Sex slavery in the Balkans (english / italiano)
1. Prostitution Rampage Through Macedonia: Teenagers Bought, Raped,
Sold (Vest, FYROM, 24/6/2003)
2. Macedonia: 'Obvious Mishap' - Ethnic Albanian Slaver Escapes Prison
(A1 TV, FYROM, 23/6/2003)
3. SERBIA/MONTENEGRO: POLIZIA SCOPRE 24 DONNE VITTIME DI SFRUTTATORI
(ANSA, 23/7/2003)
4. Sex Trafficking Victims Find Refuge in Belgrade (Politika/TOL,
24/7/2003)
5. Letter from the Balkans: An Underreported Horror Story.
Writing about the sex-slave trade is a dangerous assignment.
(Sherry Ricchiardi, American Journalism Review, Aug. 2003)
6. TRADING IN MISERY. Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are
falling victim to the Balkan sex trade.
(IWPR'S Balkan Crisis Report, No. 460, Sept. 15, 2003)
See also / vedi anche:
Albanian connection to the teenage sex slaves in London
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/2584
Sex Slave Recounts Her Ordeal (by Nidzara Ahmetasevic)
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr3/bcr3_200303_415_3_eng.txt
Europe's cash and carry sex slaves (by Gaby Rado)
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4641858,00.html
Sex Slavery / La tratta delle bianche nei Balcani - LINKS:
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/2384
=== 1 ===
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=2641
Web posted
June 24, 2003
Source: Vest, #888
Prostitution Rampage Through Macedonia: Teenagers Bought, Raped, Sold
Bitola police arrested a gang of seven who used to buy and sell
juveniles, forcing them to offer sex services for money. The suspects
Sh.K. (46) from Kichevo, owner of the cafe bar "Sedum Brakja" (7
Brothers), D.B. (56) from Ohrid, owner of cafe bar "Persa," M.A. (32)
and D.N. (28) from Bitola, the woman S.I. from Kichevo, and her lady
friend R.I. (44) from Bitola who used to trade three teenage girls
among themselves. After the arrest, the investigative judge detained
the cafe owners Sh.K. and D.B. for 30 days.
The police discovered the group after one of the abused girls reported
that she's been a victim of human trafficking. According the
preliminary reports, the girl R.A. was forced twice into whoring with
Greek citizens. In March this year, the suspects M.A. and A.N. sold
the girl to Sh.K. from Kichevo for 150 Euros. He and his unwed wife
forced the girl to serve them in their bar. The bosses sold the girl
to the Ohrid resident D.B. for 100 Euros June 6, 2003. He also forced
the girl into prostitution in his bar "Persa."
The same day, the accused Sh.K. bought the 14-year old girl A.M.
(native of Prilep) from some man from Bitola, paying 50 Euros. Sh.K.
forced the girl to prostitute herself. Several days afterward, D.B.
bought the girl A.N., also to force her to work as a servant and
prostitute. Since she refused the orders of her owners, she endured
repeated raping between June 14 and June 17, 2003.
(K.M.)
=== 2 ===
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=2634
Web posted
June 23, 2003
Source: A1 TV
Macedonia: 'Obvious Mishap' - Ethnic Albanian Slaver Escapes Prison
Background: Ali Ahmeti, the amnestied Albanian terrorist turned
favorite politician of Great Powers, basically admitted in an interview
for MSNBC that money comming from sex slavery financed his "human
rights" war, confirming numerous reports about the connections of
Albanian mafia with Albanian nationalist militants.
From the report by Vasko Popetrevski
http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/vest.asp?VestID=21399
Meri Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska, Deputy Justice Minister, raises doubts
about whole Leku's case.
There has been obvious mishaps in the transport procedure of Dilaver
Bojku, AKA Leku, from the Struga to Ohrid prison, including not
implementing all necessary meaures, remarked Deputy Minister of Justice
Meri Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska, after she talked to the management of
the prison and the officers who escorted the "boss pimp."
"The claim that Bojku wasn't handcuffed is true, although it should
have been necessary. This is not a major violation of the regulations,
but considering the identity of the convict, the wardens should have
assumed what could happen and should have taken more serious measures
to secure him," said Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska.
