Kosovar Albanians are used to living their lives
according to a traditional
moral code that - among other things - guides
the conduct of women in
public. The arrival of organised prostitution
shows that like so much
else in the tormented province, that code is
in tatters.
By Imer Mushkolaj and Mentor Shala in Pristina
Two beautiful, blonde young women stand by a car
park at one o'clock in the
morning as the traffic dies down. Only a few
kilometres outside Pristina,
on the road to Peja the women are offering their
sexual "services".
"Fifty marks for an hour," says one as her colleague
moves closer to the
car for a better look at the customer.
Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is turning into
a comfortable nest for
many young girls involved in the 'oldest profession
in the world'. Elda,
one of the girls "working" at the car park, is
only 18. She is from
Albania and came to Kosovo only two months ago.
A prostitute in Tirana, she came to Kosovo to
"bring her experience to the
Kosovar girls". "It's a good business. Kosovar
girls who want to get
into it, should go ahead," she added.
Prostitution was rare but not unknown in Kosovo before the war..."
"But prostitution in Kosovo is changing. Street
prostitution, which is
illegal, is on the increase as are the number
of illegal "mini bordellos".
In Pristina there are at least three apartments
serving as "mini bordellos". Usually only one or two prostitutes operate
in such establishments, in pleasant surroundings and for significant sums
of money.
In almost all cases the prostitutes are the 'property'
of the apartment
owners.
Sanija, a widow in her forties, owns such a "bordello".
She "employs"
two
young girls in her apartment, and makes at least
2,000 German marks a
month. "We have two or three customers a day.
Many of them are young,
but
there are also older people who come.
"Madame provides us with free food and lodging
and some out of pocket
expenses," said one of Sanija's two girls. The
young woman, who spoke
only
on condition of anonymity, said her family is
from a Kosovar village and
that they do not know what she is doing. "They
think I am working for a
humanitarian organisation," she explained.
The street prostitutes are "owned" by several
pimps, some of which are
successful businessmen. Arben, for example, is
in his thirties and
admits to running 7 prostitutes on Pristina's
streets. Four of them are from
Albania and the other three from a small village
just outside Pristina.
"What I am doing looks like a normal business
to me. I consider them as my
collaborators. We all make money," Arben said.
He denies accusations
that the girls are forced into prostitution.
"No, no," he said, "They all
wanted to do it. No one forced them."
Young students also make up the growing ranks
of prostitutes in Kosovo.
Lulja is one of them. She is currently studying
Law and has been working as
a prostitute for three months. She said that
fellow students are her usual
clients. "I charge very little for the students.
I only charge them 10 marks. I make 30-40 German marks a day," she said.
Lulja said poverty was the main reason for her
turning to prostitution.
"If I had money, I would have never done this",
she said. Lulja sends part
of her income to her family, who live in a village
in southern Kosovo,
badly damaged during the war. "My father is sick.
We have no other income,"
she
said.
Lulja said she knew of at least ten other students
who were working as
prostitutes..."
"A large proportion of the prostitutes now working
in Kosovo has come from
abroad, from the Czech Republic, Ukraine and
Poland.
UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) officials
admit they are aware
of
prostitution in Kosovo. "Yes there are some cases.
A few days ago we
captured three girls on the streets. They had
come from Ukraine. One of
them said that she was kidnapped and brought
here, while another one
said
that she had escaped from home and came here
for work," said Jack
Seamson,
Chief Detective of the UNMIK Police in Pristina.
"
"There are currently 1,800 international police
troops in Kosovo. Bernard
Kouchner, UN Administrator for Kosovo, has requested
6,000 but such a
figure has yet to be approved. Some Albanian
officials have pointed the
finger at the international police for the failure
to combat rising
prostitution.
"There are many prostitution cases. The UNMIK
police is working very
slowly
on this issue," claimed Avdi Rraci, an official
of the Ministry of
Public
Order in the Interim Government of Kosovo.
raci complained that members of the Public Order
Ministry were being
prevented from carrying out their duties as necessary
and that this was
fuelling an increase in criminal activity. "We
are trying to do our job,
but we are constrained the UNMIK police," Rraci
said.
The Ministry of Public Order is part of the interim
government formed by
the former leader of KLA, Hashim Thaci. Officials
in the ministry claim
they have 1,500 personnel ready to form the core
of a new police force in
Kosovo, under the supervision of the UN.
And it is not only in Pristina that prostitution
is enjoying something
of a boom. In Prizren, southern Kosovo, the "Skenderbeu"
restaurant has
become an illegal "meeting house". Lorry drivers
from Albania form the bulk of
"Skenderbeu" customers. "This is the best way
to relax after such a long
trip from Tirana," said Gjergji, 36, on his way
to the upstairs rooms.
Azem, a caf‚ waiter in the town centre, claimed,
"There are at least
three other similar places in the town."
Such places exist in Mitrovica, Gjilan, and Ferizaj.
In Pristina, one
can
find prostitutes in the "Mars" restaurant and
in a nightclub in Slatine,
only a few kilometres from the capital. "
From JAMES PRINGLE IN PRISTINA / The Times, February 5
THE presence of Nato-led troops in Kosovo
is
supporting a new and sinister white slave
trade trade, in
which women from impoverished parts of
Eastern Europe
are being bought and sold into prostitution.
The women, some as young as 16, are held
captive by
gangsters, often Albanian, and sell sexual
favours to
troops and businessmen in the seedy nightclubs
springing
up around Kosovo.
Others smuggled into the region from Moldova,
Ukraine,
Bulgaria, Romania and beyond are moved
further on, into
Albania, across the Adriatic into Italy
and from there to
brothels in Western Europe, all the time
under the
"ownership" of organised crime. Even children
are
following similar routes, sold for adoption
or, some say,
for body parts.
International agencies trying to combat
the trade say that it
is expanding rapidly, despite efforts
to rescue women
from the clutches of the loosely organised,
mafia-style
gangs. They say the numbers are becoming
too great for
agencies to manage.
Kosovo was not, in the past, a destination
for the East
European sex trade, which began with the
collapse of
communism in 1991, but the lure of a 45,000-strong
army
and a large international component has
proved an
irresistible draw and bars and nightclubs
are springing up
across the province in places such as
Gnjilane and
Urosevac.
One at Slatina, just outside Pristina and
near the HQ of
Russian forces, is the Nightclub International,
from which
Italian Carabinieri rescued 12 young women
last week.
Their duties involved dispensing sexual
favours, at about
?30 for half an hour, to Russian and American
Kfor
troops and other foreign clients.
"These girls who were rescued are terrified
and don't
understand what has happened to them,"
Pasquale Lupoli,
chief of mission of the International
Organisation of
Migration (IOM) in Pristina, said. "But
they are now in a
protected area where security is guaranteed."
The IOM, a little-known Geneva-based governmental
agency, was originally set up to provide
travel documents
and an assistant network to migrants;
instead, it is engaged
increasingly in trying to help the thousands
of girls who are
now prisoners in the European sex trade.
Signor Lupoli said that the number of such
girls was rising
so quickly that the agency was finding
it very difficult to
cope. The IOM had also had difficulties
locating a
non-government organisation (NGO) to agree
to take
care of them. One problem is that the
girls are not
refugees so do not come under, say, the
UNHCR.
There was, Signor Lupoli said, also some
danger.
Albanian gangsters are searching for their
"property" and
IOM staff have received threats. In Kosovo,
British
troops are subject to a strict "no walking
out" policy, but
other nationalities' forces, such as the
Russians, Americans
and Italians, are less closely monitored.
"None of our
soldiers goes into these bars unless on
an official mission,"
one British officer said. "If they did,
they would find
themselves on a military charge."
Of the dozen women rescued by the Carabinieri
in Slatina,
one had been raped at 14 and all had been
maltreated.
Like hundreds of similar victims, they
had been sold
several times as they were spirited across
Balkan borders
from owner to owner.
Greece, too, is a destination for the sex
traders. Mirela
Stan, 24, of Romania, and Hitara Antilsova,
29, from
Ukraine, were found dead from the cold
on a
mountainside near the Greek-Bulgarian
border in January.
They perished in an effort to reach their
"promised land", a
Greek nightclub.
In Kosovo, the streets were empty recently
after dark
after a panic that teenage girls were
being kidnapped by
the Albanian mafia to be sold into prostitution.
Indeed,
some have disappeared.
These days, a young East European woman
costs from
?1,000 to ?1,400 to buy. She first has
to pay back her
cost, then ostensibly she gets half of
what she makes from
prostitution, while the boss retains 50
per cent.
Additionally, the girl has then to pay
10 per cent of her
earnings for board. "Often she ends up
with very little or
nothing," an IOM official said. If she
is lucky.
The Times, February 24 2000
"The escalating number of East European women being
sold to work as prostitutes in Britain has prompted
a
Home Office report. Eve-Ann Prentice is the first
journalist to visit the hideout in Albania for victims on the
run from the traffickers.
Seven pairs of wary, traumatised eyes stare at us as we
enter the living room at the fugitives' hideout. The young
women clutch one another's arms and huddle together on
a sofa, watching in silence.
They trust no one from the outside - and nor should they.
Some of the most violent mafiosi in the world are out
there, periodically scouring the warren of filthy streets
looking for them. The game was nearly up two weeks ago
when armed gangsters gathered outside another house
that the women used as a hiding place in the Albanian
capital, Tirana. Shots were fired and only the bravery of
those protecting the fugitives saved the day. They
smuggled the terrified women out and moved them to the
new hideaway. They could be discovered again at any
moment.
The women seem barely old enough to warrant the
mafiosi's efforts; mostly they are girls in their teens. The
reason they are on the run is because they are escaped
slaves - and the men who bought them want their property
back.
