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Chapter 1

After the French, I had to contend with the American police. On landing in Puerto Rico I discovered two things: during the two months which had elapsed since we left Marseille, the immigration laws in the United States had been altered and the documents I had with me … no longer complied with the new regulations … After being accused at Fort de France of being a Jewish freemason in the pay of the Americans, I had the somewhat bitter compensation of discovering that from the American point of view I was in all likelihood an emissary of the Vichy government and perhaps even of the Germans.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

In the mid-1970s, about eighty million people – roughly 1.5 per cent of the world’s population – were living outside the country of their birth. The figure in 2012 is closer to 215 million, or 3.1 per cent, according to the International Organisation for Migration. One in every thirty-three human beings: this does not seem a lot, but the extent of human movement across borders is hard to monitor – and the figures are a mystery for those of us who have no idea how many people move in and out of our own neighbourhoods in a single day, or a year, or the course of a decade.

Migration is not a simple affair and migrants themselves are as diverse as people who stay put. The banker from Seattle who signs a five-year contract for a post in Berlin is a migrant; so is the programmer in Paris who moves to Moscow to work for a Russian Internet company; so is the labourer from Indonesia or Thailand who is subcontracted to a building site in the Gulf; so is the teenage boy from Shanghai indentured to a Chinese crime ring in New York. Refugees, too, are migrants. Often they share their route to safety with others who are not seeking asylum: the smuggling syndicates known as snakeheads, which induct Chinese women into a life of semi-slavery in Europe and the US, also ran dissidents to freedom in the retreat from Tiananmen Square. These things are largely a question of money. Refugees are not necessarily poor, but by the time they have reached safety, the human smuggling organisations on which they depend have eaten up much of their capital. In the course of excruciating journeys, mental and physical resources are also expended – some of them non-renewable.

In the past, the states of Western Europe have shown a generous capacity to take in refugees. The response to forced movement on the Continent itself, from the 1880s to the end of World War Two, might fairly be seen as impressive. So might the absorption of refugees during the Cold War: far fewer, of course, and mostly from South-East Asia, in keeping with the Cold War commitments of the West. But by the mid-1980s, when numbers started to rise again, states in Western Europe were reviewing their duty to provide asylum. The change was connected with the new availability of one part of the world to another – with the expansion of global access, not least as a result of airline price wars. It occurred at a time when France, Germany, Britain and others had made up their minds that the postwar experiment with immigration from the South was over. Refugees have paid a high price for this decision.

They have also paid for the new prestige of the North American social and economic model – unrivalled after 1989, but all the more conspicuous for its subsequent failings. The racially diverse society is a deeply troubling notion in Europe. The shifting and grinding together of peoples – the tectonic population movements that defined the European continent – were already well advanced, and largely settled, by the time the New World became a battleground between the empires of Europe and indigenous Americans. For Europeans, the multiracial model of the United States, founded on waves of relatively modern migration, including slave migration – the most lucrative case of human trafficking in history – is flawed. The Right in Europe thinks of it as a triumph of capitalism for which multiculturalism has been a high price to pay. The Left thinks of it as a qualified multicultural success which can never redeem the cost of that triumph.

In both views, the milling of cultures and races and the whirlwind of capitalism are indissociable. Everyone pays grudging homage to the American model of cultural diversity, but European governments of all persuasions are dour about its advantages and alert to its dangers: cities eroded by poverty and profit; the cantonisation of social space; urban and rural societies doubly fractured by ethnicity and class; most forms of negotiation dragged along the runnels of identity politics. And if governments incline to the gloomy view, so do many citizens.

Europeans have different ambitions for their social fabric, bound up one way or another with a lingering faith in regulation. Yet those who call for greater control of the global markets and the movement of capital are easily derided, while the wish to restrict free access to wealthier states for people from the South and East is seen as perfectly reasonable. Often the very people who think it a sin to tamper with the self-expression of the markets are the first to call for lower immigration from poorer countries, though in all probability it would take decades of inward migration to bring about the degree of ‘cultural difference’ that a bad patch of international trading, a brisk downsizing, or a decision by a large corporation to start outsourcing can inject into a social landscape in a year.

It is nothing new for the non-white immigrant, or would-be immigrant, to have to bear the cost of Europe’s fears for its own stability, but the EU’s wish to keep out asylum seekers is a striking development. Under the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, they are distinguished from other migrants by their ability to demonstrate ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted’. Many who do not qualify for ‘Convention status’ are protected by other agreements and various forms of temporary asylum, awarded on ‘humanitarian grounds’. In practice, however, the distinction between asylum seekers and other kinds of disadvantaged migrant – a distinction designed to shield the refugee from prejudicial factors such as low immigration targets in host states – has been worn away. In Western Europe, refugees have begun to look like beggars at the gate, or even thieves. Since the 1980s, they have lost most lawful means of access to the rich world.

To governments aiming at low levels of immigration from poorer countries, asylum is an exemption that allows too many people past the barriers. Meanwhile, thousands of migrants whose objective is a better standard of living for themselves and those they have left behind are opting for asylum, or plain illegal entry, as a way to outflank restrictive immigration policies. The result is an expensive game of wits being played along the frontiers of the rich world. It is a worldwide contest, in progress anywhere between the state of New Jersey and Taiwan; Queensland and New Mexico. In Europe, the field extends from the Baltic states to the Strait of Gibraltar, from the Aegean to the English Channel. You only have to go to Kent, or the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, or the coast of Puglia in southern Italy to watch the game unfold.

Southern Italy, 1998. We left the harbour in Otranto just after dark, turned north and ran along the coast towards Brindisi. The boat was crewed by members of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza. It was fifty foot or so, with two powerful engines which threshed up the water like a harvester, cutting a straight path visible for half a mile behind us through the rolling waters. The moon, too, threw a line of light, brighter, narrower, scuffed at its edges by the winter swell.

In 1997 and 1998, two or three Guardia reconnaissance boats were out in the Otranto Channel at any one time, in all but the worst weathers. For most of the night, they combed the waters for boatloads of illegal immigrants from Albania. At the end of the 1990s, the Channel became a game board on which smugglers of immigrants and tobacco pitted their skills against the Guardia, but it was the immigrants – i clandestini – who caused the real dismay in Italy. For most of 1998 they were leaving from the Albanian port of Vlorë; then, with Italian police surveillance on the Albanian coast, the departure points were moved. It takes about an hour for a good scafista and his partner to get their passengers across roughly ninety kilometres of water. They are crammed aboard gommoni, or inflatable rafts, with two outboard motors. The gommoni run a gauntlet of detection and danger. The Guardia’s boats are equipped with radar; the scafisti have to negotiate patches of rough sea at very high speeds; they must also hope for cloud cover. But business is so profitable and, until recently, demand has been so intense, that a clear night has rarely deterred them.