The Ministry of Justice has not made a decision about the disciplinary
measures for the resposnible officers, including wether Dragan Petreski
will continue working as the prison manager. The Ministry of Interior
also conducts a parallel investigation on the responsibility of prison
employees for the Friday debacle.
When asked if Dilaver Bojku's escape was well organized, the Deputy
Minister did not reply directly, but repeated the testimony of the
prison employees, which leads to such a conclusion.
"About hundred meters from the prison van, a black car appeared. Bojku
entered the car and dissapeared," said Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska.
Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska designated the whole case of Dilaver Bojku -
Leku as "specific" - starting from the proceedings to the judgement.
She considers his 6-months-only sentence [for pimping] as "debatable."
"Judiciary which considers itself an anarchy does not mean
independence, but turns into the other extreme of what it should be. If
the judiciary branch does not fulfill it's profesional and expert
obligations, all efforts by the executive and legislative parts of the
Goverment are in vain," said Mladenovska Gjorgjievska.
From the report by Nina Kepevska
http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/vest.asp?VestID=21398
Dilaver Bojku, AKA Leku
Dilaver Bojku, AKA Leku, is still at large. The Ministry of Internal
Affairs issued a national warant for his arrest, and intensified the
police controls around Struga region, especially his village of
Veleshta, and at the border crossings.
The investigation of the escape continues. The manager of Struga prison
could not be reached for comments.
Following details about the event surfaced: Leku was accompanied by the
prisoner Veljanovski who was standing at the prison gate just prior to
the incident. The warden Gjore Pejchinovski and his assistants
accompanied the Albanian slaver [whose involvement in human trafficking
was proven in a court of law]. When one of the officers wanted to open
the van which was supposed to transport Bojku to Ohrid prison, the
mafiozo used his arms to push his gards and run to a black car parked
about 100 meters from the prison.
All this confirms the suspicions that the whole action was planned in
advance. The news of Leku's escape didn't stir the local public too
much. People of struga consider the whole thing a set-up. They are not
surprised, since during his stay in the minimum-security prison
facility in Struga, Bojku would often spend his time in the city pubs
during the day, and go to prison only to get a good night's rest.
=== 3 ===
http://www.ansa.it/balcani/
SERBIA/MONTENEGRO: POLIZIA SCOPRE 24 DONNE VITTIME DI SFRUTTATORI
(ANSA) - BELGRADO, 23 LUG - La polizia di Belgrado ha scoperto presso
alberghi serbi 24 donne provenienti da Moldavia, Romania e Ukraina
costrette alla prostituzione da una rete di sfruttatori.
Le donne si trovavano in un gruppo di 133 stranieri fermati e trovati
senza permesso di soggiorno. Molti di essi saranno espulsi.
La polizia ha anche denunciato i proprietari degli alberghi in cui le
giovani si vendevano.
Serbia e Montenegro, che costituiscono un unico stato, sono una meta
costante del traffico di esseri umani.
COR 23/07/2003 17:23
=== 4 ===
http://www.tol.cz/look/wire/
article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=10&NrIssue=733&NrSection=1&NrArti
cle=10185
posted on TOL Wire on 24 July 2003
Sex Trafficking Victims Find Refuge in Belgrade
from Politika
Editor's note: Politika was founded in 1904 and is the oldest newspaper
publisher in the Balkans, and one of the oldest in Europe.
It is just one of many statistics that make it clear why human
trafficking is not only a problem for the police and justice system.
European Union countries are paying more attention to the problem
because sex trafficking is just the tip of an ugly iceberg that
includes human trafficking and scores of mafia-linked activities such
as mass border crossings, forced labor, and begging
In particular, Serbia and Montenegro is being pressured to confront
this growing problem within its borders; the EU has done no less than
assign it the role of guarding the gates of the “European Fortress.”
Experts from the British police recently trained the country's border
police to recognize a forged passport, with special instruction on
Chinese ones, since Chinese traffickers are known as masters of
document forgery.
A year ago, only the police were grappling with these problems. No
other official body regarded trafficking as a serious issue.
At the start of 2002, the nongovernmental Council Against Family
Violence opened its shelter for female victims of human trafficking.
The shelter is in Belgrade but the address is kept secret. It is the
only organization of its kind in Belgrade and is funded by the Austrian
government.