The runaways are just a tiny minority of the countless
thousands of human beings bought and sold in a
burgeoning trade which has spread its tentacles from the
far reaches of Eastern Europe to the massage parlours of
London's West End, and more recently Britain's suburbs.
The merchandise in this flourishing illicit business
comprises innocent girls and young women who are often
kidnapped from their home towns and villages and forced
into lives of violence and prostitution. They are usually
bought for between ?500 and ?2,000 and their "owners"
then make a fortune by forcing them to sell sex.
The escapees' safe house is surrounded by a high wooden
fence and we are ushered quickly inside. The seven young
women huddled on the sofa are still in a state of shock.
They include Tara, a 19-year-old former student nurse,
Maria, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, and Elena, a 30-year-old
mother-of-one who is desperate to know where her
toddler son is and who is looking after him. All three come
from Moldova; all three were sold into slavery - the
16-year-old Maria eventually being bought by a
19-year-old drug dealer who imprisoned her in his family
home with his mother.
Maria has a flawless peaches-and-cream complexion and
waves of dark brown hair falling to her shoulders. Initially
she shakes her head and refuses to speak. But after
hearing others tentatively recount their experiences, she
lifts her head and begins to describe the way she was
bundled into a car and kidnapped as she walked near her
home in the Moldovan capital, Kishinau, last September.
She has not seen her family since.
"I was going to my aunt's house when a car drew up and
two men forced me to get in. They kept telling me that
everything would be OK, but I was so frightened because
I had heard about cases of girls being kidnapped and
taken to be used as prostitutes," she says. "I kept asking
why they were doing this but they just said I should not
worry. They did not leave me alone for a second and that
first night they put me in a hotel."
Over the following days, Maria was driven to Timisoara in
Romania, and her captors and the cars they used were
changed several times. Once in Romania, she was put
with 13 other young girls and they were driven on again,
this time to a town in Serbia; Maria is not sure where but
she recognised the Cyrillic script on road signs. Here they
were locked in a house for two weeks and each day were
fed a loaf of bread between them.
"They were very hard conditions. It was very cold, so
cold, and there were no beds," she says. "I was too
frightened to try to escape but even if I had wanted to I
would not have been able to.
"Every day some men came and one or two of the girls
were taken away. I realised they had been sold." It was
here that Maria had her first experience of sex, when she
was raped by one of her jailers. "I was such a little girl,
of
16," she whispers. "The men were free to mistreat us as
they wanted."
Two weeks after being imprisoned, three men came to
take her to Montenegro, the tiny mountain republic which,
with Serbia, makes up Yugoslavia. "It was very, very cold
and I had no coat. After four days someone came and
bought me and seven other girls. We were taken in a small
boat to Shkoder in Albania. After that I was taken to
Durres and sold to this boy of 19. He paid $2,700
(?1,700). He didn't treat me as a human being and there
were now just the two of us in this apartment, with his
mother living upstairs. He told me his name and he spoke
often in Italian and kept saying he was sorry for me. That
didn't stop him using me [as a prostitute], though. I was so
afraid of him; he abused me every night."
Maria was rescued after two months, when the youth said
he wanted to take her to Italy and she was put in a car for
yet another journey. She asked the driver to help her, but
he said he could not.
Maria now suspects, however, that the driver took pity on
her because police came to the car when it stopped at one
point and she screamed for help. The girl who had begun
school just five days before being snatched says she was
kept in a police station for another two months before
being taken to the International Organisation for Migration
a Geneva-based intergovernmental group. "I cannot say
the police were kind," she says. "They treated me as if I
was a prostitute and I was forced to sleep on a table
because there was no bed."
The house which shelters the young women is one of three
in the Albanian capital provided by the International
Organisation for Migration and the International Catholic
Migration Commission. It is pristinely clean, bright and
well-furnished, in stark contrast to the jumble of fetid
streets outside. I am sworn to keep the shelter's location
secret, but it would be hard to describe the route to its
door even if I wanted to. Rich Kocher, an American who
is head of the IOM mission in Albania, and his
compatriate Ken Patterson, director of the ICMC, drove
me through a bewildering tangle of streets and back
roads, sometimes doubling back and reversing down blind
alleys. At one point we passed a roadblock manned by
sinister-looking men in black balaclavas bearing automatic
rifles. "They are special police who wear masks to prevent
anyone knowing who they are," says Patterson. "They
could be targets of organised crime if they stop and search
one of the mafia and find anything."
The IOM is trying to help Maria to return home to her
parents, three-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister,
but the organisation first has to arrange travel documents.
Maria is luckier than most because she was able to keep
her identity card throughout her months of captivity. Most
sex slaves are quickly deprived of their passports and
other identity papers and issued with forgeries when they
are transported abroad. This, along with language
difficulties, makes escape or repatriation should they
escape, doubly difficult.
"I have telephoned my family," says Maria. "When I get
home I will tell my parents everything that happened. I
never, never thought of myself as a prostitute and still do
not. What I do think is that a part of my life has been
stolen."
While Maria is speaking, Tara clasps a hand over her
mouth and leaves the room in tears. She emerges a few
minutes later, red-eyed.
"I only escaped five days ago and my friend who was held
captive with me has been killed," she says. "What will I tell
her family?"
Unlike Maria, Tara left Moldova for Albania of her own
free will. She wanted to find a job to pay for her nursing
studies. "In my country it is usual to leave for work abroad
because there is no work at home. You even have to pay
to work in the hospital," she says. She was taken hostage
after applying for a job as a waitress. "They didn't believe
me when I went for the job and it was obviously for
prostitution work and I said I was not a prostitute.
"My friend and I were sold for $4,000 for both of us. My
friend tried to escape, she struggled very, very hard but I
was more afraid and just cried. She was mistreated very
badly and was soon in a terrible state. She cried and
shouted all the time and that is maybe why they killed her,"
says Tara. The 19-year-old is too upset to describe
exactly what happened to her friend, saying only, between
sobs, that "they took her away and killed her".
Tara was taken hostage by a drug dealer who repeatedly
raped her. "Then he told me his mother was sick and I
explained that I was a nurse. After that he treated me as a
human being and asked me to help his mother. We
understood one another very well after that because my
mother is ill, too."
Tara spent ten months with the man who bought her, she
says, until he came to trust her. "Then one day he let me
go out of the apartment. I lied to him and he thought I
would come back, but I went to the police. I didn't want
to go back to him because I am not a prostitute. I was
also stressed and tense and couldn't stop crying and
crying. The police didn't arrest him. He had much money
and he could pay the police because he used to buy and
sell drugs and could afford it. Everyone is so corrupt."
The IOM shelters were set up in January and so far they
have shielded about 15 women. Ken Patterson and Rich
Kocher know that they have touched only the tip of the
human-trafficking iceberg. "If we need to help thousands,
we will try to do it," says Kocher.
Not all the women are kidnapped; some are duped by
promises of jobs abroad. It is easy to trick a naive young
woman from a poverty-stricken no-hope town in
Moldova or Romania into believing that there is an escape
route from desolation if they accept the offer of a job as a
babysitter or waitress in Italy, Belgium or London. There
are also some women who willingly opt to become
prostitutes, seeing it as their only chance to avoid a life
of
grinding poverty, and they mistakenly believe they will be
able at least to store up the money they make. The reality
is different, they are rarely paid for their sexual services.
Almost all the women - whether kidnapped, conned or
consenting - are usually raped, beaten and psychologically
tortured for weeks before being sold on to pimps,
brothel-owners or perverts who can afford to buy a
woman for their own use.
The sex-slave mafia trade is in women from the former
Soviet republic of Moldova, Romania, Kosovo, or
Albania, where the hub of the trade is centred. The victims
are then often taken by car or force-marched along
remote mountain paths for days to Tirana or the Albanian
coast. Many are dispatched on flimsy dinghies across the
Adriatic to Italy, from where they are passed on to the
red-light areas of West European capitals. Others are
forced to work in Albania, Greece, or in the newest
market for sex-traders - Kosovo, with its hundreds of
thousands of international troops. For some women, their
forced journeys end in death - either at the hands of the
mafiosi if they prove to be more trouble than they are
worth. Or they fail to survive the rigours of their
transportation.
Earlier this year the body of a young, scantily clad woman
was washed up on the Albanian coast. She had rope
burns on her wrists, "not because her captors had tied her
up," says a Western aid worker, "but because these
women lash themselves to the dinghies when they are
taken across the Adriatic as they are afraid of falling
overboard and drowning. This was one who didn't make
it."
Many victims are told that their relatives will be killed if
they try to escape. This makes the courage of the seven
women in their hideout in Tirana all the more remarkable.
In the city's dust-choked Skanderbeg Square, the national
museum is fronted with a large, epic communist mosaic
portraying a woman striding confidently forward with a
rifle in her strong arms. The scene is a remnant of the era
of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist leader from 1946, who kept
Albania in isolation for much of his rule until his death in
1985. The impoverished country finally held democratic
elections in 1992, but the shock to its system of joining the
cut and thrust of capitalism has left hundreds of thousands
without work and living literally off the scraps which form
great mounds of litter wherever you look.
A miasma of disease hangs over a canal which runs
through the heart of the capital and which is used as an
open sewer and general rubbish tip. Huge rats rummage
openly among the debris.
The Third World atmosphere of Tirana has proved a
fertile breeding ground for Europe's burgeoning Albanian
mafia. Corruption and racketeering reach deep into
Albanian society; some police are hand-in-glove with the
gangsters and are widely believed to take bribes to
smooth the path of the criminals they are supposed to
catch.