From the deck of a Guardia boat you can see the game board in all its splendour. The wake of the boat and the moonlight traverse the waters like linear markers, setting the terms of the contest. As the gommoni scud across the Channel, they must keep clear of these two lines: the giveaway light of the moon and the roaming, tell-tale wash of the predator. The first two hours of a night patrol are spent in obscure coming and going, the lines of light converging and diverging. As the night draws on and the moon rises, the brighter path begins to fade until there is only a diffuse, milky light covering the water, and the one line, loitering, veering, running straight again, from the back of the boat. It is the record of one crew’s efforts to defend Italy’s frail territorial integrity, and with it, the integrity of Fortress Europe, bounded by a single external border.

On the Guardia boats, below decks, radar technicians monitor the waters for movement. A regular signal marking every 360-degree scan sounds like the beep of a heartbeat in casualty. In rough weather, the equipment picks up misleading signals. Twice, what might have been a boat turned out to be a piece of flotsam: a large vegetable-oil drum, a reeling assortment of polystyrene packaging. The vessel was well off the Puglia coastline when news came through from the base in Otranto that there were four gommoni on the water, within minutes of the Italian beaches.

The lieutenant at the helm took his speed up to about forty-five knots, flipping the boat over the waves. Garbled coordinates, crumbling with static, came through from the base radio. After a surge of movement that brought us within a kilometre of the coast, we slowed up and hung in the swell. The lieutenant produced a pair of infrared binoculars and gazed through them at the mainland. He handed them across, arranging and rearranging me, until I could pick out the shapes of migrants wading through the shallows, the rubber rafts lying off the beach and the scafisti refilling the outboard motors as they prepared for the return journey to Vlorë. It was my first sight of illegal immigrants, tiny, pale and alien, stirring like febrile particles under a microscope. I would have seen them, I suppose, in the way we tend to see them, clambering into our world, importunate, active, invasive, always other than ourselves: clandestini, irregolari, extra-comunitari. Headlights moved from left to right through the trees behind the beach: cars organised by the smugglers to pick up the migrants; maybe a few police vehicles speeding to the scene.

No one in Italy can agree on how many people are in the country without ‘papers’. An amnesty for illegals who could prove they’d arrived before March 1998 provoked an uproar when it became clear that fewer than 40,000 irregular migrants would be eligible by the terms of the deal: there were thought to be between five and ten times that number in the country. It is not known how many people entered on the gommoni in the late 1990s. Some in the Guardia will tell you that by the middle of 1998, there were up to forty boats a night; others put it at twenty-five – which is to say, anything between 500 and 1,000 migrants attempting the passage on the coast of Puglia alone. Thousands were coming from Kosovo, Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan, and places further afield – West Africa, the Horn, the remains of the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China. A decade on and the numbers entering Italy remained high. By 2011 they were mostly Libyans and Tunisians crossing from the Maghreb in their tens of thousands. A turmoil of movement has been taking place along the seaboard of southern Europe, as people make their way up to Sicily or cross the Strait of Gibraltar in fishing boats crammed to the gunwales. It is difficult to know what will put a definitive stop to this movement or how it might be regulated.

In 1998, when Austria held the EU presidency, it suggested in a draft paper on immigration and asylum that the number of migrants to ‘the rich, especially Western European, states’ exceeds 1.5 million a year. ‘The proportion of illegal immigrants in this total,’ the paper adds, ‘has clearly increased. It must now be assumed that every other migrant in the “first world” is there illegally.’ This figure turned out to be a gross overestimate, but one thing is sure: the muddier the conjecture, the better it sticks, and the association with illegality is hard for large numbers of non-nationals or extra-comunitari in wealthy EU countries to shed. For asylum seekers this is especially worrying, because so many have had to break the law first in their own country, then in their putative host country, in order to find safety. Often there is no other way.

Paragraph 1, Article 31 of the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees recognises that they may be obliged to use illicit means of entry into a safe country – just as they may have to evade customs and immigration checks to get out of their own – and requires that host countries ‘shall not impose penalties’ on this account. Yet, with the extension of the single European border in the 1990s, asylum seekers who enter a country illegally have come to be seen as a threat to EU, as well as national, security. At the heart of the EU’s thinking about refugees lies the imputation of a double criminality: not only do they flout national boundaries, but they consort with criminal smuggling gangs to do so. As signatories to the 1951 Convention, states may not punish asylum seekers for illegal entry, but to associate them persistently with crime is itself an insidious form of penalty. It leads to the presumption that most asylum claims are bogus (if deceit was the means of entry, why should it not be the basis of the whole claim?) and justifies measures designed to deprive them of elementary privileges – some would say, rights.

The huge forced movements of people in Europe during the twentieth century were always a cause of anxiety, and often outright hostility, on the part of states that took in refugees. But the record suggests that even very large numbers of refugees can be accommodated without disruption to host countries. During the 1920s and 1930s, France received hundreds of thousands of White Russians and German Jews; in the 1990s, Germany – already deeply committed after reunification – took in more refugees from the former Yugoslavia than any other EU member. The misgivings of wealthy states about accommodating refugees are a reaction in the first instance to the manner of their arrival, to the initial cost – housing, school places, social security benefits – and to the tensions that arise, as they have in parts of Germany and Britain, between new groups of refugees and resident communities. The uninvited are a costly nuisance when they first show up: a fact which sharpens official dislike of those who smuggle them in.

The crews of the Guardia di Finanza in Otranto have much to say about the scafisti. They will grudgingly admit how much they admire their skill; they will talk morosely about the difficulty of catching them and the leniency with which they are treated by the Italian courts. They think of them chiefly as ruthless profiteers who will put people’s lives at risk for gain. Since a clash in 1997 between an Italian coastguard boat and a large Albanian vessel, when around eighty or ninety migrants were drowned, the Guardia came under instructions to pursue smugglers only after they had delivered their passengers. The policy is not always observed, but most of the chases in the Channel take place when the scafisti are heading for home in empty boats.

