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.´´
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