The arrival of two boatloads of illegal migrants on the southern shores of Italy at the end of last month has focussed attention on a growing smuggling trade. The boats had set out from western Turkey, and many of the hundreds of people on board were Kurds from both Turkey and Iraq. The BBC's Ankara correspondent Chris Morris reports now on the human face of international migration.

I met Anvar on a freezing cold day on one of Ankara's busiest street corners. I was surrounded by more denim jeans that I'd care to set eyes on, and he was going to be the one wearing blue trousers. At least it kept him inconspicuous.

After circling each other a few times we finally made contact and walked to a smoke filled cafe on the top floor of a run down building just around the corner. Anvar, still in his twenties, is going grey before his time. Life on the run has aged him.

He's in Turkey illegally, having already been deported back to his native Iran once before. An Iranian Kurd, he was in prison for his political beliefs, and -as he put it - for thinking un-Islamic thoughts. Twice now, he's paid $500 to be smuggled by night across the steep mountain passes into Turkey.

"I'm not an economic migrant", he insisted to me in broken English and half-translated Farsi. "I just want somewhere to live in peace". He's applied for asylum through the UN but things look difficult. He already has a record with the Turkish police, and no-one wants to rock the boat unduly.

Going further abroad is one option, but that's not easy either. It requires a dangerous trip across the sea to a Greek island or even to Italy, or the risk of being packed like sardines with many others behind a pile of tyres or a stack of ready made garments on the back of a lorry.

More than anything it requires a lot of money to be given to often untrustworthy smuggling gangs, who just might hand you over anyway to one of their contacts in the police. It's hard to trust anybody when you no longer have a country to call your own.

I'm not saying that all those seeking to flee to Europe are like Anvar, but blanket descriptions are always misleading. Turkey says the refugees in the news recently have all been economic migrants in search of a better life. That's wrong. Some people in Europe think they're all Kurds fleeing from Turkish oppression. That's wrong too.

What we're seeing is a conglomeration of the huddled masses of the world -unfortunates both political and economic, who see Turkey as a route perhaps not to a better life, but at least to a different one. Somewhere the grass has to be greener than war or grinding poverty.

Turkey's misfortune is to be caught in the middle of all this. It boasts a proud history of granting asylum, stretching back as far as 1492 when the Ottoman Empire welcomed the Jews being kicked out of Catholic Spain.

Constantinople, now Istanbul, was always one of the world's great cosmopolitan centres, a city where different customs and cultures collide and intermingle. That historical association lingers on, although old timers say the city is not what it used to be. The inward migration of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in just a few years has changed its character, and its sprawling ghetto suburbs are threatening to overwhelm its extraordinary centre.

Even so Istanbul still feels like an appropriate place to put in the middle of an international drama of people on the move. Cheap hotels and boarding houses are being raided night after night, and suspicious ships are searched. Thousands of people have been detained, only for many to be released again to plan their escape anew. Across the seas, Europe shudders at the thought of a new invasion from the east.

Turkey protests its innocence and on one level it's right to do so. Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and Egyptians are not the responsibility of the hard-pressed government in Ankara. But Turkey has also created part of the problem itself. Its mistreatment of the Kurds is its greatest national blind spot, its refusal to accept the notion of minority nationalism hard for this outsider to understand.

In the end, geographical realities place Turkey squarely in the middle of Migrant Route One to Europe. Some say the smuggling business is becoming as lucrative as the drugs trade - organised crime is certainly involved in a big way.

But the bare bones of this story are about ordinary people cast adrift in a difficult world. That shouldn't be forgotten amongst all the statistics and all the hand-wringing.

As we sat over beer and Turkish tea in our smoky cafe, I asked Anvar what he might want to say to anyone listening to the piece I was going to broadcast about him. He stared at the table, and then looked up. "Tell the people in their comfortable houses", he said, "that we mean them no harm. Tell them not to forget about us".
 

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