One group of escaped sex-slaves reached a police station
in Durres, only to be imprisoned and repeatedly raped by
the police officers over a two-month period last year,
according to one Western aid worker. When they became
tired of abusing the girls, they terrorised them and sent
them out to work as prostitutes.
However, Patterson says his organisation has begun to
work with other officers. The IOM-ICMC shelters are
part of a $640,000 project to help women who have been
bought and sold, to return home. The mission also aims to
help them become reintegrated in societies which often
shun them after they return, suspecting that they willingly
prostituted themselves.
The aid project was born after a counter-trafficking
workshop sponsored by the IOM and the British
Government's Department for International Development
in Tirana last September. The scale of the task facing
those trying to help is monumental; between 250,000 and
500,000 are believed to be working as prostitutes in the
European Union - "the majority having reached their
destinations through illegal trafficking networks," says the
IOM. "Women being trafficked into prostitution now
constitute the largest single category of illegal migration
to
the EU."
The number of women being seized and forced into
unpaid prostitution is believed to have increased since
Nato-led peacekeeping troops entered neighbouring
Kosovo last summer. Young Kosovo-Albanian girls were
also reported to have been snatched from the refugee
camps set up in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro
during the Kosovo crisis. "Especially alarming have been
the reports of young refugee women being abducted from
the camps by armed scafisti (members of Albanian
organised crime), forcing these women into prostitution in
Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe," the IOM said in
July, last year.
In London, Inspector Paul Holmes, of the Clubs and Vice
unit of the Metropolitan Police, has seen a mushrooming
of the numbers of Balkan women sold into prostitution.
About 77 per cent of the "working girls" arrested in Soho
brothels before Christmas were from the Balkans.
"The Albanian situation has changed things here. We have
labelled it 'trafficking by deception and threats'. In our
experience, 95 per cent of the women know what they
are doing by the time they get here but they have been
told they will be able to come here, clear debts and make
a profit," he says.
"They arrive here with forged documentation, their own
documentation is seized and they are put into virtual
imprisonment. They have to comply with any sexual
perversion or threats that are made to loved ones back
home. It is effectively psychological torture. Unfortunately
the law doesn't allow us to prosecute for psychological
imprisonment. We are not on top of this by a long chalk,"
he says.
The police's big fear is that "turf wars" - fights between the
various gangs - may break out with so much money at
stake. "The turnover in a busy brothel can be ?1 million a
month," says Mr Holmes.
The Home Office has meanwhile asked the University of
North London to investigate the growing problem of
prostitutes smuggled into Britain from Eastern Europe. A
report is due in March.
Back in Tirana, the mosaic of the warrior woman outside
the national museum is testament to a bygone Balkan era -
an ironic contrast with the wretched lives of the women
who are bought and sold.
By JAMES PRINGLE
THE TIMES (London), February 24 2000
"TROOPS of the Nato-led Kosovo Force (Kfor) guard
12 women in
a safe house in Pristina who are victims of the
growing sex-slave
trade. It is not quite the role originally envisaged
for Kfor, which
intervened in the province last June..."
"Case-workers describe a 22-year-old Moldovan
girl housed there
as "adorable". "She is keeping up the morale
of the other girls in
the safe house with her good spirits, appetite
for life and sense of
humour." The Moldovan girl was kidnapped and
later sold
several times. Her dream before being kidnapped
had been "to
work as a nanny or look after babies", an IOM
official says. "She
saw no future in her home country which has a
deteriorating
economy." The girl was one of 12 rescued in January
by Italian
UN peacekeepers from a nightclub just outside
Pristina, near the
HQ of Russian forces. Her "duties" at the club
involved
dispensing sexual favours - about $50 for half
an hour - to
Russian and American Kfor troops,
and Albanian clients..."
By Peter Finn Washington Post, 4/30/2000
RISTINA, Yugoslavia - The trafficking of East European women into sexual
slavery, one of the major criminal scourges of post-Communist Europe,
is
becoming a serious problem in Kosovo, according to UN, NATO, and
international aid officials.
Porous borders, the lack of a working criminal justice system, and
the
presence of international troops and aid workers have promoted the
trade, according to the officials.
In the past six months, UN police and NATO troops in Yugoslavia have
rescued 50 women - Moldovan, Bulgarian, and Romanian - from brothels
that have begun to appear in cities and towns in Kosovo, the rebellious
ethnic Albanian province of Serbia whose conflict led to the
international intervention.
Police and aid workers fear that hundreds more, lured from their
impoverished homelands with the promise of riches, may be living in
sexual servitude.
''These women have been reduced to slavery,'' said Colonel Vincenzo
Coppola, regiment commander of the Italian Carabineri, a police force
with military powers in Kosovo that has rescued 23 women in raids of
brothels in Pristina and Prizren.
According to police sources and aid workers, the women, some as young
as
15, were transported along a well-established organized crime network
from Eastern Europe to Macedonia, which borders on Kosovo to the south.
There, they were held in motels and sold to ethnic Albanian pimps in
auctions for $1,000 to $2,500.
The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo,
officials said, including some with links to the former rebel fighting
force, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The women were stripped of their passports as soon as they left their
homelands. They were then frequently held in unheated rooms with
primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to have unprotected
sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night, for no payment, according to
UN
police officers who said they had spoken to the women. The officers
requested anonymity because of UN regulations limiting their ability
to
talk to the media.
Police, truce forces, and aid workers have been slow to respond to
the
problem. The undermanned UN police force is confronting a variety of
criminal activities, and there are limited humanitarian resources to
protect the women once they seek sanctuary.
Moreover, officials said, the trade has flourished because of a lack
of
applicable law on trafficking or prostitution and because some countries
with military forces here have tended to dismiss the activity as simple
prostitution. German forces in southern Kosovo, for instance, have
taken
a benign view of the phenomenon in part because prostitution is
tolerated in Germany; international aid workers are trying to convince
them that these women are victims.
''It's not classic prostitution,'' said an international aid worker
who
has interviewed the rescued women, and who is working on a draft UN
regulation to punish people involved in the slave trade. ''They are
not
paid. They are never paid. Of the 50 women we have seen, not one has
received a single deutsche mark. And they are often held in horrendous
conditions.''
According to authorities, the women were told that before they could
keep any of their earnings, they had to pay off the pimps for their
purchase price. Often, however, they found themselves fined for
infractions such as not smiling at customers, so there was no way they
would ever have enough money to complete the payoff. The women said
that
if they protested, they were beaten.
A number of the women appear to have contracted sexually transmitted
diseases, officials said, and international groups are trying to get
them treatment either in Kosovo or when they return home.
''This is a major problem and it is going further underground because
of
police raids,'' said an international aid worker who was tracking the
problem. ''At first it was very out in the open, and so-called
nightclubs were popping up. But now it's moving into private dwellings.
And I expect if we get a reliable phone network, we'll soon see
call-girl services.''
International organizations here recently established a safe house
to
protect women who escape from the brothels until they can be returned
to
their home countries. But it is now full, with 21 women, and police
have
suspended raids until they can repatriate some of them.
International officials declined to allow a reporter to speak to any
of
the rescued women. But visits to bars in Pristina, Gnjilane, and
Urosevac found young Moldovan and Ukrainian women who described
themselves as ''waitresses'' seeking economic opportunity in Kosovo.
''I can earn 400 deutsche marks a month,'' said a Moldovan women at
the
Tirana bar and cafe in Gnjilane, where beds are set up behind a dank
front bar. Asked how much cash she had, the woman said only, ''I'm
OK,''
as an ethnic Albanian bar manager looked on.
The client base varies from brothel to brothel, according to the women,
officials said. Some serve mostly ethnic Albanians; others cater to
a
mixture of ethnic Albanians and international workers. Truce forces,
including Americans, also were customers, the women reported. US
officials have denied that American troops visit the brothels, pointing
out that soldiers are confined to base when they are off duty.
Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no trafficking problem
before the international forces arrived, is just another new market,
officials said. Most of the women interviewed responded to newspaper
ads
seeking ''attractive women'' to work in the West and, in fact, knew
they
would work in the sex industry. A small minority told police they had
been kidnapped or completely deceived when they applied for jobs in
the
West, including one Moldovan teenager who was impregnated in Kosovo,
police said.
''The women we've spoken to left their countries of their own volition
and basically knew they would work as prostitutes,'' said a UN police
officer in Gnjilane. ''But they thought they could earn thousands of
dollars in some exotic location like Italy or Spain and then go home
rich. Instead, they end up imprisoned here without a dime.''
TOP Stories in the Toronto Star OP-ED
May 7, 2000
exploit the war zone
By Olivia Ward
Toronto Star European Bureau
PRISTINA, Kosovo - POST-WAR KOSOVO has become the latest hotspot in
Europe for sexual slavery.
Since Yugoslav forces pulled out of the province last June and turned
it
over to United Nations control, thousands of East European women have
been lured over Kosovo's unsettled borders to a life of violence, abuse,
starvation and disease that police describe as subhuman.
Behind the doors of dimly lit makeshift bars, women are forced to
receive 10 to 20 clients a night on filthy backroom cots. Sometimes
there are no toilets or running water.
The criminals, who operate across Europe, kidnapping, terrorizing and
enslaving women, have become a small but particularly dangerous force
in
Kosovo's burgeoning underworld.
Those who have tried to liberate the women from the lucrative sex trade
have been threatened with mob violence. It is believed some of the
captives have been murdered trying to escape.
`The stories we hear are so horrible, I have to stop listening'-
Barbara,
who risks violence for speaking out
One veteran aid worker - hunched into a chair at a sunny cafe and
glancing fearfully around her - refused recently to comment on the
sex
trade.
``I'm sorry but I can't tell you anything", she says, her hands
shaking as she lights a cigarette.
