"Peace-Keepers" and
Prostitution in Kosovo
Sexual slave trade a problem in
Kosovo
Frankfurter
Rundschau
06 June 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 organization 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.