A chase is dramatic and largely symbolic – another kind of contest between the cumbersome forces of the state and a more mobile, unencumbered enemy with few allegiances and no jurisdiction to defend. A Guardia boat can manage a top speed of sixty-five miles an hour. Its quarry is capable of slightly faster bursts, the prow riding up at a rampant angle to the water. Under a handheld searchlight beamed from the Guardia boat, you can see the outboards and the hooded drivers, but as you turn in on the gommone, it simply pirouettes in a flurry of spray and slides away. I was on a Guardia boat during one of these chases. The captain forced the gommone round several times, turning at full power, until it hit our wake, bouncing wildly over the ridge of ferment, baulking at a great ditch of water on the other side and recovering to steer for home. We made another approach, another turn, a fraction earlier than the last; the gommone thrashed across the bows at a tremendous pace and tore into the night; we altered course and picked it up again, pursuing, circling, almost engaging. Things went on in this way until we were halfway to Albania. But it was clear from the first confrontation that the Guardia were up against hopeless odds. In this bruising, violent but strangely abstract hunt, manoeuvrability has a clear advantage.

The organised smuggling of people from Albania is abetted in Puglia by the Sacra Corona Unità, one of Italy’s major criminal organisations, which also handles tobacco – now a Guardia priority (as it is for British customs) – and a proportion of the marijuana grown in Albania: the scafisti act as couriers. Elsewhere, ‘facilitators’ offer access to the rich world via lorry, train and sea container. Agents in Asia and Africa receive money for getting people into the high-security areas of airports so that they can stow away in the landing gear of aircraft and die. By the end of the 1990s it was thought that the number of young women being smuggled into the EU every year from the former Eastern bloc and trafficked into the sex trade was in the hundreds of thousands. It is not hard to see why the smugglers are vilified by governments, police and the press. They can foil the defences of the United States and Fortress Europe, carrying a criminal virus into the rich world, a sickness which has its origins – we like to suppose – thousands of miles away.

Some of the best information about smugglers comes from the people who have had to use them. In 1998 at the Centro Regina Pacis, a summer colony for children converted into short-term accommodation for people caught on the beaches, I was introduced to a young Kosovan called Fatmir. He had taught Albanian in a private school in his village; he was also a Kosovo Liberation Army supporter: fair game for the Serbians and a likely candidate for asylum under the terms of the Convention. Earlier that year, after his village was bombarded and the school burned down, he had joined an exodus of KLA from the province. They were heading for Albania. Fatmir took up with a contingent of about 400 fighters, followed by some 1,500 civilians. He walked for three days across the mountains, but encountered Serbian police at the border. Three of his party were killed. He now embarked on a ten-day detour, attempting another route into Albania, but this failed and he made the five-day journey on foot back across Kosovo and into Montenegro. There, he and his companions – four brothers and some cousins – paid 200 Deutschmarks each for a ride in a kombi down to Lake Shkodër. They paid another 50 DM each to be ferried across and, a month or more later, having arrived in Vlorë, a further 1,000 DM or so for passage on a gommone.

The agents who took his money for the last leg of the journey gave Fatmir the impression that he would be going straight up to Milan and, from there, through Switzerland to Germany on forged Italian documents. With him on the gommone were nine people from Kosovo. Most of the others were Albanians. The gommone was not detected and the passengers, around thirty of them, waded ashore in the dark, led by an Albanian agent carrying a bag of marijuana. They followed the agent through the dark into a coppice, hid until the police had called off a brief helicopter search, and after a seven-hour walk reached a ruined house in the countryside. The agent collected more money from all of the passengers and disappeared, instructing them to wait in the house: ‘A taxi will come and take you to Milan.’ After two hours, a small truck arrived and they wedged themselves inside, but they had only gone a few kilometres when the driver and his mate stopped the vehicle and threw all the Kosovans out. Fatmir and his companions walked to Lecce, thinking they might change some money and take a train north, but they were apprehended at the station and put on a boat back to Albania. Fatmir was returned because he was eager not to claim asylum: a number of people who could petition successfully would rather try to get through Italy undetected and lodge the claim in a neighbouring state, where they have a better network of expatriate contacts who can assist with lodgings, social services and, eventually, jobs. This kind of common sense on the part of asylum seekers is now disparaged by European governments as ‘asylum shopping’.

Fatmir’s second venture across the Channel some weeks later was a success. Once ashore, he simply went to a police station and announced that he was from Kosovo. He no longer had a Kosovo ID card: it had been removed by an Albanian official on his return from Italy (and sold, he was convinced, to an Albanian who could now pose as a Kosovan in order to claim asylum). He had spoken to dozens of other arrivals and discovered that it was quite common for agents to treat Kosovans – and Kurds – in the way they had treated him, first time around. The agents, he believed, wanted only to maximise their success rate. For Kurds and Kosovans to remain in Italy, it is normally enough for them to make their way to the police, as Fatmir did on his second run, and state their place of origin – which is why the agents could dump a group from Kosovo by the side of the road, and rob them, without jeopardising their own reputation as effective smugglers or the chances of their clients’ remaining in Italy. Albanians, on the other hand, are mostly economic migrants. The EU disapproves of them and, if caught, they are returned as a matter of course by the Italian authorities. For this group, more careful chaperoning by the agents is necessary. The alternative, for an Albanian, is to pose as a Kosovan refugee: Fatmir’s Kosovo ID card would have fetched a good deal of money, up in the hundreds of dollars, in Albania.

Human smuggling is one thing, and human trafficking another. The most concise definitions, based on the International Organisation for Migration’s guidelines, were offered in 2007 by Caroline Moorhead in the New York Review of Books: ‘Smuggled people have consented to travel and when they reach their destinations they expect to be free; the trafficked, even if they have initially consented, remain victims of continuing exploitation at the hands of their traffickers.’ Freedom of a kind – escape, safety, success or failure in a new life – is the fate of the smuggled migrant. Bonded labour or sex-trade slavery – answering to worldwide demand – is the fate of trafficked people, including minors; even legal work schemes can turn into forms of slavery in the under-regulated world of domestic service. Yet this clear-cut distinction between smugglers and traffickers is effectively blurred, because benign behaviour coexists with racketeering in the same smuggling organisations and even in the choices of individual smugglers, whether they are running boats across the Mediterranean or groups of Latinos up through Arizona. Offered a chance to profit from trafficking, a smuggler will often want to take it. This is a free market. Unauthorised migrants run risks of their own, and assess them to the best of their abilities. One year as a sex worker in Toledo, Ohio, or two as an unpaid construction worker on a corporate pyramid in Dubai: many unauthorised migrants have thought this through. The fog of slavery, where governments can shine no light, descends when the contract was supposed to end and didn’t.

