafficking. Not only the Al Qaeda network, but also terrorist groups elsewhere such as the Sri Lankan LTTE and the Kurdish PKK, have been engaged in “commercial” activities such as trafficking in narcotics, arms and human beings. The LTTE, for example, not only owned and operated a fleet of ten ocean-going freighters flying Panamanian, Honduran and Liberian flags, but also hijacked commercial vessels carrying cargo valuable to the Tamil Tigers, such as the 1997 hijacking of the freighter “Stillus Limassul”, loaded with more than 30, 000 81 mm mortal rounds, worth over three million dollars. In 1994, the LTTE shipped 50 metric tons of RDX explosives on board one of their own freighters, operated by a front company called Carlton Trading, from a Ukrainian Black Sea port via the Turkish Straits to Sri Lanka.

A developing trend in international terrorism in the last decade is called narco-terrorism. Turkish authorities are aware that most of the human smuggling, which takes place in Turkish waters is connected with the terrorist organization PKK. Turkey has historically remained a key transshipment point for drug trafficking because of its desirable geographical location connecting Europe to Asia. From the late 1970s, a new trend toward bigger and more efficient criminal organizations was observed. Especially from the mid- 1980s terrorist organizations with quasi-political agendas started to become involved in narcotics trafficking. In the beginning these terrorist groups entered the business mainly to finance their arms supplies. It has been documented in many instances that these Turkish terrorist groups either dealt or partnered with certain Eastern Bloc criminals and intelligence services in drugs-for-arms deals.

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