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For years, Vietnamese organizations have been smuggling their compatriots into Europe and exploiting their victims here, including children and youth. The BKA calls out this human trafficking RBB– Now investigate the fight.
By Adrian Bartocha and Jan Wiese, RBB
Chung * is a thin boy. For some time he has lived in a secret place in Warsaw. When fear overcomes him, he begins to draw. That calms him down, he says. His executioners have been sentenced for a long time.
Chung is an orphan. After the death of his parents, his grandmother took him in until she too died. To survive, he collected clams, snails, driftwood, and bottles. One day, a compatriot approached the then 15-year-old and offered to smuggle him to Europe so he could build a better life there. Chung agreed.
But already on the trip that took him to Poland via Russia and the Baltic countries, he had doubts. Time and time again he was held in basements and forced to work. “I had the feeling that I had been set up. I tried to fight back, but they hit me.” On the way from Warsaw to Berlin, Chung’s dream of a better life ended abruptly. The van, packed with twelve Vietnamese, had an accident. The Polish driver fled and left the seriously injured to their fate.
Dark high field
“We are taking on a very high number of unreported cases,” says Carsten Moritz of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The field in which the senior BKA employee in RBB-The interview speaks, it is human trafficking: most young Vietnamese are attracted to Europe with the hope of a prosperous life. Once they have arrived here, they have to work in the most adverse conditions. “In massage studios, restaurants, nail studios,” Moritz explains, but “also in cigarette smuggling, in the slaughterhouse industry.” Vietnamese were also found in brothels and in drug trafficking.
After the accident, Chung was captured and testified in Poland. The smugglers were arrested, including Andrzej *. The Polish criminal led a group of three who, on behalf of the Vietnamese mafia, took hundreds of Vietnamese from Lithuania to Warsaw and from there to Belgium, Holland and France, for 400 euros per person, crammed into vans.
Andrzej didn’t care about his fate: “They were all yellow, small and thin anyway.” He would never hit “those,” he said in an interview, supposedly out of “fear of killing them,” and laughs. He is now in custody, convicted of human trafficking, as are his employees and a Vietnamese sponsor.
13 years as prostitutes
“Highly professional, hierarchically structured with a gray eminence in the background, similar to an international company”: this is how Markus Pfau, chief of crime control of the Halle Federal Police, describes Vietnamese criminal organizations that work together in European networks. According to their findings, human traffickers charge up to € 20,000 for the road to Western Europe. Money that families or young people like Chung often do not even have and therefore go into debt with the networks.
“You are dependent, of course,” says Pfau. “The organization has those affected in its hands, and if they don’t dance to their rhythm, then the matter is quickly over for them. Ultimately, it is modern slavery.”
Minors are also enslaved. “We had cases where we found 13 or 14-year-old girls as prostitutes who were smuggled in for this purpose,” says Markus Pfau. “And we have had individual cases where minors have been used in cannabis plantations.”
Berlin as the “focal point”
Berlin is the “hub” for human smugglers and human smugglers, says Moritz, Head of Department at BKA. Most of the smuggled Vietnamese are “delivered” to an industrial and commercial zone in the eastern part of the city and distributed further afield, throughout Germany.
But in Berlin, of all places, they don’t want to acknowledge the problem of Vietnamese human trafficking. “In our experience, criteria for human trafficking in the context of human trafficking are generally not met,” explains Sebastian Laudan, chief investigator in the field of organized crime at the Berlin State Criminal Police Office. He not only opposes the assessment of Federal Police officer Markus Pfau, but also that of the BKA. “These smugglers,” said BKA department head Moritz, “always have one purpose: human trafficking.”
Systemic failure
The point of view of the Berlin police is not an isolated case. Investigations into human trafficking are tedious and require adequate structures. But that is exactly what is lacking in Germany, criticizes Kevin Hyland. He is a member of the Council of Europe Group of Experts on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings. Germany had already made a commitment under international law in 2005 to take action against human trafficking, but the main demands have yet to be met. “There is still no national trafficking officer and no national victim protection program. The duty to conduct proactive investigations is not being met,” Hyland said.
Very different from Hyland’s home country of Great Britain. There he was the government’s first antislavery commissioner. In 2015, Britain passed the world’s first law to combat modern slavery and human trafficking. The “proactive” investigations made it clear that the Vietnamese are the largest non-European group of victims of human trafficking: almost 900 in 2019, almost half of them minors. Even in Corona 2020, 500 possible victims were identified in the first three quarters. His path almost always passed through Germany.
But the BKA only confirmed seven Vietnamese victims for 2019. It is also clear to the BKA that this number does not reflect reality. That is why Vietnamese human trafficking in Germany and Europe will be a priority from 2021, along with 13 other European investigative authorities. Because, according to Moritz, it is “a pan-European problem” that can only be fought at the European level.
* Name changed by publisher
At 11:05 p.m. M., Das Erste broadcasts a documentary entitled “Children’s merchandise: the mafia of human traffickers”, which can be accessed from 6 pm. M. In the ARD media library.