In Puglia I became suspicious of the idea that smugglers were a modern embodiment of evil. I didn’t doubt their business acumen, or their lack of scruple with lives, or their incentive to traffic – a market incentive – but it was reasonable to assume there was another side to the story and in due course I heard it, from a young man called Adem, another resident at Regina Pacis. Adem was from Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo. He left in 1998, at the age of twenty-three, after repeated police harassment. He went overland to Albania and bought a place on a gommone for 1,750 DM – about £600 – but the weather was too much and the boat turned back halfway to Italy. In Vlorë, the passengers waited for another run. Together with a new intake that brought the total to forty-two, they set off again twelve hours later on a bigger boat. Adem told me in his faltering, Americanised English that the scafisti were ‘very good guys’. He’d heard about them tipping people overboard at gunpoint and when, on his second run, the Guardia di Finanza approached the boat moments from a beach, he prepared for the worst. Instead, the scafista and his mate worked their way about and put off their passengers in the shallows. The Guardia nearly cornered the gommone before everyone was off. The scafisti flipped it around at full throttle and lit away from the beach, with a man and two young children still on board. Again, Adem expected to see them dump their charges in the waters 100 metres from the beach, but they took the gommone into another patch of shallows and helped them over the side. The Guardia boat was in hot pursuit and Adem believed the scafisti were taking ‘a big risk’ when they set the last three passengers down.

There are nonetheless few Schindlers among the modern smugglers of human beings, and the money is good: one gommone with thirty passengers safely delivered represented £20,000 in fees in 2000. It has been suggested that twelve years on the business of illegal trafficking, worldwide, is worth more than $30 billion a year – and a significant part of the business involves a second tier of profiteering, as women (43 per cent of all people trafficked) are herded into the global sex industry and domestic service: refugees have always kept strange company. We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of asylum seekers. But when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which asylum seekers suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have come to see generosity as a vice. When smugglers treat their clients properly, however, they interrupt the current of contempt. Above all, they save lives. In the end, the question of good or bad intentions is less important than the fact that the scafisti and others like them provide a service for desperate people, to whom most other avenues have been closed.

This is the meaning of the terse exchange that millions of us have watched at least once in the movie Casablanca, shortly before the love interest sweeps in, arm-in-arm with the suave paragon of anti-Nazi struggle. It is 1942; Casablanca is full of refugees who have taken passage from Marseille to Oran and come overland in the hope of obtaining a visa to Lisbon. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a forger and procurer of documents, asks Rick to look after two sets of safe-conduct papers until his clients arrive. ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ he says to Rick. ‘You object to the kind of business I do, huh? But think of all those poor refugees who must rot in this place if I didn’t help them. But that’s not so bad. Through ways of my own, I provide them with exit visas.’

‘For a price, Ugarte,’ Rick replies. ‘For a price.’

In smuggling and trafficking, price is the main consideration, but it is not everything. Smugglers enjoy playing cat and mouse with immigration authorities. In the mid-1990s, the exiled Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah began to investigate the state of his fellow nationals after the fall of Siyad Barre. Many were refugees in Kenya. Others had made it to Europe, North America and the Gulf. Farah spoke to several of the smugglers who had helped them and soon discovered the relish with which the ‘battle of wits’ was joined. In Italy, he met a ‘xambaar carrier’ or smuggler, once a professor of biochemistry, who was now officially a ‘resident’ in one European country and a ‘refugee’ in another. ‘What matters,’ he told Farah, ‘is that the doors are closed … and we, as carriers, are determined to open them.’ Another xambaar carrier in Milan told him that trafficking was a kind of ‘dare’ – a challenge taken up in the dismal refugee camps in East Africa, where many Somali carriers have had to subsist in the first stages of exile. Carrying, he said, was largely a way of helping people to snub the rich nations, ‘who frustrate their desire to leave a hell-hole of a country like Kenya by placing obstacles in their path all the way from the starting point of their journey down to the cubby-holes which they call home here in Milan’.

The game of wits, the challenge, the whole rigmarole of clandestine entry – these have never been far from the refugee’s experience, but it is only since the 1980s, when Europe embarked with new zeal on its project of seclusion, that they have become so all-encompassing. Among the most important changes is the fact that rich countries now require a visa from citizens wishing to travel from places which are likely to generate asylum seekers. Britain, for example, imposed visa requirements for people travelling from Sri Lanka in 1985 (and broke with a cherished Commonwealth tradition in doing so), from Algeria in 1990, from Sierra Leone in 1994 and from Colombia in 1997. It is, of course, very dangerous for someone who is being targeted by a regime, or an insurrectionary group, or a religious movement, to be seen presenting themselves at a foreign embassy day after day in the hope of obtaining a visa. Even if the embassy is not under surveillance, there are likely to be local staff who will report the application. Safer, for those who can afford airline tickets, to think of a destination that does not require an entry visa, buy a ticket that involves a stopover in the country in which they wish to claim asylum, and make the claim in transit. But this option was closed off by means of the Direct Airline Transit Visa, introduced by Britain in 1998 when a group of Kosovans claimed asylum while they were in transit through London. At the end of the 1990s, travellers from over a dozen countries were required to have these visas to take a connecting flight in Britain: the number of countries in 2012 is nearly sixty.

In addition, airlines must pay high fines for carrying anyone whose papers are not in order, as well as the cost of returning them to their point of departure. ‘Carriers’ liability’, as it is known, is an American idea, which can be found in a Bill that went before the Senate immigration committee in 1903 and called for deportations of undesirable immigrants ‘at the expense of the steamship or railroad company which brought them’. When carriers’ liability reappeared in the 1980s, the US again took the lead, but there were now a number of wealthy countries willing to follow suit. Airline companies had once been a neutral – which is to say, benevolent – force from the asylum seeker’s point of view; ground staff might even intervene discreetly in cases where local security in some torrid dictatorship tried to prevent a dissident boarding a plane. This has changed. The risk of incurring high penalties has forced carriers to act as a screening agency on behalf of governments. By January 2000 the British Government had widened the scope of liability: it now applies to the Eurostar rail link and to haulage companies whose vehicles are found to contain stowaways.

None of this would be so serious if the UN’s resettlement programmes could bring refugees to safety. But their application is narrow. Strictly speaking, to be eligible for resettlement, a person must already be in a country ‘of first asylum’ and still be at risk – like many Somalis in Kenya – or unable to integrate in the longer term. This rules out hundreds of thousands of people, not yet recognised as refugees according to the terms of the 1951 Convention. The resettlement programme is also modest. In the late 1970s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was resettling nearly a quarter of a million people a year (most of them from Indochina), or roughly one in four of the world’s refugees. By 2010, resettlement involved fewer than 75,000 people – around one refugee for every 150 worldwide.

