By: Ellen Marleen Staack
Ellen Staack is a BA student at the University of Cologne, studying Social and Cultural Anthropology, as well as Languages and Cultures of the Islamic World. Moreover, she is an activist in the Sea-Eyes local group in Cologne.
Content Warning: This blog entry deals with the topic of flight including descriptions of border violence and death.
During the DiaMiGo Summer School of 2025, we read a story titled “The Truck to Berlin” from “The Madman of Freedom Square”, a short story collection from 2009 by Hassan Blasim, originally written in Arabic, but published in English translated by Jonathan Wright.
In the course of the DiaMiGo Summer School we discussed the story “The Truck to Berlin”. This story centres on a person who was working in Istanbul and wished to migrate to Western Europe. In order to do so, he aimed to find a smuggler who would take him there. However, due to the various stories he had heard, he was afraid of this undertaking. One of these stories was about a group of Afghans who had paid a smuggler to take them from Istanbul to Greece by truck. However, instead of driving them to the agreed destination, the smuggler drove them around Istanbul for several hours and then dropped them off in a park. There, they were met by the police and deported. However, the reluctance of the man in “The Truck to Berlin” (Blasim 2009) to proceed with his plan is rooted in another story
Thirty-five people from Iraq had relied on a smuggler to take them to Germany, and they were all crammed into a truck. After driving part of the way, the passengers noticed that the truck had stopped and that they were not being given food or water as agreed. The truck remained sealed, leaving them unable escape – trapped in a dark, cramped space without food or water with the air inside becoming increasingly unbearable with each passing hour. The story goes on to describe the horrible conditions they endured. Three days later, two Serbian police officers opened the truck. As the door swung open, a man jumped out and ran into the forest. Inside the truck the policeman saw a mess of bodies, blood, and other fluids that could no longer be separated (Blasim 2009).
The story has stayed with me ever since I read it, making me think about the character of the truck driver, and why he would leave those people to die. This led me to engage more with how the figure of the “smuggler” is constructed and discussed in migration discourse.
The story represents the reality of many people on the move who are denied asylum in border regions. Those attempting to access their right to asylum are often compelled to make use of channels the EU labels as smuggling. According to the EU guidelines on “Facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence” in the “Facilitators Package”, doing anything to enable someone to cross a border illegally is considered smuggling. This applies even if these actions were not profit-oriented but based on solidarity (Cancellaro 2025). In the introduction of “Illicit Flows and Criminal Things”, edited by Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (2005), the authors argued that the construction of “smugglers” stems from a narrative in which migration that is not controlled by states is portrayed as a global crime. And global crime, in turn, is portrayed as an increasingly dangerous threat. Within this framework, mobile people and those who assist them are folded into a border story of transnational criminal networks. The narrative of escalating danger serves to justify expanded surveillance and policing powers, stricter border controls and increasingly restrictive migration policies (van Schendel & Abraham 2005).
It has become increasingly common for activists involved in sea rescue operations in the Mediterranean to be criminalized. However, while these cases are discussed publicly and meet with protests against their criminalization, there are countless people who have been arrested at Europe’s external borders because they were (temporarily) responsible for a vehicle during their own flight, i.e., they drove a car or steered a boat. These people are also arrested as “smugglers”. They drove these vehicles because they were forced to do so by smugglers, because it allowed them to minimize the high costs that smugglers demand from refugees, or simply because someone was needed to drive the vehicle across the border (Winkler & Mayr 2023). The trials are rarely discussed publicly, and those who are arrested under such circumstances rarely receive attention or support. During the proceedings many defendants have no access to interpreters and are therefore unable to fully understand the charges against them, or sometimes even why they were arrested in the first place. The hearings themselves are typically very brief, often lasting only around thirty minutes. In some documented cases, the entire trial lasts no more than six minutes. Despite the short durations and limited understanding of the process, people are frequently sentenced to long prison terms (Winkler & Mayr 2023). At present, over 2,000 migrants are imprisoned in Greece alone, sentenced as “smugglers” due to the EU’s harsh migration policies (Sabetara 2025).
