Last week’s drowning of 24 illegal immigrants, most of them Pakistanis, after their overloaded boat capsized in a river on the Greece-Turkey border, has sparked a crackdown on the massive human smuggling racket in Pakistan.

According to the authorities, it was the worst accident involving illegal immigrants for more than three years. The bodies of the 24 people, including two women, washed up on the banks of the Evros River.

The young men and women were lured by agents in Pakistan who cash in on the dreams of the poor to make it big in the West.

Agents in such international smuggling rackets mostly bait young men from low-income families. They charge up to US $5,000 for those wanting to travel to any of the West European countries using different routes.

Unfortunately, the gig doesn’t always work out the way it is planned. Most of the starry-eyed youths land in jails or perish enroute to their dreamland, leaving their families waiting back home for the rest of their lives.

Thousands of such illegal immigrants attempt to reach Greece, the Balkans’ only European Union member, either through its northern borders with Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey or by crossing the Aegean Sea from the western Turkish coast.

Turkey and Greece lie on a major people-trafficking route from Asia to Europe. More than 10,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in the Evros region in 2002.

Up until August of this year, Greece had arrested 31,835 illegal immigrants.

Pakistan’s foreign office issued a statement, saying 15 bodies were buried on the advice of the local Islamic religious leader due to their badly decomposed condition.

Among the dead was Abdul Sattar, a resident of rural eastern Punjab. Muhammad Hussain, Sattar’s 75-year-old father, says they had paid US $400 to an agent and the remaining US $5,000 was to be paid after his arrival in Greece. Hussain, a small farmer, says, “Abdul’s death has shattered us but the agent still wants the money.”

Another unlucky traveler was Muhammad Ishfaq from the eastern city of Lahore. Sultan Ahmad, the victim’s father, who owns a tea kiosk, says he has lost both his son and money in the search for a bright future.

The incident has deeply embarrassed the Pakistan government. Says Interior Secretary Tasnim Noorani, “The government has taken various steps to minimize human smuggling and trafficking.”

He admits that human trafficking has become a serious issue, which has tarnished the country’s image.

Noorani says the Human Smuggling Ordinance promulgated in October 2002 has helped curb such rackets. He says a high-powered inter-ministerial committee has also been set up to control human smuggling.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has also launched a drive against fake travel agents and human traffickers in Pakistan. FIA director Sharif Virk says hunger, poverty and a war-like situation in the region are responsible for the spurt in human trafficking. He says although it is hard to find a job in neighbouring countries, it is easy to sneak into Europe through the Central Asian Republics.

This year, the FIA has arrested 327 travel agents from the eastern province of Punjab, acting on tip-offs from off-loaded people, deportees and other complainants. Some 450 were arrested last year.

The voyage of the smugglers can chill all but the most desperate. The smugglers transport people in fishing and cargo ships. People wishing to go to Turkey, Greece, Italy, France and Austria prefer this route, risking their lives in squalid and airless containers for days and even weeks.

Hundreds of people try to enter Europe this way, hiding in boats which are barely seaworthy.

With such tidal waves of Pakistanis shipping out illegally, it isn’t surprising that over 2,000 Pakistanis are languishing in European jails for violating immigration laws.

With 5,000 miles of coastline, Turkey has remote inlets and busy industrial dockyards that are a haven for illegal immigrants. Most of them are trucked to secret locations or to shabby factories in industrial estates on the outskirts of Istanbul.

The FIA has set up a special counter at Pakistan’s Islamabad Airport to curb illegal immigration and human trafficking of Pakistanis, Virk says. But limited resources stand in the way of combating this crime. “There are only seven FIA passport cells in Pakistan, whereas we have proposed 26 stations to the Interior Ministry,” says Virk.

An FIA official says there is a need to check people travelling to Libya and Iran that offer sea routes to Europe.

But smugglers have other routes to fly people out — in the guise of “cultural delegations.” These “art promoters” (organizers of musical programs) earn large sums of money in immigration rackets and supply Pakistani girls to striptease bars in the West.

Naib Nazim Malik Hamid, a “renowned personality” of Lahore’s sex workers’ district told a Pakistan newspaper that it is common practice to arrange delegations for “art promotion,” which actually supplies girls to striptease bars abroad.

Last week, Pakistan and Sri Lanka signed a deal regarding security matters, elimination of drugs and human smuggling, after the arrest in the past few weeks of hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants, mainly from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan as they were preparing to leave for Italy.

The latest arrests bring to 682 the number of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals arrested during the past month for using Sri Lanka as a transit point for illegal immigration. Under the deal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan will adopt joint measures to stop human smuggling.

But the sharks are one step ahead of the Feds. Officials say that after the government’s crackdown, traffickers have now shifted to smaller towns and cities to lure more people with the promise of a better future abroad — for a few dollars more.