``You need a story, but I need to go on living."
Paula (not her real name) is a psychologist whose job is counselling
traumatized women.
Her clients are not ethnic Albanian war casualties, but victims of
Kosovo's peace.
In this territory of rapid transition, with a thinly stretched police
force and inadequate detention facilities, mobsters hold most of the
aces.
``Kosovo is a great big marketplace," says Barbara, an
administrator with one of the organizations that help shelter the women
on their way back to their home countries, placing them in secret,
heavily guarded locations.
She, too, is nervous about revealing her identity. In the criminalized
Balkan region, betrayal and violence dog even the most well-intentioned,
she says.
The poisonous mixture of sex, violence and big profits in the expanding
trafficking racket makes it impossible to know whom to trust.
``In any conflict zone, you have a lot of men who are looking for sex,
and criminals who are willing to supply them," she says. ``Here,
they can do it with impunity because the legal infrastructure barely
exists."
And, she adds, the trade is shocking because it is not ordinary
prostitution. The women are not voluntary sex workers, and they are
abused and degraded in a life of daily terror.
``The stories we hear are so horrible, I have to stop listening,"
she says. ``It?s hard to believe that human beings could be used in
such an appalling way in Europe in this century."
There are 100,000 ``internationals" in Kosovo, about 60,000 of them
aid workers and the rest members of the military.
But the overburdened U.N. police force barely can cope with the daily
demands of fighting violent crime and ethnically motivated attacks
in
the war-torn province. In the past six months, police have rescued
only
50 women, taking them to halfway houses in Kosovo for treatment and
preparation for return home.
Most disturbing, nearly half of the men who patronize the women are
international aid workers and peacekeepers, even though it is obvious
from the conditions at the sleazy underground bars that double as local
brothels that this is not prostitution, but slavery.
And, according to aid workers and KFOR officials who asked not to be
identified, members of at least one of the peacekeeping contingents
are
involved in running a brothel in Kosovo.
One bar in the Pristina suburb of Slatina, which was raided by Italian
members of the U.N. police, operated near the headquarters of the
Russian forces. Its clients, police said, were American as well as
Russian troops.
KFOR contributors deny such involvement.
But although the military is kept under heavy discipline, and troops
are
barred from socializing in towns, the enslaved women tell their
counsellors that a number of the men find ways to evade the rules.
Male aid workers, on short-term contracts away from wives or
girlfriends, also have little difficulty finding ``action" in
notorious bars.
``Some of the women have begged the humanitarian workers to help them,
and they're just ignored," says Barbara. ``We're very shocked
by this, and we have urged their organizations to discipline them."
Like other aid officials who work with the rescued women, Barbara
refuses to allow reporters to approach the secret shelters and interview
the residents, for security reasons.
The main country of supply for Kosovo's sex slaves, police and aid
workers say, is the former Soviet republic of Moldova, bordering
impoverished Romania.
But many others are from Romania itself, as well as Ukraine and
Bulgaria.
The enslaved women are part of a pattern of trafficking throughout
Europe, according to the Organization for Security and Co-Operation
in
Europe, which produced a recent report on what it said was a growing
menace to the women of the poorest countries.
``More than 174,000 are estimated trafficked each year from the former
Soviet Union and East Europe," it said. ``Most are under 25, but a
lot of them are aged 12 to 18."
Ironically, some of the victims began their nightmarish odyssey by
spending their life savings on phony visas to escape their near-bankrupt
countries.
Others were tricked into signing up for what they thought would be
``respectable" jobs as waitresses or dancers in rich western
countries, handing over their documents to racketeers who later sold
the
women to human traffickers for sums ranging from the equivalent of
$500
to $20,000.
According to those who have helped the rescued women, a typical life
of
sexual slavery begins in a sleazy hotel room in an East European city,
where the new recruits are ``indoctrinated" by multiple rapes.
Women who already earned a scant living from prostitution discover
that
their wages are now owned by their new masters.
Captured by what appears to be a well-developed criminal network, the
women are moved through several countries in the region, traded off
each
time to men who bid thousands of dollars or deutsch marks for them.
Many end up in Macedonia, whose borders with Kosovo are patrolled by
international forces, and which has a large ethnic Albanian population.
Once they reach Kosovo, the enslaved women hit rock bottom.
Police who have raided bars in Pristina say that some of the women
have
been forced to live in cellars ``not fit for a dog to inhabit."
The owner of one bar named Toto's, which was closed by international
police, locked them into a squalid unheated basement without running
water, toilets, or beds to sleep in. Some of the trapped women tried
to
commit suicide.
Others were penned in an attic. All were kept under lock and key, and
women who tried to escape said they were beaten. In addition to working
as prostitutes, some of the women were forced to provide bar
``entertainment" by dancing naked for the clients.
Many of these women will never be rescued.
Aid workers fear they will eventually die violently, or from inevitable
disease. Few clients worry about protection against sexually transmitted
disease, and the women are in no position to protect themselves.``The
women we see have every kind of physical and mental illness you would
expect in that life," says Barbara.
None of the captive women will realize her dream of rising from abject
poverty. And only a few will be able to leave their captors, even after
they have worked out the ``debts" incurred by their sale.
``The best they can hope for is to get out with their lives," says
Barbara.
``We don't even know how many have already died."
By Alexandra Poolos
Women from former East Bloc countries are being trafficked in large
numbers to former Yugoslav territories to
serve as prostitutes for the area's large population of soldiers and
aid workers. In Part Two of a two-part
series on trafficking of East European women, RFE/RL correspondent
Alexandra Poolos reports on the
sex-slave trade in a former war zone.
Prague, 19 May 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The sex-slave trade in Eastern European
women -- one of the major
crime scourges of post-communist Europe -- is becoming a serious problem
in Kosovo.
As a former war zone, Kosovo is a prime location for the burgeoning
trafficking trade. Porous borders, the
presence of a large clientele in the form of international troops and
aid workers, and the lack of a working
criminal justice system offer excellent conditions for the sex-slave
trade.
East European women make up much of the work force in Kosovo's underground
brothels. Their native
countries are close by and are home to well-established organized-crime
networks.
In the past six months, United Nations peacekeepers and police have
rescued women from Belarus, Moldova,
Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Albania. The police say that
most of these women and girls --
some as young as 15 -- were transported from their home countries to
Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to
the south. There, they were held in motels and sold at auction to ethnic
Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500.
The women were stripped of their passports and held in unsanitary conditions
in bars or motels. They were
then forced to engage in unprotected sex with local police and international
peacekeepers for no payment.
They were told that before they could keep any of their earnings, they
first had to pay the pimps for their
purchase price and the cost of their travel. If the women resisted,
they were beaten.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, has
provided support for women victims
released from brothels by UN police and NATO-led peacekeepers. Rolf
Welberts, the OSCE's human-rights
director in Kosovo, says his organization has assisted some 50 women.
He believes the number of women still
held in bondage is much higher:
"We're talking about women from Eastern Europe who are brought into
Kosovo to serve as prostitutes, or
when they arrive they're submitted to conditions that they didn't know
about -- meaning passports taken away,
money withheld, and so on. It is a form of slave trade."
Welberts says that the conditions in Kosovo are ideal for international traffickers:
"A postwar society is always an unstable society. And unstable societies
leave more room for crime -- also for
organized crime -- than most stable societies. In the situation we
live in here, it is simply easier to organize
crime and trafficking in women than it is elsewhere. The demand is
certainly here. The other issue is, of course,
the large presence of internationals."
Welberts says that "internationals" -- foreign soldiers and aid workers
-- are very often brothel patrons. The
same phenomenon also exists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the presence
of peacekeepers and aid workers
initiated a major trade in trafficked women from Eastern Europe that
continues to thrive today.
Human Rights Watch -- an international monitoring organization -- documented
that women from Belarus,
Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Albania were lured into Bosnia
by promises of legal work and
safe passage. When they arrived. brothel owners seized their passports
and subjected them to slave-like
practices. They were often sold from one brothel owner to another,
with the women forced to work without
wages.
Human Rights Watch says that international officials were aware of the
trafficking problem in Bosnia, but did
little to combat it. The organization says that some officials were
actively complicit in the abuses, participating
in the forced prostitution of the women or patronizing the brothels.
Jill Thompson -- an adviser on trafficking issues for the OSCE's Warsaw-based
human-rights office --
estimates the number of trafficked women throughout the former Yugoslavia
in the tens of thousands.
Thompson told RFE/RL's Lily Hyde that the trade prospers with the connivance
of local law enforcement
authorities:
"The pattern in a lot of countries is that local police are involved
at various levels. Sometimes they are
customers, sometimes they provide protection for the clubs, sometimes
they are actively involved in the
trafficking operation."
There is now considerable international cooperation in tackling the
trafficking problem in the former Yugoslav
territories. In Kosovo, many organizations -- including the UN's local
police force, the UN refugee agency
(UNHCR), NATO-led peacekeepers, the OSCE, and the International Organization
for Migration -- have
recently started working together to help trafficked women.
Still, the OSCE's Welberts says that is very difficult to combat the
problem with the weak justice system that
exists in Kosovo:
"Those who brought women in, or those who have women working for them,
consider them as a very valuable
investment, and they are not happy with letting them go. So the readiness
for violence is tremendous."
Welberts says that, as a result, the OSCE often has to hide rescued
women in safe houses until they can be
repatriated to their home countries. But he says that's where OSCE's
victim protection ends. Once the women
are repatriated, then they must face on their own any threats and intimidation
from home-country traffickers.
(Lily Hyde in Kyiv contributed to this report.)