Even if people are found not guilty in this process, it severely harms the outcome of their asylum applications. Individuals in pre-trial detention often have to undergo asylum interviews while in prison, which limits their ability to prepare and access legal assistance. In many cases, the asylum process is suspended until the criminal trial is concluded, delaying any decision on their status. Some detainees are even unable to file an application at all during their imprisonment (Winkler & Mayr 2023).
One well-known case is that of Homayoun Sabetara, who fled Iran and crossed the Turkish/Greek border in a car with several other refugees. In August 2021, he was arrested by the Greek police. On September 26, 2022, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. His daughters then founded the protest movement Free Homayoun. He is no longer in prison but is instead living in a small Greek town, which he is not allowed to leave for the duration of his sentence and where he must report to the police once a month. In an interview in January 2025 with the Free Homayoun protest movement, Homayoun said that for a long time he did not know why he had been arrested, and that the Greek authorities did not provide him with an interpreter. He explained that the language barrier preventing people from understanding their situation is exploited by pressuring them into signing documents they do not understand. These documents and isolated statements are then used to prosecute them. He also described the terrible conditions in European prisons and expressed shock at the realization that people in Europe are subjected to violence and oppression. Moreover he reports that he was denied medical treatment until he nearly died, and that his medication was withdrawn. He goes on to explain that without the protest action, he thinks that he would have remained in prison for years, and that his case only ended because of the publicity it received. But even the protest did not change everything. He was not acquitted, but his sentence was reduced from 18 years to 7 years and several months, even though it could be proven that he was not a smuggler (Sabetara 2025).
In his article “Das Konzept der Autonomie der Migration überdenken? – Yes, please!” Stefan Scheel argues that portraying migrants as either victims or criminals denies that their actions have political significance, making them easier to govern. These categorizations of migrants are not neutral, but rather a discursive means of shifting responsibility for state violence at the borders onto individuals (Scheel 2015).
Many migrants depend on smugglers simply because there are no accessible legal pathways into the EU. In this context, the fight against so-called smugglers does not protect migrants but it targets services they are forced to rely on (Winkler & Mayr 2023). Thus, the violence in the story “The Truck to Berlin” is not simply the result of an individual act, i.e., the driver locking the people in the truck until they died, but rather the consequence of larger political contexts that criminalize migration and thus force people to take such dangerous routes. Truly preventing exploitation and death would require legal and safe routes for migration. Without such options, the legislation that is framed as being aimed to prevent smuggling of refugees is, in effect, a fight against migration itself (Winkler & Mayr 2023).
Author’s Bio:
Ellen Staack is a BA student at the University of Cologne, studying Social and Cultural Anthropology, as well as Languages and Cultures of the Islamic World. Moreover, she is an activist in the Sea-Eyes local group in Cologne.
Footnotes
1: In this text, I use “smuggler” in quotation marks when referring to the constructed figure of a smuggler, and I write smuggler without quotation marks when referring to those who profit from refugees.
References
Blasim, Hassan 2009. The Truck to Berlin. In: The Madman of Freedom Square, translated by Jonathan Wright. Manchester: Comma Press. P.
Cancellaro, Francesca 2025. Kinsa-Fall: Europas umstrittene Schleuser-Gesetze vor Gericht [Interview]. Pro Asyl. https://www.proasyl.de/news/kinsa-fall-europas-umstrittene-schleuser-gesetze-vor-gericht/. [last access 30.07.2025].
Sabetara, Homayoun 2025. Ameisen wurden meine besten Freunde. [Interview]. Free Homayoun. https://www.freehomayoun.org/. [last access 30.07.2025].
Scheel, Stefan 2015. Das Konzept der Autonomie der Migration überdenken?. Yes, please!. In: movements. Journal für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung. 1 (2). P. 1-15.
Van Schendel, Willem & Abraham, Itty 2005. Intruduction. The Making of Illicitness. In: Van Schendel, Willem & Abraham, Itty (Hg.): Illicit flows and criminal things. States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. United states of America: Indiana University Press. P. 1-37.
Winkler, Julia & Lotta, Mayr 2023. Ein rechtsfreier Raum. Die systematische Kriminalisierung von Geflüchteten für das Steuern eines Bootes oder Autos nach Griechenland. Borderline-Europe.
