PRISTINA,
Yugoslavia The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of the
major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe, is becoming a serious
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, U.N. police
officials, NATO-led peacekeepers and humanitarian workers say.
In
the past six months, U.N. police and troops here have rescued 50 women
Moldovan, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Romanian from brothels that
have begun to appear in cities and towns in Kosovo, a province of
Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia. Police and aid workers say
they fear that hundreds more, lured from their impoverished homelands
with the promise of riches, may also be living in sexual servitude.
"These
women have been reduced to slavery," said Col. Vincenzo Coppola,
commander of a special unit of the Italian carabinieri, or national
police, in Kosovo that has rescued 23 women on raids of brothels in
Pristina, the provincial capital, and Prizren.
According
to police sources and aid workers, the women and some girls as young
as 15 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.
The
women, who had been stripped of their passports, as then were frequently
held in unheated rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and
forced to engage in unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night
for no payment, according U.N. police officers who requested anonymity
because of U.N. regulations limiting their ability to speak with
reporters.
The
undermanned U.N. police force here is hard-pressed to cope with a
variety of criminal activities in this war-scarred province, and
authorities and aid workers here have been slow to respond to the
burgeoning sex-slave trade. Moreover, there are limited humanitarian
resources available to protect those women who are able to seek
sanctuary.
In
addition, officials here said, the trade has flourished because of a
lack of applicable law on both trafficking and prostitution and because
some countries with military forces here have tended to dismiss the
activity as simple prostitution. German peacekeepers 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 one aid worker who has
interviewed rescued women and is working on a draft U.N. regulation to
punish people involved in the sex-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 first had to pay off the pimps for their purchase
price. Often, however, they found themselves fined for such infractions
as not smiling at customers, so there was no way they would ever have
enough money to make the payoff. If they protested, the women said, they
were beaten.
A
number of the women appear to have contracted sexually transmitted
diseases, officials said, and international groups here are attempting
to obtain treatment for them either in Kosovo or as soon as they can
return to their homelands. "This is a major problem, and it is
going further underground because of police raids," said one
international aid worker. "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 home. But it is
now full, with 21 women, and police have had to suspend raids on other
brothels until they can repatriate some of the former captives.
International
officials declined to allow a reporter to speak to any of the rescued
women. But in bars in Pristina, Gnjilane and Urosevac, there are young
Moldovan and Ukrainian women who describe themselves as
"waitresses" seeking economic opportunity in Kosovo. "I
can earn 400 deutsche marks [$200] a month," said a Moldovan woman
at a cafe in Gnjilane, where beds are set up behind a dank front bar.
Asked how much cash she had on her possession, the woman said only,
"I'm okay," as an ethnic Albanian bar manager looked on.
According
to the rescued women, the clientele varies from brothel to brothel,
officials said. Some serve mostly ethnic Albanians; others cater to a
mixture of ethnic Albanians and international workers. Peacekeeping
troops including Americans also were customers, the women said.
U.S. officials deny that American troops visit the brothels, pointing
out that soldiers are confined to base when they are off duty.
The
first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October four
months after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province when French
police officers raided a brothel in Kosovska Mitrovica and found two
Ukrainian women, ages 21 and 22, and two Serbian women, including a
minor. The establishment was closed and the Serbs were released, but the
French did not know what to do with the two Ukrainians, who had no
travel documents, officials said.
According
to sources familiar with the case, the French policemen detained the
women at a military camp while they appealed, without success, to
humanitarian organizations for assistance. After two weeks, fearful of a
public relations disaster because of the presence of
"prostitutes" at a military facility, The French policemen
took the two women to the administrative boundary between Kosovo and
Serbia proper and essentially expelled them. It is unclear what happened
to them after that.
In
November and December, further cases of enforced prostitution came to
light when U.N. policemen visited a number of bars in Pristina bars
with such names as Totos and the Miami Beach Club and removed women
who appealed to them for help.
On
Jan. 22, officers with the Italian police unit entered an establishment
on the outskirts of Pristina called the International Club, where they
were approached by women asking for help. The club, now closed, was a
crude structure with a small bar and barren rooms in the back that were
equipped with just a bed and a red light bulb. Some women were kept in
an attic. The following night, the Italians raided the club and rescued
12 women, mostly Moldovans and Ukrainians, who appealed for sanctuary.
The
Italians were criticized for conducting the raid without coordinating
with the U.N. police and humanitarian organizations who then had to
assume care of the women. But their efforts did lead to official
recognition of the problem and the creation of the safe house in early
February.
That
has allowed international workers to interview the women and understand
the process by which they were brought into the sex industry. In the
last 10 years, according to women's advocacy groups, hundreds of
thousands of women from the former Soviet republics and satellites have
been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the United States. 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.
Most
of the women interviewed here 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 were completely deceived when they applied for jobs in
the West, including one Moldovan teenager who got pregnant in Kosovo,
police officials said.
"The
women we've spoken to left their countries of their own volition and
basically knew they would work as prostitutes," said a U.N. 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."
© 2000 The Washington Post Company