Trafficking in Women to Macedonia
IOM Press Briefing Notes
Friday 23 March 2001
FYR of MACEDONIA - Counter Trafficking Activities -
Despite the present crisis in Macedonia, the IOM office in Skopje,
working with the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) and
the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), is holding a
counter-trafficking training seminar for police and customs officers.
The training, taking place in Skopje from 21 to 23 March, brought
together more than 50 representatives from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia,
FYR of Macedonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Turkey,
the United Kingdom and the United States.
This training is part of IOM Skopje's
counter-trafficking capacity building programme, which aims to raise
awareness and to heighten skills among relevant authorities directly
dealing with victims of trafficking and combating this organized crime.
Given the regional and international character of trafficking,
IOM is trying to enhance cross-border and regional cooperation between
Macedonian officials and their counterparts in other SECI countries,
particularly those which are source countries for women trafficked to
Macedonia.
Instructed by seasoned officers from the US
department of Justice, the participants are receiving training in the
following topics: interviewing techniques and strategic investigations
related to international organized crime.
The recent events in Macedonia forced the Government
to postpone the Stability Pact Trafficking Task Force meeting scheduled
to be held in Skopje at the end of this month. Nevertheless,
participants agreed that the fight against trafficking in women and
organized crime must continue and that regional cooperation between law
enforcement officials should be stepped up. As a concrete illustration
of this effort, seven women were released from a bar in Tetovo thanks to
the intervention of IOM, the Ukrainian Embassy
and the Macedonian authorities. The
women used IOM trafficking information and hotline to ask for help.
In less than eight months, IOM Skopje has assisted
202 trafficked women to return home.
The majority of the women came from Moldova (119), followed by
Romania (54), Ukraine (12), Belarus (9),
Bulgaria (3) and Russia (3). All
of these women either managed to escape their captors or were freed
during police raids.