19-05-00
PRAGUE, May 19 - We’ve reported in several of our prior TiM Bulletins
that drug use and trade
were blossoming in NATO-“liberated” Kosovo, with KFOR troops, especially
American and British
soldiers, being the main targets for the Kosovo Albanian drug pushers
(see “Drugs and Prostitution
Blossom within KFOR”). This “Standstill at the Bondstill” (name
of the large American base in
Kosovo) should come as no surprise, given the longtime ties between
the CIA and the KLA (see
“CIA’s Ties to the KLA”).
Well, add to it now the trade in sex slaves, especially with women from
Eastern Europe. That’s
another example of “progress” that the “international community” has
also brought into this Serbian
province, along with its KFOR troops. Nor is this a new phenomenon.
It merely follows the pattern
established four years ago, when the NATO troops similarly occupied
Bosnia.
Here’s an excerpt from a May 19 report by the Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty that the TiM
received from Prague:
“Sex-slave trade in Eastern European women
-- one of the major crime scourges of
post-communist Europe -- is becoming a serious
problem in Kosovo. As a former war
zone, Kosovo is a prime location for the burgeoning
trafficking trade. Porous borders,
the presence of a large clientele in the form
of international troops and aid workers,
and the lack of a working criminal justice
system offer excellent conditions for the
sex-slave trade.
East European women make up much of the “work
force” in Kosovo's underground
brothels. Their native countries are close
by and are home to well-established
organized-crime networks.
In the past six months, United Nations peacekeepers
and police have rescued women
from Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria,
Hungary, Romania, and Albania. The police
say that most of these women and girls --
some as young as 15 -- were transported from
their home countries to Macedonia, which borders
Kosovo to the south. There, they
were held in motels and sold at auction to
ethnic Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500.
The women were stripped of their passports
and held in unsanitary conditions in bars or
motels. They were then forced to engage in
unprotected sex with local police and
international peacekeepers for no payment.
They were told that before they could keep
any of their earnings, they first had to pay
the pimps for their purchase price and the
cost of their travel. If the women resisted,
they were beaten.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe, or OSCE, has provided
support for women victims released from brothels
by UN police and NATO-led
peacekeepers. Rolf Welberts, the OSCE's human-rights
director in Kosovo, says his
organization has assisted some 50 women. He
believes the number of women still held
in bondage is much higher: "We're talking
about women from Eastern Europe who are
brought into Kosovo to serve as prostitutes,
or when they arrive they're submitted to
conditions that they didn't know about --
meaning passports taken away, money
withheld, and so on. It is a form of slave
trade."
Welberts says that "internationals" -- foreign
(KFOR) soldiers and aid workers -- are
very often brothel patrons. The same phenomenon
also exists in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where the presence of peacekeepers and aid
workers initiated a major trade in
trafficked women from Eastern Europe that
continues to thrive today.
Human Rights Watch -- an international monitoring
organization -- documented that
women from Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Romania,
Hungary, and Albania were lured
into Bosnia by promises of legal work and
safe passage. When they arrived, brothel
owners seized their passports and subjected
them to slave-like practices. They were
often sold from one brothel owner to another,
with the women forced to work without
wages.
Human Rights Watch says that international
officials were aware of the (sex)
trafficking problem in Bosnia, but did little
to combat it. The organization says that
some officials were actively complicit in
the abuses, participating in the forced
prostitution of the women or patronizing the
brothels.
Jill Thompson -- an adviser on trafficking
issues for the OSCE's Warsaw-based
human-rights office -- estimates the number
of trafficked women throughout the former
Yugoslavia in the tens of thousands.”
For the full RFE/RL report, check out
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/05/F.RU.000519123012.html
Thursday, May 25 12:51 AM SGT
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, May 24 (AFP) -
NATO-led troops and United Nations workers in Kosovo have fed a
mushrooming sex trade in which young girls are being forced into
prostitution by criminal gangs, officials said Wednesay.
The explosion in prostitution in the Yugoslav province was largely
down
to the international presence there, said Pasquale Lupoli, a spokesman
for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
Lupoli was launching a campaign against forced prostitution from the
regional capital Pristina to raise awareness among UN workers, KFOR
troops and aid agency employees of the violence and intimidation used
against the women.
Many had been lured from eastern Europe with the promise of jobs in
the
catering or leisure industry, but had then been forced into
prostitution, said Lupoli.
"Once they cross the borders, the victims can be beaten up, sold, and
their documents seized," he added.
There had been a "mushrooming of night clubs" and brothels in Kosovo
since 40,000 KFOR troops and thousands of United Nations workers arrived
in June
The Yugoslav province had not previously been known as a centre of
the
sex trade, said Lupoli.
"The large international presence in Kosovo itself makes this
trafficking possible," he added.
Seventy percent of the women had never been prostitutes before arriving
in Kosovo. Aged between 16 and 25, they were living in Kosovo in
difficult conditions "maltreated and with very little medical
attention", said Lupoli.
The IOM helped repatriate women trying to return to their home country,
said Lupoli. So far, it had helped 50 women, but he added: "It's the
tip
of the iceberg."
Nearly half were from Moldova, while others were from Ukraine, Romania
and Bulgaria.
The UN deputy police commissioner Gilles Moreau for Pristina said no
brothel-keeper had so far been caught despite the fact that pimping
is
illegal, even though prostitution is not.
"We're making progress on this matter, but we are not yet a force with
25 years of experience," said the Canadian officer.
Some brothels simply moved when police started gathering information
on
them: others were based in people's homes.
He said organised crime was behind the sex trade in Kosovo, pointing
the
finger at expatriate Kosovars.
Some of the people behind the trade had offered their prostitutes to
former KLA members the now-disbanded ethnic Albanian guerilla force,
for
free.
The IOM campaign is also being run in Bulgaria and Hungary, using
leaflets, posters and radio messages.
The campaign carries the slogan: "You pay for a night -- She pays with
her life."
http://www.workers.org/ww/2000/kosovo0525.html
Workers World newspaper
May 25, 2000
By Leslie Feinberg
An imperialist occupation army brings with it rape,
prostitution, and extreme and brutal forms of
oppression of women. This has been true throughout
history.
The strength of a liberation army can be directly
measured by its role in freeing women from oppression.
When the U.S. ordered the bombing war on Yugoslavia,
U.S. and NATO leaders posed as liberators. The people
of the Balkans knew this was a lie.
Now, with the Pentagon and other NATO "peacekeepers"
hunkered down in Kosovo, what has emerged are
conditions that are no different from other
imperialist occupations. Most particularly revealing
of the near-colonial state that has been imposed on
Kosovo by the United States and NATO are the
conditions for women in the occupied territory.
Rape, prostitution, brutality and murder--and the
literal enslavement of thousands of women--are the
documented reality in just over one year of
imperialist occupation.
"The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of
the major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe,
is becoming a major problem in Kosovo, where porous
borders, the presence of international troops and aid
workers, and the lack of a working criminal-justice
system have created almost perfect conditions for the
trade," reported the April 24 Washington Post.
This report of the nightmare condition for these women
was admitted by the very imperialist forces that
ushered in this lucrative profit industry: NATO
occupiers, United Nations police officials and
capitalist "aid" agency personnel.
"The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light
in October--four months after NATO-led peacekeepers
entered the province," admitted an April 24 Washington
Post report.
"In the last 10 years, according to women's advocacy
groups," the article continued, "hundreds of thousands
of women from the former Soviet republics and
satellites have been trafficked to Western Europe,
Asia and the United States."
Recall the media hoopla, the Pepsi Cola commercials,
all hailing the "liberation" of Eastern Europe from
socialism? Yet last Oct. 22, UNICEF released a report
on the plummeting standard of living for the 150
million women and 50 million girls of Central and
Eastern Europe.
Imperialist military occupation
What has the reintroduction of the capitalist
profit-driven economy meant for women and girls in
these former workers' states? Widespread unemployment,
loss of free health care and education, the rise of
drug and alcohol abuse, and anti-woman violence. This
has helped created fertile ground for the emergence of
a large-scale prostitution industry.
What created the conditions for Kosovo to be the hub
of a sex-slave industry?
"Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no
trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived
after the Kosovo war ended last June, is just another
new market," officials said.
According to a few women lucky enough to escape their
confinement, the Post noted, "Peacekeeping
troops--including Americans--also were customers."
The women and girls--some in their early teens--are
lured with lies or outright kidnapped from Moldavia,
Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania. They are reportedly
robbed of their passports.
The Post referred to a report, recently released in
France, that the women are frequently taken to
slave-breaking stations in Albania where they are
repeatedly raped and beaten in an attempt to crush
their spirit.
Although many people forced into prostitution are paid
very little, these women are literally held as
chattel.
"These women have been reduced to slavery," conceded
Col. Vincenzo Coppola, commander of the national
police in Kosovo.
Who is profiting? According to the Washington Post
report, the women and girls "were transported along a
well-established organized-crime network from their
East European homelands to Macedonia, which borders
Kosovo to the south. There, they were held in motels
and sold at auction to ethnic Albanian pimps for
$1,000 to $2,500.
"The pimps work under the protection of major crime
figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with
links to the former anti-Serbian rebel force, the
Kosovo Liberation Army."
Liberation army? The KLA began as a mercenary force
covertly armed and uniformed by Germany and the United
States. Even the New York Times--an avowed enemy of
the Yugoslav government--reported March 28 that many
of the leaders of the KLA trace their roots to a
fascist unit set up by the Italian occupiers during
World War II.
The KLA's stated aim is an "ethnically pure,"
Albanian-only Kosovo. KLA leaders insisted on the
U.S.-NATO occupation of the multi-ethnic province of
Yugoslavia.
That's under whose protection these crime bosses work.