According to the shelter's coordinator, Vesna Stanojevic, the first
women arrived on 14 February 2002. Since then, 76 women--35 Moldovan,
12 Romanian, 15 Ukrainian, three Russian, and eight from Belgrade--and
six girls under the age of 18 have passed through its doors in search
of safety. Stanojevic said the shelter was established with the goal of
helping victims restore their health and emotional well-being, learn
how not to be dragged again into the criminal underworld, and return
safely to their home country.
The women who seek help in the volunteer-run shelter receive a
complete medical workup that includes treatment by a range of
specialists, including a gynecologist and psychiatrist. Many arrive at
the shelter alcohol-dependent because their pimps forced them to drink
constantly; a few are drug addicts. The shelter provides legal
assistance and helps the victims navigate local laws on illegal
immigrants and border crossings. The shelter lawyer escorts victims to
the police station and the courts, if necessary.
The majority of the victims are married and have children, but poverty
has forced them to make the risky trip to foreign countries to work.
The victims range from underage girls to women of 40. Stanojevic said
the shelter requires women and girls who show up and ask for help to
agree to stay in Belgrade for at least 20 days, but the prospect of
staying isn't easy for those who fear they will be caught by their
"minders" or the police. Stanojevic recalled a case in Mladenovac,
where she went with three Moldovan women who were set to testify in
court against a trafficker. When they stopped to ask a police officer
for directions to the courthouse, the women recognized him as one of
the regulars at the brothel where they had been forced to work.
In sex trafficking cases, Stanojevic said, the justice system is
inefficient. Dozens of trials against traffickers have dragged on
endlessly. The women the system is meant to help are re-victimized and
traumatized, she said, compelled to testify over and over again and
relive experiences they would rather forget, first in front of the
police, then the investigator, and finally in court.
By Milos Z. Lazic. Translated by Mirna Skrbic.
=== 5 ===
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3080
AMERICAN JOURNALISM REVIEW (USA)
August 2003 issue
Letter from the Balkans: An Underreported Horror Story
Writing about the sex-slave trade is a dangerous assignment.
By Sherry Ricchiardi
Sherry Ricchiardi is an AJR senior writer.
A story smoldering in the war-bedraggled Balkans has all the earmarks
of a Pulitzer Prize. At the core is a medieval sex-slave trade
masterminded by cutthroat crime cartels. The tentacles reach into
Italy, Germany and even the United States.
Thousands of women, tortured, raped and imprisoned in seedy "night
bars," are the mainstay of the multimillion-dollar industry. Armed
thugs, bearing tattoos and buzz-cuts, are part of the decor in the
makeshift brothels.
The script of "white slavery," as it commonly is known in this region,
resembles a hard-core porn flick. Traumatized victims describe being
locked in cages, chained to beds, starved, burned with cigarettes,
punched and gang raped until they are broken and forced to perform
sex-on-demand.
Some women tell of being hawked at auctions outside of Belgrade,
ordered to dance naked for prospective buyers who pay thousands of
Euros for lithe, full-bosomed blondes. Most are lured from dirt-poor
countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Romania by the promise of jobs as
waitresses, au pairs or dancers. The human slave trade operating here
has been
compared to African slave auctions in 18th-century Europe.
Once they are sold, owners make it clear that if they attempt to
escape, family members might take a bullet in the head or a younger
sister might be kidnapped and sold.
"It is one of the great underreported stories of our time," says
DrewSullivan, an American journalist working in southeastern Europe.
It's also one of the riskiest.
So far, there is no evidence of reporters being killed for delving into
the sex-slave industry. That's because none has penetrated its inner
workings, explained Sullivan over lunch in Sarajevo. "The closer you
get to the heart of trafficking, the closer you get to the Serbian,
Albanian and Russian Mafia. It is well known they will kill anybody to
protect their business," says Sullivan, who has interviewed more than a
dozen
survivors.
The issue of forced prostitution has been largely ignored or glossed
over by the local and international press corps. In Montenegro, a
country in the thick of the trafficking, the government line has been
"there is no problem here." In fact, up to 200,000 women are bartered
in the Balkan region every year, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration. A 2002 United Nations report calls trafficking the
fastest-growing transnational organized criminal activity and a major
violation of human rights.
Most stories on the topic have focused on victims who have escaped or
have been rescued, on police raids and on minor players in the trade.
Few reporters have dug deeper.
