Bulgaria - a Dangerous Transit Route to Western Europe

Since Bulgaria's accession to the European Union in 2007, the country has become a magnet for illegal immigrants. Photo by BGNES

By Stefan Tashev

waz.euobserver.com

A half-dying man lay by the embankment of the border river Maritsa on Bulgarian territory. Only the fact that he was found by Bulgarian border policemen saved his life. The man was Iranian. He had tried to enter illegally into the country by boat, together with three countrymen on the frosty morning of 24 January this year.

They set off from Turkey with a local trafficker who led them across the Turkish-Greek border. Then they decided to enter into Bulgaria by boat. But one Iranian fell overboard. The other three left him to drown, got off the boat and headed for the nearby woods.

However, minutes later they were spotted by inhabitants of the border village of Kapitan Andreevo. They called the border police. When an attempt was made to stop them for an ID check, the immigrants tried to flee and were stopped by the officers firing rubber bullets in the air. The border guards followed the foot steps in the snow and found the fourth Iranian, almost frozen to his death.

This case is not an exception but one of many happening on the Bulgarian-Turkish border on an almost daily basis. On that same day, another seven half-frozen illegal immigrants, including one woman, were found at a border checkpoint in a truck trailer. Six of them were Turks, one was Iranian.

Since Bulgaria's accession to the European Union in 2007, the country has become a magnet for illegal immigrants. They try all possible ways to get to Bulgaria, hoping to use it as a stepping stone for the richer EU countries further west.

In 2009, the border police caught 485 illegal immigrants at the Bulgarian-Turkish border. They came from Iraq, Turkey, Palestine and Afghanistan. The immigrants try to cross the border any way they can. They use boats, hide in secret compartments in trucks, or crawl on the ground across the border.

Every summer some 1.5 million Turkish workers, living and working in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Belgium, head off to Turkey on holiday in their cars. A heavy flow of vehicles, sometimes packed with 7-8 people, squeezes its way through Bulgaria.

In September, traffic moves in the opposite direction. Many families try to smuggle a relative without documents in their cars. They wrap them up in blankets or pile up luggage over them so they will not be discovered at the border. Policemen have rescued half-suffocated people from cars in the September heat.

When the immigrants are caught, they usually request humanitarian protection or asylum. Sometimes Bulgaria sends them back to Turkey if they are caught at the border, or accommodates them in two temporary shelters for foreigners. Many are desperate to continue to Greece or Western Europe. In 2009, 252 were caught trying to cross the border into Greece at the Bulgarian-Greek border.

There are tragicomic cases as well. Last year, border police stopped a Tadzjiki citizen who had walked 70 kilometres from Sofia to the Serbian border, carrying just a backpack and no documents, assuming Serbia was his best bet to proceed to Western Europe. And there are tragic stories too, like that of two Russian women who tried to make it to Greece but perished in the snow drifts on Belasitsa mountain.

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