No industry can function in Kosovo today without
U.S.-NATO approval and collusion.
What has the Pentagon-NATO war of bloodshed brought to
the Balkans? Ethnic peace? The post-war military
occupation has provided the cover for murderous
pogroms against Serbs, Rom and other peoples in
Kosovo.
Freedom and democracy? Ask the women and girls being
sold on the auction block for NATO armies and KLA
crime bosses.
Philadelphia Inquirer
May 28, 2000
By Alexandra Poolos
As international peacekeepers and officials wrestle with how to settle
the unruly province of Kosovo, a new and elusive crime scourge is
seeping its way into the war-ravaged borders.
It's sex slavery. Ironically, the same peacekeepers and international
officers sent to administer and police the province are trade's best
clients. It's a market that degrades and brutalizes women, and not
enough is being done to stop it.
A former war zone, Kosovo is a prime location for the burgeoning
sex-traffick. Porous borders, a large clientele in the form of
international troops and aid workers, and the lack of a working criminal
justice system are excellent conditions.
Eastern European women make up much of the workforce in Kosovo's
underground brothels. Not only are Slavic women in high demand for
their
good looks, but also their native countries are close by, making the
women easily transportable along well-established organized-crime
networks.
In the last six months, United Nations peacekeepers and police have
rescued women from Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania
and Albania. Police say that most of these women and girls - some as
young as 15 - were brought from their home countries to Macedonia,
which
borders Kosovo to the south. There they are sold at auction to ethnic
Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500.
The women are stripped of their passports and held in unsanitary
conditions in bars or motels. Seen as chattel with no rights, they
often
are traded from owner to owner, brothel to brothel. They are forced
to
engage in unprotected sex with local police and international
peacekeepers for no payment. They are told that before they can keep
any
of their earnings, they first must pay the pimps for their purchase
price and the cost of their travel. Of course, those so-called expenses
have no end. If the women resist, they are beaten.
Many of these women know the men who trafficked them. Often boyfriends,
husbands, family members, or friends act as the home-country suppliers.
In many cases, the women go knowingly, hoping to make some money, a
distant possibility in their home countries.
The sex-slave trade of Eastern European women is one of the busiest
in
the world. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people throughout
the world are trafficked each year. According to the International
Organization for Migration, about half a million women from Central
and
Eastern Europe are trafficked annually into the nations of the European
Union and the United States.
The problem is not new, and international measures have recently been
enacted to deal with it. In the United States, the House of
Representatives recently passed a series of laws to tighten immigration
controls and improve victim support. What congressmen don't realize
is
that their own government-funded employees, deployed in these troubled
lands, are often the trade's biggest clients.
Rolf Welberts, human-rights director in Kosovo for the Organization
for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), says his organization has
assisted about 50 women. He believes the number still held in bondage
is
much higher.
Welberts says that "internationals" - foreign soldiers and aid workers
-
are very often brothel patrons. The same phenomenon exists in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the presence of peacekeepers and aid workers
initiated a major trade in women from Eastern Europe.
The problem of what do to with the women once they have been rescued
plagues all international attempts to curb the sex-slave trade. The
problem lies in the international attitudes toward prostitution. Around
the world, trafficked women are too often seen as criminals and not
victims. They are frequently incarcerated while their handlers go free.
Worse, they are often sent home. Out of sight, out of mind.
But the woman's troubles don't end with deportation. When the woman
returns home, she returns alone to deal with threats and violence from
the original traffickers far from the sanctity of international law.
As history has proven repeatedly - once again in Kosovo - war and sex
slavery go hand in hand, leaving behind a whole class of living victims.
Alexandra Poolos ([email protected]) is a journalist with Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague.
Frankfurter Rundschau
Jue 5, 2000
By Stephan Israel
Pristina - The dubious clubs that spring up overnight
with names like
Miami Beach, Manhattan or International Club
often do not remain in
business very long. A raid by Italian carabinieri
first brought the
miserable situation to light in January, when
the UN peacekeepers burst
into one club to find a dozen desperate women
staring back at them.
"The women were treated like slaves," said one
of the investigators on
the case. Since then about 60 women have been
freed from similiar
conditions. Trafficking in sexual slaves and
forced prostitution have
become serious problems in Kosovo.
The women come from Romania, Moldova, Ukraine
and Bulgaria: the poorest
regions of eastern Europe. A monthly salary of
50 to 100 dollars is
normal in all of those countries. Some of the
women fell prey to
seemingly innocuous newspaper adverts promising
lucrative jobs in the
West as waitresses or dancers. Some of them wound
up part of a sex trade
ring after being kidnapped. Still others knew
about the nightclub and
the job as a prostitute that awaited them, but
not about the horrifying
conditions.
None of the 60 women were still in possession
of their identification
documents when they were discovered, according
to investigators in
Pristina. Passports are usually collected by
the "carers" while the
women are still in their native countries; sometimes,
their "escorts"
issue them false documents. It usually takes
a while before the trip
gets underway, with long waiting periods par
for the course.
The sex traders command a well-organised network
of contacts across the
entire region. Inconspicuous motels are the scenes
of out-and-out
auctions, where the women are sold for the highest
bid to pimps and bar
owners.
On the way to Kosovo, the actual trafficking
occurs in Struga on the
Macedonian-Albanian border and several villages
around the capital,
Skopje, that are well-known for their role in
illegal prostitution.
Until now Macedonian officials have shown little
interest in
co-operating with the UN, says one UN investigator,
who suspects that
Macedonian police are involved in the trade in
women.
Kosovar club owners and pimps pay around 1,500
dollars for each woman.
The women are confined to the bars day and night
and made to endure
cramped and unhygenic conditions. They are usually
told that they have
to "work off" the cost of transporting them.
However, none of the women found in forced prostitution
in Kosovo had
ever seen any money. Anyway, in most cases the
women are auctioned off
to another club in some other region after a
few weeks or months.
Contributing to the problem is the massive international
presence
brought by the arrival of Nato peacekeeping forces,
and the large
amounts of money now in circulation. At present
more than 40,000
soldiers from all over the world are stationed
in Kosovo, plus another
7,000 UN administrators and aid workers from
public and private
international relief organisations.
Many of the prospective customers perusing the
bars and nightclubs are
members of the international mission in Kosovo,
reports one aid worker
with an international organisation. "This business
is determined by
supply and demand," says the woman, who gets
her information from
talking to victims. It is, she says, a cheap
investment for the
traffickers, who are attracted by the low risk
and the potential for
making enormous profits.
But, she adds, for the women and girls - sometimes
as young as 15 - the
sex trade is an extreme form of sexual and economic
exploitation. Once
they come under the slave traders' control and
end up in one of the
clubs, the women have no freedom whatsoever to
decide their fate,
according to the aid worker.
A campaign is now being planned for the coming
weeks that is aimed above
all at the nightclubs' international "clientele."
The campaign is
supposed to make it clear to these men that the
women in the clubs are
not "normal" prostitutes. "You pay once, she
pays her whole life long,"
one of the slogans goes.
The situation in Kosovo is not without precedent.
Nightclubs and bars
sprouted up like mushrooms near the former frontline
after the war in
Bosnia. Kosovo is simply the latest market in
a network that is part of
a booming business. Most local women stay away
from the clubs.
Kosovo, like neighbouring Albania, is both a
recruiting ground and a
transit area for traffic in women. Experts estimate
that around 30,000
Albanian women are currently working as prostitutes,
most of them in
Italy. For eastern European women, the road also
stops in Serbia or
Belgrade en route to final destinations in Bosnia,
Montenegro or western
Europe.
Recently seven Ukranian women were rescued from
a club in the
Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, thanks to leads
provided by a
development organisation based in their home
country. Aid organisations
allege that, once the women are freed from forced
prostitution,
officials treat them no better than criminals,
arresting them and then
deporting them. Pimps and "nightclub" owners,
however, generally get off
scot-free.
In April a Serbian court in the northern section
of the divided city of
Mitrovica sentenced two Moldovan women to 30
days in jail for
prostitution, and issued a three-year ban on
their re-entering the
country. The UN administration, which is formally
responsible for
Kosovo, did not see fit to intervene. The women
usually have no
identifying papers to show police when they arrived.
In what human
rights observers see as a clear case of criminalising
the victim, the
women are generally taken into custody like illegal
immigrants to await
their deportation. The carabinieri working for
the UN in Kosovo who made
the initial nightclub raid did not know what
to do at first with the 12
women they discovered.
In the meantime, local and international aid
organisations in Pristina
have quietly opened a temporary refuge for women
at a secret location.
The "safe house" with room for 20 women has already
been full on
occasion.
Workers from the non-profit International Organisation
for Migration
(IOM) assist women who want to return to their
countries of origin. The
organisation locates people they can turn to
and also procures new
identity documents for the women. IOM is active
in some of the women's
home countries as well, working, for example,
in Ukraine and Moldova in
conjunction with local charities, counselling
centres and women's
shelters so that the women have somewhere to
turn once they arrive home.
No one, however, is forced to return. Once back
in their hometowns, the
women often fear acts of revenge by the traffickers,
who feel cheated
out of their profits.
UN investigators and aid workers believe the
trend in illegal
prostitution is likely to continue. "If we close
a nightclub one day, a
new one is certain to open up somewhere else
the next day," says one
official resignedly. The attention international
organisations are now
giving to the problem could result in the unintended
consequence that
the lucrative business will increasingly be driven
underground, where
the women will be forced to work in anonymous,
private apartments.
The seedy side of peacekeeping in a war-torn region
NBC’s Kevin Tibbles reports there is a new battle in Kosovo; an illegal
sex slave trade.