A highly detailed story by Sebastian Junger appeared in the July 2002
issue of Vanity Fair. The author traced the path of one Moldovan woman
and delved into the corruption, local laws and victims' fear of
testifying that hinder prosecutors.
Around the same period, Preston Mendenhall, MSNBC. com's international
editor, aired a series on sex slaves in Europe, including accounts from
women who had been rescued and were in hiding. One of them displayed an
infected wound on her breast and described how a client had bitten her.
A Lexis-Nexis search found few significant stories under the label of
human or sexual trafficking in southeast Europe or the Balkans over the
past two years.
A handful of regional journalists have worked the story despite living
alongside the killers. In 1998, reporter Dzenana Karup Drusko set out
to document that crime cartels were trafficking in women in Bosnia. At
the time, the government and the public were in denial. "You can't
report on [criminals] unless you get into their minds," she said during
an interview in a café across from her newsroom. "If you show fear, it
doesn't work."
Across the border in Croatia, veteran investigative journalist Sasa
Lekovic poses a series of ethical questions to guide his reporting on
trafficking. "Is it ever OK to buy a woman to get her story or to pay
for her time?" asks Lekovic, who once tracked a 17-year-old to Italy
and helped bring her home. "Should a journalist ever try to rescue a
victim? How far should we go to protect their identity if they
interview with us?"
Human Rights Watch has said members of the international community,
including United Nations peacekeepers and NATO officials, were regular
clients of the night bars.
In May 2000, an investigation by the U.S. Army concluded that up to
five U.S. government workers were involved in "white slavery." Sources
stated that they purchased women from local Mafia to live in their
homes for "sexual and domestic" purposes.
When women are freed, there is little chance they will testify against
their tormentors. To date, no viable witness protection exists.
Operating behind the scenes are such organizations as the International
Center for Journalists and the International Research and Exchange
Board, who send media trainers--myself and Drew Sullivan among them--to
help local journalists create strategies for covering trafficking.
The U.S. State Department, which sponsors some of the training, has
taken a leading role in helping to create a legal framework to further
prosecution of traffickers in the Balkans. Still, local watchdogs
operate on their own in tightly knit communities.
In June, I traveled to a Bosnian town to join a reporter who was
following a hot tip. A notorious crime boss, sentenced to prison
earlier this year, had been spotted freely walking the streets on
certain days of the week. The night bar he ran continued to thrive.
"Will you be able to write the story?" I asked.
A finger across the throat was the reply. "Not if I want to live," the
reporter said.
=== 6 ===
IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT,
No. 460, September 15, 2003
TRADING IN MISERY
Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are falling victim to the
Balkan sex trade.
By IWPR's Balkan reporting team
Marcu scratches his unshaven face and stares intently out of the window
at the queue of battered tankers, trucks and cars beyond.
He's nervous, tired and desperate. Sitting in a small café on the
Greek-Bulgarian border, he hesitates over his coffee before asking us a
favour, a big favour.
"Look, I know you're Romanians. May I ask you to take these two girls
in your car and drive them over to Greece?" he said, pointing to a car
outside where a couple of young girls are sitting in the back seat.
He's figured out where we're from by the plates on our vehicle.
"They're from Brasov [a town in central Romania] and need to get to
Thessaloniki [northern Greece]. I'll pay you good money. Their papers
are OK," he added enthusiastically.
Marcu tells us he is trying to make a living by trafficking the two
girls. "I'll find them good positions in a club in Thessaloniki. I have
an address and I'll get good money from this. You know how hard it is
to make a living nowadays. The girls are poor too, they're sisters and
their parents are drunkards," he said.
"Greece is a much better future for them. I arrived here with them by
bus but now I'm afraid to cross the border together with them because I
heard the Greek custom officers are very suspicious and can stop us
from entering."
Leaning over the table, Marcu began to look worried, "Please help me,
take the two girls in your car and then we'll meet on the other side
and you'll get some easy money."
"Why don't you just take a cab across?" we asked.
"No, I don't want to hire a cab because these guys are crooks, they can
rob me," he snapped back.
Marcu was getting edgy and wanted us to do a deal to take the girls
across and quickly. Leaving the coffee shop, he followed, shuffling
along to our car. We were about to talk to him further when, nervously
examining our distinctive Romanian Dacia, he noticed we had made a
mistake. On the back seat were our cameras and equipment: our cover was
well and truly blown.