Little by little, the routes asylum seekers once took to safety have been choked off. The formidable growth in underground ‘travel agencies’ – document forgers, chaperones, drivers, boatmen – is the result. They are the material consequence of Europe’s dreary pastoral fantasy, in which the EU resembles an Alpine valley, surrounded by impregnable, snow-capped mountains. For most asylum seekers who wish to reach Europe, being smuggled to sanctuary has become the only option.

At the harbour in Otranto there are two short rows of prefabricated huts and containers for illegals who have been caught, most of them on the beach, a handful inland. They arrive at the huts drenched and chilled to the marrow. They are shivering, terrified, nearly ecstatic – a state induced by the journey and the fact of having survived it. Their eyes are bright, feverish, inquiring, their faces transfigured by a combination of exhaustion, curiosity and surprise. It’s as though they’d tumbled slowly and painfully to earth through rain-logged skies and couldn’t quite grasp that they’d survived the impact of landing. Jeans, shirts, sweaters are set out to dry between the huts and, after an hour or so, the men begin milling about, while the women sit with their heads bowed and the children sleep.

It is 5 a.m. There are dozens of detainees in the huts. Two Albanians who are sure to be sent back take out their sodden documents: they have wives in Italy and children attending Italian schools; they have work contracts and Italian tax returns, the evidence of their right to reside here. One is a building labourer, the other a mechanic. When the labourer heard that his mother had taken sick in Tirana, his friend accompanied him back. The time came to return to Italy, but they couldn’t get the authorisation from the Italian consulate and anyhow, they explained, it is hard to take the legal route to Italy on the ferry that plies the Channel daily. The scafisti soften the ticketing companies and harbour authorities with a mixture of threats and incentives, to ensure that very few passengers avail themselves of the ferry and demand for the gommoni remains high. But these two men, who are legally entitled to stay in Italy, attempted illegal entry and that is sufficient reason to send them back. (Imagine a diligent servant lodging in the house of the family he works for. He has to leave for a day, on business, but loses his key. He arrives late at night and enters by a window at the back. The family dismisses him.) The strain on their faces is no longer the strain of fatigue. It has cost them over the odds to get to Otranto and now all their outlay is squandered.

By 7 a.m. medics, finger-printers and interpreters are arriving at Otranto harbour. People are examined for injuries. Migrants often sustain fractures wading ashore in the dark. Children can be concussed by the repetitive jolting of the boats at high speed on rough seas. In one of the huts, plywood table tops have been stood on oil-drums and forensic staff are preparing to take fingerprints. The migrants shuffle down the line with their hands extended. The abrupt introduction of the illegal alien to the grudging host state begins. In this parody of greeting, gloved hands reach out to bare hands, seize them, flatten them down on an ink block, lift them across the table-top and flatten them again onto a square of paper. Four sets of prints are taken from each person, then a photograph. A group of Kurdish men, some in stone-washed denims, others in crumpled checks with turn-ups from their overnight bags, dig their knuckles into a tub of industrial cleansing jelly and climb out of the hut, wringing their blackened hands. A truck arrives with sacks of sandwiches and cases of mineral water. Briefly the sight of food rouses the detainees; dejection and reticence give way to energy and assertion. Men come forward to skirmish on behalf of wives, sisters, children. As disorder threatens, a detachment of carabinieri cajoles them into silence.

There are sixty detainees in all. About a third are Albanians, who will be sent back on the ferry. The rest – Kurds and Kosovans – will be bussed up the coast to the Centro Regina Pacis, to be quartered and processed, and eventually released into Italy with a short-stay permit or temporary leave to remain. The figures for last night’s game in the Otranto Channel are now through: twelve landings and 201 detentions along the coast of Puglia. But many will have got away. Rain drives down on the prefab huts. Grey seas fret at the harbour walls. As the first contingent of shivering arrivals prepares to board a waiting bus, a dull church bell starts tolling for Mass.

Whether they’ll live or die must, at some point on the journey, become a more pressing question for illegal entrants into EU countries than whether they will find a foothold in the rich world. These journeys are dangerous. But to be driven by attrition is to prefer the devil you don’t know, or to give him the benefit of the doubt, and for those who buy passage on the gommoni, the devil is vaguely familiar in any case. Rumour and precedent keep the scafisti in business. This form of passage is relatively low risk. The bigger boats which fill up with passengers along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and hang in the offing with hundreds of people on board waiting for the moment to abandon them on the Italian coast are another matter. Death from thirst, sickness, hunger or a full-scale disaster is a pressing possibility.

About three hours after the buses loaded with Kurds and Kosovans left for Regina Pacis on that bitter Sunday morning, a 200-tonne vessel under an Albanian flag dropped anchor south of Otranto, off Santa Maria de Leuca. The captain and most of the crew got away in an inflatable raft, consigning their passengers to Italian jurisdiction, and the Guardia di Finanza began shuttling them off the boat in lighters and reconnaissance craft. The captain had been cruising the coasts of Greece and Albania for two weeks, but some of the passengers had probably been at sea for longer, languishing in an even larger boat anchored off the coast of Turkey, before being decanted into this elderly cargo ship.

Hundreds of bystanders waited on the quays in the lashing rain, watching the migrants disembark. There were many exhausted women and children coming off the boat. One Guardia shuttle consisted entirely of Africans. On the gangways, a ravaged young man lifted his face and bared his parched mouth to the downpour. To a barrage of questions he replied that he was from Sierra Leone and that he’d been travelling for three months. He flicked one hand gracefully, dismissively, at about the level of his forehead: ‘Up, up.’

He and his friends had come overland from West Africa. I asked where they’d boarded ship, but the police shut the conversation down. That night I drove along the coast through a violent storm to Regina Pacis, to find out more, but the gates were barred by carabinieri. After half an hour an official appeared and read out a provisional tally of arrivals: 169 from Turkey, probably Kurds, four from Iraq, three Afghans, seventeen from Sierra Leone, twenty-nine from Guinea-Bissau, one from the Democratic Republic of Congo and another from Senegal.

In the course of twenty-four hours in deep winter, with Italian security already beginning to deploy in Albania and the Italian Government more resolute than it had been throughout the hectic summer of 1998, 400 illegal migrants had entered the country. The figure does not include those who made their way off the beaches of Puglia without being detected. Statistics for the following year showed no let-up: by October 1999, over 20,000 illegal migrants had been apprehended and for every one of those, the Guardia di Finanza estimated, two or three would have slipped through the net.