By Kevin Tibbles
NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT
FEAR AS A TOOL OF SUBMISSION
Melissa Colten, an American working
for the
International Office for Migration, a non-governmental
organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, said
traffickers instill a deep fear
in the women.
“Usually they are locked in a room for between three
and five days. Maybe they will receive water.
Everything is taken away from them. Usually they are
beaten and usually they are raped repeatedly. In some
instances they are kept awake so they lose all sense
of reality and time, and it becomes very, very
disconcerting for them.”
The purpose of the brutal treatment
is to break
the women down emotionally so traffickers can control
them. Once this “training” session is over, the women
are ready for sale. Prices start at around $500 in
their country of origin. Each time they’re smuggled
across an international border, the price will
increase. By the time a woman is trafficked into
Kosovo, she could sell for as much as $2,500.
There are bolder ways of
obtaining women for
forced prostitution. Many have simply been kidnapped
at gunpoint, outside nightclubs, off trains or on
street corners. Once in the hands of the slave
traders, they become “the disappeared.”
“They’re paraded. The girls tell
us they’re
made to walk around in their underwear while the
buyers from Kosovo examine them, and then they make
their choices. So, it’s pretty much like a cattle
auction,” Simmons said.
Officials from Kosovo’s international
police
force told NBC News that Valeshta, a town in Macedonia
near the border with Albania, is controlled by the
Albanian mob and where many of the young women say
they were sold. Recently, two Macedonian police were
beaten into critical condition simply for setting foot
in the place.
In Valeshta, reporters were immediately
accosted by three armed men who jumped from a car.
They demanded to know the purpose of the visit and
threatened the lives of any journalist venturing
further into the town.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TOLL
Psychologists say that women forced
into
prostitution must fight for their survival.
“If you put a person on the border
between life
and death, then every human being would chose life,”
said Nadia Kojouharova, a psychiatrist working in the
Bulgarian capital, Sofia. “They are ready to do
everything just to stay alive. This is the situation
the girls are in. They build in their imagination that
their life doesn’t mean anything beyond survival, and
to survive each day you must obey what the pimp wants
from you.”
What the pimp wants is for the
women to have
sex, often unprotected, with as many men as possible.
Records U.N. police have seized from some brothel
owners show hundreds of thousands of dollars being
made in just a few months’ time. The numbers are
shocking in the context of Kosovo, one of the poorest
areas of Europe.
Women, however, see none
of the riches. They
are forced to “pay back” their purchase price to the
pimp and reimburse him for clothing, and room and
board. In the rare cases when women do pay back pimps,
they find themselves “fined” for minor infractions —
like not smiling at a client or complaining about
treatment — and falling back into debt.
“Not one girl we’ve rescued has
had any money
on her,” Simmons said. “They don’t have money, they
don’t have travel documents ... they’re helpless.”
DISORIENTED PRISONERS
Many women become so confused
they don’t even
know where they are. In some cases, police say,
rescued women actually thought they were in Italy,
when in fact they were being held in a Kosovo bar.
Just across the Kosovo border
is the Macedonian
town of Tetovo. It is here that an off-duty Macedonian
police officer takes us on a midnight tour down a
series of broken-down roads. We pass a dozen or so
dingy-looking houses, all with red lights out front.
‘We don’t have any money. I work, but I don’t have
any money, because he doesn’t pay me.’
— ANA
Kosovo prostitute
Inside one house, Ana, 19,
is from Romania. Natasha, 21, is from Moldavia. They
are slinging beer out front, but they live in a
bare-walled room behind the bar — furnished with two
unmade beds and a dirty hand-held shower in the
corner. The girls are prostitutes, although they claim
they came here to work as waitresses.
“Do you make good money here?”
I ask. “No,” Ana
answers. “We don’t have any money. I work, but I don’t
have any money, because he doesn’t pay me.”
Sitting out front, smoking Marlboros
and
drinking brandy, Carlo, the girls’ “owner,” swears he
splits their earnings 50-50.
“I buy them on the border with
Bulgaria,” he
said. “They come from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia,
Romania, Greece, and also Albania. I own 30.”
Carlo said he often moves the
women he buys on
to Kosovo, and that “they can go back home if they
like.” Still, he holds Ana and Natasha’s passports,
making it impossible for them to travel. Both girls
say they want to go home.
Back in Kosovo, the police have
helped 50 such
women return home this year alone. Working in tandem
with the International Organization for Migration, the
police spirit sex slaves out of the clubs, hide them
from pimps and traders in a safehouse and then take
them over the border. The IOM also tries to help them
resettle.
FREEDOM GONE WRONG
Irina, one freed woman who asked
that her real
name not be used, was found working in a Pristina
brothel and asked police to get her out. Her story of
liberation, however, doesn’t have a happy ending.
She was repatriated to Bulgaria
and provided a
bed in a local women’s shelter in Sofia. She even
managed to get a job and make a few friends, usually
difficult for women who have been taken captive and
lived in fear.
“People don’t
make the difference between a
voluntary prostitute and someone who is forced into
prostitution,” said the Bulgarian psychiatrist
Kojouharova. “If you have been in this business, it
stays with you forever and you cannot do anything to
delete it from your life.” Suicide is a common
occurrence, Kojouharova said.
When Irina got home, however,
she disappeared,
likely a victim of the long tentacles of organized
crime. One night, after going out with a friend, she
said her good-byes and climbed onto a streetcar. She
has not been seen since.
IOM’s Melissa Colten met and helped
Irina when
she was pulled from prostitution’s grasp. Her face
darkens when asked of Irina’s fate.
“My fear is that she is being
trafficked again,
and that this is the completion of the vicious cycle
that is going around again for her.” Colten said she
believes Irina’s former pimps tracked her down.
In Giulani, in the heart of the
American sector
in Kosovo, an American cop walks the beat. North
Carolinian Steve Dunbar patrols a place where law and
order has been put on hold. The day he found a
pregnant 15-year-old girl working “behind the scenes”
in a local coffee bar, he made freeing sex slaves his
personal mission.
“No kid should be in a business
like this,” he
said, pointing to the window where the girl used to
ply her trade. Yet with so many Westerners — including
NATO peacekeepers — the gangs are working overtime to
tempt them with women. U.S. military personnel in the
area have been warned to steer clear of the sex
traders. When off duty, they are confined to a nearby
base.
“I’m not going to say that everyone
is immune
to temptation,” said Maj. Debbie Allen. “What I am
going to say is that they know it is illegal ... and
that they are aware of the consequences.”
SHUTTING DOWN THE SEX TRADE
Dunbar and his fellow officers
wind their way
down a dusty alley, along a stagnant canal filled with
debris and stench. They’re making their way to the Bar
Tirana, already the target of one police raid. On this
visit, they find a young woman from Moldova. “Yes, I
was bought and sold,” she said. “Of course I was.”
The police shut
Bar Tirana down, forcing the
bartender to padlock the doors. They warn him that he
faces arrest if they find the bar open again.
Dunbar may be light years away
from the streets
he usually patrols in Charlotte, N.C., but he said it
won’t stop him from laying down the law.
“They can go anywhere they want
in Europe to do
this kind of business, but it is not going to happen
in the American Sector in Kosovo, and it’s not going
to happen in the town of Giulani as long as I am
here.”
NBC’s Kevin Tibbles is on assignment in Kosovo.
Sex Slaves of Kosovo There for NATO Troops and UN Personnel
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com)
June 11, 2000
In his closing statement to United Nations General Assembly Saturday,
the President of the Assembly, Theo Ben-Gurirab (Namibia), praised the
document that finally emerged from months of bickering over an update
for the Beijing +5 "Platform for Action" document on women's rights.
He noted that there had been "no backward movement on any of the Beijing
language" in the final document.
The UN press release Sunday announced:
"The Platform remained fully valid for national and international actions. Further, the new text updated the Platform in the areas of violence against and trafficking in women, health, education, human rights, poverty, debt relief and globalization, armed conflict, sovereignty, land and inheritance rights for women, political participation and decision-making. If governments demonstrated the necessary political will and allocated required resources, the goals of gender equality, development and peace would become a reality very early in the twenty-first century, he said.
"On the issue of violence against women, governments agreed to establish or strengthen legislation to handle all forms of domestic violence, including marital rape and sexual abuse of women and girls. The delegates agreed that violence against women and girls was a human rights violation, noting that many governments had introduced educational and outreach programs, as well as legislative measures criminalizing that practice. Meanwhile, many of those measures in the criminal justice area to eliminate forms of violence against women and children, including domestic violence and child pornography, were weak in many countries. Prevention strategies also remained fragmented and reactive."
Interesting. Just out of curiosity, do you suppose that this section
of the new document also is supposed to apply to United Nations and NATO
occupied territories? If so, what kind of action against the United Nations
and NATO may we expect the United Nations to take to halt "violence against
and trafficking in women" which has exploded into a major industry since
NATO and the United Nations occupied Kosovo a
year ago?
The government responsible for law an order in Kosovo, since the bombing stopped in June 1999, according to UN Resolution 1244 is the United Nations, with NATO providing the muscle with a multi-national force. And now that the Platform for Action document has been approved by the General Assembly, does that mean that the United Nations and NATO will be expected to implement its provisions about halting violence against and trafficking in women that is now rampant in Kosovo?
Kevin Tibbles, an NBC News Correspondent, filing from Pristina about the same time the United Nations was voting to adopt the Platform for Action, reported a
" new kind of human abuse ...emerged: forced prostitution, organized by the Albanian mob. More than 1,000 women have been smuggled into the war-ravaged region to serve as sex slaves.