This is not the first time that Europe has become a place of passage and confusion. In 1937, with one massive displacement of people following another in the heart of the continent and points east, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed the National Flood Relief programme in China (1931–32) and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. In the summer of 1938, Simpson published a preliminary report of his team’s findings. By the time a full text was ready for the presses in October, he was forced to note in his preface that the annexation of Austria had now ‘strained the capacity of absorption of neighbouring countries to breaking point’, while the annexation of Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia had created ‘yet another most serious problem, the full effects of which are not yet measurable’. A report commissioned at a moment which the Institute might justifiably have thought to be the high-point of the ‘refugee problem’ was superseded on the eve of publication by a further flurry of stateless people and evacuees clamouring for sanctuary. Yet the findings of Simpson and his colleagues on refugee movements in the preceding years and on reception and settlement in host countries, were so carefully researched and presented that the finished document, which runs to 600 pages, remains a model of what have come to be known as ‘refugee studies’. It also has a bearing on the refugee movements we are witnessing now.

Simpson’s mainstay in France was H. W. H. Sams, a gifted investigator decorously referred to in the report as ‘Mr Sams’. France, Simpson noted, was ‘par excellence the country of refuge in Western Europe’ – it was once again the preferred country of asylum in 2010 – and Sams had his work cut out to account for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russia, Germany, Armenia, Saarland, Republican Spain and, as time went on, from Fascist Italy. For most of the 1920s, a high demand for labour had worked in favour of refugee ‘integration’. Depression did away with that propitious circumstance – it also marked a reversal in France’s vigorous pro-immigration policy. By the mid-1930s, however, labour was once again an issue: indeed, with the population little more than half that of its huge, industrialised and militarised neighbour to the east, something of a national security imperative. On the other hand, tailoring the location of immigrants to the precise contours of demand, before and after the Depression, was impossible and would, in any case, have been a delicate matter, even though popular animosity towards them and outright ill-treatment were common enough. Of the large numbers of Russians entering France after the Bolshevik Revolution, a proportion were thoroughly marginalised. Sams reported that in Marseille, those who worked on the docks ‘are amongst the dregs of the cosmopolitan population’ of the city. In Lyon, which had one of the biggest Russian colonies, 45 per cent of the refugees were unemployed and living in ‘great poverty’. Every night, along the banks of the Rhône, about 100 ‘bridge-dwellers’ were sleeping rough.

Conditions of work, even for the many refugees who had it, were often dismal. Lyon, with its high numbers of émigré unemployed, may have been one of Sams’s ‘black spots’ for sickness, but so was Billancourt in Paris, where there had once been 8,000 Russians in the Renault works. Sams gave heart strain and TB as the main causes of illness in the refugee workforce. Problems of labour rivalry also arose. The two conventions of 1933 and 1938 to which France was a signatory urged that ‘restrictive laws’ governing foreign labour ‘shall not be applied in all their severity to refugees’. The French, however, entered a reservation in the margin about foreign labour quotas – the same quotas, Mr Sams noted drily, which meant that only 15 per cent of the musicians in a well-known balalaika orchestra could be Russian. The quota system was left in place by the Front Populaire, making it hard for new refugees with qualifications to find a position, while political attitudes tended to harden in industry. Sams hints that the refugees in Lyon suffered at the hands of the French Communist Party. ‘The Russians,’ he reported, were regarded as ‘enemies of Soviet Russia’ (a very different objection from the one raised by Lyonnais prostitutes sixty years later when the first young women with Kosovo ID papers began competing with them on the quays).

Still, there were jobs and, under the Front Populaire, a growing culture of social provision. ‘In general,’ Sams reported from Moselle, ‘any Russian with the willingness to work and good health can earn a living.’ Former German nationals, too, found sanctuary in France, which in the third quarter of 1933 received between 30,000 and 60,000 refugees from Nazism. Many remained for several years, others moved on to Palestine, Latin America, the US and South Africa. The figures began to fall in 1937, but by now 6 per cent of the population were of foreign origin and there were still refugees coming in from Germany, Austria and Spain, including ‘wounded or incapacitated German members of the International Brigades’.

It was the crisis in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the fretwork of successor states created after their demise, that gave Simpson and his team such a wealth of human material to consider. Already, between the 1880s and the eve of the Great War, enormous numbers of Jews had been driven west by the ferocity of the pogroms. By the time the Ottoman Empire had been divested, the survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915–16 were scattered in camps from Sofia to Damascus. In the 1920s, thousands of Kurds followed the Armenians out of Turkey to settle in Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq. By one count, a million and a half Russians were displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution; a third of these were still stateless by World War Two. With the dismantling of Austria-Hungary and the formation of the Baltic states, more Europeans swelled the ranks of apatrides, or stateless persons; others found that they were now members of precarious minorities with marginal rights in new political entities, confected by the postwar treaties.

At the end of World War Two, with the retrenchment of the Western empires, mass movement was largely assigned out of Europe: to India, Palestine, Indochina – and thereafter to zones of contention where the superpowers had leaseholder status and a steely readiness to wage war by proxy. During the Cold War, three million people left their homes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, five million left Afghanistan, a million or more were uprooted in Central America, and two to three million Palestinians dug deeper into exile; on the eve of the millennium there were nearly seven million refugees in Africa and many more people displaced inside their own borders.

The end of hostilities between the Soviet Union and the West brought hundreds of aid workers and dozens of refugee monitors – the successors of John Hope Simpson and Mr Sams – back from the tropics to Europe. The dramatic character of events in 1989 and the years that followed gave them a distinctive cast, but in the Baltic countries and elsewhere it was a smeared mirror-image of interwar statelessness that now reappeared, as a series of successor states came into being after the collapse of communism. Punitive rules of citizenship denied 700,000 Russian-speakers national status in Latvia and 500,000 in Estonia. By the end of 1996, UNHCR was alarmed by the ‘significant numbers’ of Slovaks and Roma rendered stateless, in effect, by the creation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In the 1930s, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had been exemplary hosts to large refugee populations. It was now the turn of former Yugoslav and Czechoslovak nationals – Yugoslavs, above all – to spill across new boundaries in search of refuge. Many of the elements that had led to the massive evictions of the interwar years were once again in place, but the idea of sanctuary had withered.

* * *

Western Europe was reluctant to intervene until the last minute in Bosnia, but at the end of the 1990s, with very high numbers of refugees already exiled from the former Yugoslavia and thousands more arriving from Kosovo, it was impossible to quarantine the Balkans any longer. The many asylum seekers who breached the fortress, and to whom, in the end, Germany and others opened their doors, were a pressing consideration in the Nato air campaign of 1999. A regime that had confined the effects of its misdeeds within its own borders might have fared better, but Slobodan Milosevic’s policies were foisting large numbers of terrified people on prosperous nations that wanted nothing to do with them. That was one of the issues that the European members of Nato had in mind when they spoke of a ‘humanitarian crisis’. Tens of thousands of Kosovans had already lodged asylum claims in the EU before Nato began its air strikes. The Albanian scafisti ferried hundreds across the Otranto Channel every week, while others struck out overland for Western Europe. The EU looked on with growing dismay.

Yet the extraordinary deportations with which Serbia responded to the Nato intervention made these movements look trifling by comparison. In a matter of months, the number of deportees in Macedonia and Albania stood at around half a million. This was by no means the biggest post-World War Two eviction in Europe: the brutal ‘transfer’ of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after World War Two took five years, involved twelve million people and cost at least 500,000 lives. Yet the Kosovo deportations, trifling by comparison, were shocking to those of us who never knew about the postwar persecution of ethnic Germans. The speed and intensity of the process in Kosovo gave it the appearance of rapid flight from a natural disaster.

There were fewer media organisations on hand to record the earlier movements of people on a similar scale in Europe. To get from Skopje, the Macedonian capital, to the country’s border with Kosovo during Nato’s bombing campaign, you had to negotiate a double barrier of police and military roadblocks and then, as you approached the gantries of Macedonian customs and immigration, a vast array of foreign journalists. The field at Blace, where perhaps 40,000 refugees were confined by the Macedonian Government, became the focus of round-the-clock scrutiny by hundreds of digital camcorders and telephoto lenses. It was as though the world had dispatched emissaries to record the arrival of an unknown life form, now evolving in a vast crater of mud and bodily waste. The refugees were cordoned off, victims of a threefold dispossession: forced from their homes and relieved of their belongings by Milosevic; denounced and immobilised by the government of Macedonia; inspected – though hardly addressed – by the media. Stateless, defenceless and finally voiceless. Eventually, posing as emergency workers to slip through the police lines, the press were able to enter the field and talk directly with people who had no idea when or how their ordeal would end.

Gaps began appearing in the screen of objectification thrown up around them, but these did nothing to alleviate the mixture of apprehension and dislike with which the intruders were greeted in Macedonia. Here, above all, they were seen as a potential threat to national stability (and ‘Slav’ ascendancy), already under pressure from the country’s Albanian minority. The desultory tones of Western governments – slow to offer support to the Macedonians in the face of this extraordinary crisis – gave rise to anger. There was much to extenuate the reaction of this little country to the overwhelming influx of refugees – it was no worse than the worst reactions in wealthier countries to the arrival of Kosovans – but in the end, it looked very much like a version of the same hostility that had driven people from their homes in the first place.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarked that ‘those whom the persecutor had singled out as the scum of the earth – Jews, Trotskyites etc – actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere.’ She was writing about the ‘denationalisations’ of the 1930s under Hitler and Stalin. The Kosovan refugees fleeing into Albania were spared the indignities of the field at Blace. They came in carts, towed by tractors, along the flaring snowline of Pastrik, down into a country that existed only in name, but which was once the lodestone of every militant Kosovan’s irredentist dreams. Here they were lodged by distant Albanian cousins: in Kukes, in the north of Albania, I saw twenty-six people living in an apartment that a family of four could have managed in Slough or Sarcelles. Yet there was a bitter aftertaste to this draught of hospitality, for it proved that blood and filiation are the best guarantees of sanctuary and that outside their clan, refugees have little to fall back on. In millions of cases, to be an asylum seeker is to be a stranger on trial. He is accused of nothing more palpable than his intentions, but these are assumed to be bad and the burden of proof rests with the defence. The ethnic Albanians forced out of Kosovo into Macedonia were not even put in the dock.

Reviewing what had happened during the 1930s, Arendt wrote at length about the capacity of nation states to project their prejudices. (Of these she had first-hand knowledge: she had left Germany in 1933, after a run-in with the Gestapo, and worked in Paris for a youth organisation, arranging the transfer of Jewish orphans to Palestine.) She believed that it was a simple matter for a totalitarian regime to ensure that the people it had turned into outcasts were received as outcasts wherever they went. She refers to an extract from a circular put out in 1938 by the German ministry of Foreign Affairs to its diplomatic staff abroad: ‘The influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the opposition of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the German Jewish policy … The poorer and therefore more burdensome the immigrating Jew is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the reaction of the country.’ Arendt was confident that this is more or less what happened. ‘Those whom persecution had called undesirable,’ she wrote, ‘became the indésirables of Europe.’

Sweeping, certainly, but her remarks catch the drift of the refugee’s central misfortune: to be shuttled along a continuum of abuse, a victim of ‘persecuting governments’ who can ‘impose their values’ on other governments – even those who oppose them in fact or on principle. For Kosovans who fled to Albania, clan and language interrupted the continuum. But most of the refugees and displaced people created by the break-up of Yugoslavia, including the Serbs, have run a gauntlet of opprobrium that begins when a regime decides that some of its citizens are guilty of ‘subversions of brotherhood and unity’, or are simply ‘barbarian’, and continues when those people are denounced by a local newspaper in a country of asylum a thousand miles away as ‘human sewage’, which is how the Dover Express described the Kosovan and Kurdish refugees holed up on the south coast of England in 1998. The government of a country of asylum may not share the views of its doughty fourth estate, but it is bound to take them into account as it draws up measures, such as those introduced in Britain, to keep asylum seekers at bay.

Depriving refugees of their assets before they flee, in order to ensure a hostile reception in countries that receive them, is harder now than it was between the wars. Army and police can raze their houses, kill their livestock, strip them of their jewellery, steal their cars and cash and destroy their papers – all of this and worse occurred in Kosovo – but they cannot intervene so easily in the network of contacts that persecuted communities build up abroad. Once a pattern of departure is set down, as it has been in Turkish and Iraqi Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia and Kosovo, the refugee can follow the thread of survival through the labyrinth with help from friends and relatives outside the country who are ready to put up money for the journey or provide support in the early stages of adaptation.