"...The women in Kosovo's sex business - estimated by police to number more than 1,000 - come from all over Eastern Europe, funneled into the region by well-organized crime gangs using regular trade routes. The former Soviet states have become prime suppliers of women for the multimillion-dollar sex trade. Moldova, Ukraine and Russia, as well as Bulgaria and Romania, are the hunting grounds for men who deal in the seedy business of so-called white slavery. Many young women, seeking to escape the shackles of collapsed economies and high rates of unemployment, are easy targets for the sophisticated traffickers.
"In Bulgaria, for example, women are offered better lives in Western countries working as nannies or waitresses. They respond to newspaper ads that carry a cellular telephone number as a contact. Once the women accept a job and put their future and passport in the hands of an "employer," things go horribly different than they planned. 'We try to act professionally when we come here, but it is hard not to be emotional,' said Jack Simmons, a lanky Texas detective on loan to the U.N. police force in Kosovo. 'This is slavery, and these are slaves. They are bought and sold at auctions. They're treated like property.'
"Melissa Colten, an American working for the International Office for Migration, a non-governmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, said traffickers instill a deep fear in the women. 'Usually they are locked in a room for between three and five days. Maybe they will receive water. Everything is taken away from them. Usually they are beaten and usually they are raped repeatedly. In some instances they are kept awake so they lose all sense of reality and time, and it becomes very, very disconcerting for them.' The purpose of the brutal treatment is to break the women down emotionally so traffickers can control them. Once this 'training' session is over, the women are ready for sale. Prices start at around $500 in their country of origin. Each time they're smuggled across an international border, the price will increase. By the time a woman is trafficked into Kosovo, she could sell for as much as $2,500.
"There are bolder ways of obtaining women for forced prostitution. Many have simply been kidnapped at gunpoint, outside nightclubs, off trains or on street corners. Once in the hands of the slave traders, they become 'the disappeared.'
" 'They're paraded. The girls tell us they're
made to walk around in their underwear while the buyers from Kosovo examine
them, and then they make their choices. So, it's pretty much like a cattle
auction,' Simmons said. Officials from Kosovo's international police
force told NBC News that Valeshta, a town in Macedonia near the border
with Albania, is controlled by the Albanian mob, and where many of
the young women say they were sold. Recently, two Macedonian police were
beaten into critical condition simply for setting foot in the place.
In Valeshta, reporters were immediately accosted by three armed men who
jumped from a car.
They demanded to know the purpose of the visit
and threatened the lives of any journalist venturing further into the town."
The reporter, Kevin Tibbles, described in detail not only how the women
are bought and sold, but gave names, ages and their countries of origin.
He identified one of the "Owners" of the women, Carlo. Obviously, if a
foreign reporter can find these houses where women have been bought and
sold and can even interview the women and their "owner," they can't be
very hard to find. In Giulani, in the heart of the American
sector, Tibbles wrote, "An American cop walks the beat. North Carolinian
Steve Dunbar patrols a place where law and order has been put on hold.
The day he found a pregnant 15-year-old girl working 'behind the scenes'
in a local coffee bar, he made freeing sex slaves his personal mission."
That's commendable. But, that is only one American's reaction to the
situation he has found himself in. He's not calling the shots. It should
be perfectly obvious to all by now who is ruling Kosovo and running this
sex slave business. It's the same people who were doing similar kinds of
things when Bill Clinton ordered the American Air Force to bomb the Yugoslav
army and police and drive them out of Kosovo - the KLA. The
so-called Kosovo Liberation Army was financed the purchase of their
weapons with heroin sales and prostitution.
Less than a year before Clinton ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia the
United States government condemned the KLA as a terrorist group, linked
closely to Iran, the Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin-Laden, and the heroin
traffic in Europe. A year almost to the day after the Yugoslavian army
withdrew from Kosovo and NATO forces occupied it, the KLA is in control
of the civil government of Kosovo, and most of
the non-Albanians have been ethnically cleansed from the province.
Either they have fled the province or they are dead. There IS no justice
system operating in KLA controlled Kosovo. Anarchy, trafficking in women
for prostitution for those NATO and UNMIK personnel, and drugs, which the
Yugoslav police and Army tried to control, now have total control over
Kosovo. No woman or young girl is safe in UN and NATO controlled Kosovo
today. The Kosovo Liberation Army, supposedly disbanded, is actually in
control of Kosovo, not the United Nations.
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and author of The Globalisation of Poverty, wrote about "The Albanian Connection" in an analysis of the IMF's
"...According to one press report (based on intelligence sources), senior members of the Albanian government during the Presidency of Sali Berisha including cabinet members and members of the secret police SHIK were alleged to be involved in drugs trafficking and illegal arms trading into Kosovo. ... Drugs barons from Kosovo operate in Albania with impunity, and much of the transportation of heroin and other drugs across Albania, from Macedonia and Greece en route to Italy, is believed to be organized by Shik, the state security police (of Albania.) Intelligence agents are convinced the chain of command in the rackets goes all the way to the top and have had no hesitation in naming ministers in their reports. The trade in narcotics and weapons was allowed to prosper despite the presence since 1993 of a large contingent of American troops at the Albanian-Macedonian border with a mandate to enforce the embargo. The West had turned a blind eye. The revenues from oil and narcotics were used to finance the purchase of arms (often in terms of direct barter): "Deliveries of oil to Macedonia (skirting the Greek embargo [in 1993-4] can be used to cover heroin, as do deliveries of kalachnikov rifles to Albanian `brothers' in Kosovo"
"...The proceeds of the narcotics trade has enabled the KLA to rapidly develop a force of some 30,000 men. More recently, the KLA has acquired more sophisticated weaponry including anti-aircraft and antiarmor rockets. According to Belgrade, some of the funds have come directly from the CIA "funneled through a so-called "Government of Kosovo" based in Geneva, Switzerland. Its Washington office employs the public-relations firm of Ruder Finn--notorious for its slanders of the Belgrade government".
The June 8th version of the UN document to implement the Beijing Declaration
and the Platform for Action in Paragraph D - Violence Against Women notes
that there is a "lack of comprehensive programmes dealing with the perpetrators
(of violence)." The delegates at that point still did not agree on the
wording. The European Union wanted to delete any mention of "prostitution,
pedophelia, pornography" because, it was
claimed, prostitution by choice is an honorable professional according
to some European nations. They did leave in "trafficking in women and girls".
Isn't it just a little hypocritical for the United Nations to be issuing a document urging everyone ELSE in the world to stop "trafficking in women when it won't, or can't stop drug dealing, trafficking in women and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo of its non-Albanian population?
To comment: [email protected]
BY CONAL URQUHART
http://www.the-times.co.uk (World)
The Times (UK)
July 6, 2000
A SENIOR Army officer is to be sent home from Kosovo
after he was allegedly caught by military police in a
brothel.
Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Buxton, 43, was reported to
have been found by an anti-vice squad in one of
Pristina's many brothels. It is believed that the
father-of-two has been relieved of his duties and is
due to be sent home. He could face a disciplinary
hearing and court martial.
The Ministry of Defence said last night that it was
aware of the incident.
Lieutenant-Colonel Buxton was posted to Kosovo as a
liaison officer with the 2nd Battalion, Royal Regiment
of Fusiliers.
Serbia Info: Pristina, August 1st - After the arrival of United
Nation's peace forces, Kosmet was turned into the
largest center of lawlessness and criminal in Europe,
and recent analyses, which appear more often even
in western press, confirm that the Balkans, Albania
and Kosovo-Metohija in the first place, have turned
into the main brothel where women are sold and
forced to prostitute.
"Prostitution in the Balkans has increased three,
maybe four times in the last four years", European
Union representatives, who deal with migrational
questions, claim.
According to the estimations of the International Organization for Migration,
more
than 300.000 women from eastern Europe are selling love. There are
35.000 of them
only in Italy. Large number of them is in Kosovo-Metohija, where they
give their
services to KFOR and UNMIK members in the first place.
Ethnic-Albanian mafia, which now rules Albania and Kosmet, turned prostitution
into a profitable "business". According to the UN estimations, more
than seven
billion dollars a year can be earned from prostitution. However, there
are those who
believe that that figure is double - 12 billion.
White slavery trade knows no boundaries: state, ethic or religious.
Young girls from
Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Russia…arrive to Kosovo-Metohija.
According to some western assessments gathering centers for prostitutes
for the
Balkans are in Greece. The prostitutes are later, thanks to the corrupted
Macedonian police, transferred to Kosmet.
"Macedonian ministers are not involved in such business, but some policemen
are
corrupted and accept bribe", Macedonian Minister of Justice, Dzevdet
Nasufi,
confirmed.
"Those women are promised well paid jobs, usually as waitresses in western
countries. But, at least half of them were kidnapped, or previously
raped and
several times sold before reaching Kosmet", UN investigation organs
stated.
Many nightclubs and bars in Kosmet turned into brothels. The business
"flourishes" thanks to the UN peace mission members and larger number
of
foreigners coming to the province. According to some testimonies American
soldiers have the lead. They even recently took pictures with some
prostitutes in
Gnjilane brothels.
Pimps do what they want, molest and beat those women, which is naturally
subjected to punishment according to every law. However, they avoid
punishments
by bribing the judges - Albanians appointed by UN civilian mission
chief Bernard
Kouchner.
"Pimps threat those women as slaves. We are trying to help them, but
judges
prosecute them as they are the criminals instead of prosecuting those
who procure
these women", says one member of international police forces in Kosovo-Metohija.
International Organization for Migrations also became engaged in order
to help the
women who are in most cases forced to prostitute. The organization
started the
media campaign against that modern slavery and have managed up to this
moment
to return home more than 60 traumatized girls, victims of ethnic-Albanian
mafia,
which deals with smuggling of weapons, narcotics and cigarettes, and
also with
laundering "dirty money".