That pattern of support is as old as migration itself. What is new is the ease with which many persecuted people can move money out of a country before they leave. Once a community under pressure grasps the enormity of its situation, as ethnic Albanians in Kosovo did at the end of the 1980s, it begins to evacuate resources. The crucial transfer is psychological. When hope – the simple idea that circumstances might improve – is no longer possible in situ, it becomes fugitive. As it migrates across borders, the able-bodied and the educated go with it: often the middle classes are the most visible dissidents and among the first to leave. Redoubts are established in the wider world; jobs are secured and, in time, others consider leaving. The rhythms are those of straightforward economic migration, with a smaller flow of remittances to the homeland: it is pointless to remit earnings to a place where they can be pillaged. On the contrary, the more who leave, the greater the transfers out, as those who remain convert their wealth into hard currency and place it abroad with the help of others who have left. In due course, the free expression of political views, outlawed at home, becomes possible outside: journals, meetings, fund-raisers, levies, numbered accounts into which donations to the cause can be paid. This was the case of the Eritrean and Palestinian exiles during the 1970s and 1980s and the Kosovan community in Switzerland during the 1990s. It is also one of the reasons people can raise the money to pay for human smugglers.

The poor refugee, unlike the middle-class dissident who makes a bid for safety, is just as disadvantaged as the poor person in a stable social arrangement. In Yugoslavia, greater numbers of Serbs have been hounded from pillar to post than any other ethnic or ‘national’ group. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s there was no larger group of displaced Europeans. Yet of the 600,000 Serbs who have been uprooted once and, in some cases, several times, only a small proportion have known how to salvage their wealth. They too have been prey to the regime in Belgrade. If Milosevic wanted to strip Kosovo Albanians of their citizenship – for which few had much enthusiasm anyhow – he also used the misfortunes of other Yugoslavs, exiled by the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, to slow down the unravelling of Yugoslavia. Their hardship was as severe as anything faced by the many Yugoslavs who made their way towards the rich world.

The Marinkovic family, for example, were interlopers in Kosovo. They arrived in Pristina in 1995. Their new home lay under the shadow of a pale ochre high-rise: the military police headquarters, a source of comfort to Kosovo’s Serbian minority and an object of loathing to Albanians. Marinkovic and his relatives lived together in a large room with five beds in a wooden hut full of other Serbs, like them, from the Krajina (the self-proclaimed Serb entity within Croatia). There were several such barracks, disposed around the police building in an overground warren. They had once contained more than a hundred people but, by 1998, when I met the Marinkovic family, there were no more than forty. A refugee is, by definition, someone who has fled beyond the borders of his own country – someone who knows that the only option is to head for open water. For old Djuro Marinkovic, his daughter Anka and their dependants, the process was different. Yugoslavia simply drained around them. Federal boundaries suddenly became sand spits denoting the frontiers of new sovereign entities. When Djuro Marinkovic and his fellow Serbs from the Krajina fled towards Belgrade in 1995, they were making for the capital of a state whose jurisdiction no longer obtained in their place of origin. In the cold eye of history, they were like any Europeans undone by the vicissitudes of the 1920s and 1930s.

Marinkovic was sixty-two when he was uprooted from his farmstead in the Krajina. When the crisis came, he got his family away without mishap. On their arrival in Belgrade, they registered as refugees and were eventually transferred to Pristina. Other options had been mooted, but in Belgrade they were promised that if they moved to Kosovo, they would be housed by the Republic of Serbia. That seemed to clinch it. Marinkovic, his wife, their daughter and her two children became the willing victims of Milosevic’s forlorn attempt to shift the demographic balance in Kosovo in favour of the Serbian minority. By the mid-1990s, several thousand Krajina Serbs had been dumped in the province like so much ethnic ballast.

Marinkovic’s life had been a long, fumbling, painful descent into the basement of Europe and, after three years in Kosovo, he was ready to admit that he was in the dark – that everything had gone wrong. He told me that he had been interned in a Croatian camp for Serbs in 1941; that in the same year his father had been murdered by Ustashe guards; that his older brother, a Partisan, had been killed in the course of duty and that his mother had become a drunkard. As a boy of nine or ten, he said, he had worked with the Partisans, setting fires in the fields to guide in Allied planes. This, in turn, put him in mind of how the enemy had laid false fires to mislead the pilots – and the memory of these fires brought him round to the subject of Milosevic, the deceiver; the man that he, Marinkovic, should never have taken at his word. In Kosovo there was nothing. The old man lived in miserable conditions, surrounded by angry ethnic Albanians; he received a pittance as a guardian on a building site; his family depended on a regular international aid package of basic foodstuffs.

In the summer of 1999, after the Serbian withdrawal from Kosovo, I looked for Marinkovic in Pristina. Before the bombings, there were two places, apart from the cramped barracks, where you could find Krajina Serbs. One was a miserable hotel, permanently under guard, the other a stone building up towards the city’s mosques. Since Nato’s entry under the guise of KFOR, the hotel had changed hands and the stone building had been boarded up. Where the Marinkovic family had lived, the sun beat down on the charred remains of the huts. A large radio mast in the police complex had been targeted during the sorties. It lay lengthways in front of the ruins.

The Marinkovic family had not been long in Kosovo – a little less than four years. Now, in all likelihood, they had been pushed back into Serbia proper, along with hundreds of families driven out under the new dispensation, and scores of Roma. As the Serbs headed north, hundreds more Roma – also targets of ethnic Albanian fury – began heading west, replacing Kosovans on the boats from Albania or making their way by other routes towards France and Britain, to join the tide of ‘human sewage’ in which Dover, a town of some 35,000 inhabitants hosting around a thousand refugees at the time, imagined it was foundering.

Kosovo was a severe weather event in the prevailing climate of crisis and asylum. As it passed, the issues that were pressing during the 1991 Gulf War and the conflict in Bosnia became visible again. The names of places like Blace in Macedonia and Kukes in Albania have already been replaced by others, while both new and older dispossessions coexist on UNHCR’s agenda: in 2012 there were nearly half a million refugees in Dadaab, north-east Kenya, and more than 1.7 million internally displaced persons in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Meanwhile millions of Iraqis fled their country after the Bush/Blair invasion in 2003: the tally by 2007 was two million, but it may now have reached five million. The numbers of Kosovans on the gommoni from Albania have already diminished, but by 2011 Puglia and other parts of southern Italy were taking in large numbers of people from the Maghreb.

Governments in ‘receiving countries’ have to hold to the belief that at some time or other the forced movement of people can be reduced, especially in a world where a new ideology of human rights and ‘good governance’ has begun to hammer at old bulwarks of impunity such as national sovereignty. But there is nothing to suggest that they will. In the meantime, the same sovereign status that was challenged by military means in the former Yugoslavia can be challenged by law in the wealthy democracies, above all in the EU, where recourse to the European Court of Human Rights may produce outcomes that go against an individual state’s preference for minimal intakes of refugees.