He didn't look back as he sprinted away down the road, getting into his
car and disappearing round a bend into Bulgaria. He will no doubt be
back to try another day.
Marcu is one of the hundreds of traffickers working across this and
many other borders in the Balkans, smuggling not guns, drugs or stolen
cars but women.
HOW THE TRADE WORKS.
In November 2002, an the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, OSCE, conference on the trafficking of human beings estimated
that some 200,000 women in the Balkans had fallen victim to a smuggling
network that extends across the region into the European Union.
According to the latest figures from International Organisation for
Migration, IOM, the four biggest exporters of girls to Western Europe
are Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Russia.
Romania is the nexus of the trade for two reasons: its geographic
location makes it a good transit country and the presence of large
numbers of impoverished women desperate to make money provide a ready
source of trafficking victims.
Two main smuggling routes begin here: one going north into Hungary,
southwest through the former Yugoslavia to Albania and then across the
Adriatic by speedboat to Italy; the other runs directly south, through
Bulgaria to Greece.
With the first route, girls are taken to Romanian cities such as
Bucharest and Timisoara, near the Serbian border. Many are then sold to
Serbian gangs who move them south, putting them to work as prostitutes
in Belgrade or selling them to criminal groups in Bosnia, Kosovo or
Montenegro. Some will be smuggled into Albania, and then on to Italy
and other European countries.
The second route runs from Romania directly south through Bulgaria to
Greece. In Bulgaria, some of the girls are sold to gangs who smuggle
them into Macedonia, then Albania and on to Italy.
The trade is a coalition of interests that crosses ethnic divides.
Well-organised groups, familiar to each other from drugs or gun deals,
trade across frontiers, as do lone traffickers.
War has made the Balkans a traffickers dream. Their illicit trade has
been able to flourish as a result of the chaos of the last decade,
which has weakened border controls and fractured and impoverished
communities that were once held together by rigid moral codes.
Throughout the Balkans, checkpoints are badly policed by often corrupt
officials, well used to taking bribes as guns and drugs moved through
the region during the wars. Forged or stolen passports are easily
available and visa regulations are flouted.
The wars have has also created a market for girls inside the Balkans.
The influx of cash from the international community policing the peace
in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia has swelled the trade in prostitution.
One United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, source told IWPR in August
that the market is now so developed that many of the girls smuggled
into the protectorate now willingly work as prostitutes. Their profits
are good, their pimps are treating them decently and, they say, it's "
better than returning to Moldova", the source said.
Of the 826 girls helped by IOM's projects in the region from May 2001
to December 2002, 590 - 77 per cent - were reportedly destined for
either Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro.
There are several methods of recruiting girls. One is through newspaper
advertisements promising menial jobs such as waitressing in Western
Europe. Others are attracted by promises of marriage to EU nationals.
After luring the girls, the traffickers seize their passports, then
take them to major regional sex trade centres, where they are forced to
work as prostitutes.
Some escape from their captors. We met several girls who had managed to
flee. But a number of those who do are often recaptured by the
traffickers or are hounded by them when they seek refuge in womens'
shelters.
In a major investigation, involving IWPR reporters in eight Balkan
countries, we set out to explore this massive trade in people across
the region. Our teams followed the trafficking routes, going from
Romania, south into Bulgaria and Greece, across to Albania and then
north through former Yugoslavia.
We visited clubs, bars, hotels and brothels, speaking with the
traffickers, the pimps, the authorities and the girls themselves, to
build up a picture of how this cross-border network of criminal gangs
smuggling women operates.
TRAFFICKING FOR THE OLYMPICS
At the Kulata border crossing between Greece and Bulgaria, dozens of
taxis line up on the Bulgarian side of the frontier. According to a
Bulgarian police source, some of the vehicles are waiting to ferry
Greek traffickers to two local towns, Sandanski and Petrich, which have
become regional sex trade centres - market places for girls from all
over the Balkans and the former Soviet Union who are bought and sold
with impunity. Some are destined to be smuggled to Italy and other EU
countries, but the majority are purchased by nightclub owners from
northern Greece.
In a bitter twist of irony, Sandanski is also well known for being the
birthplace of the world's most renowned slave, Spartacus. But today's
young slaves are not likely to rebel against their captors. They're too
weak, too far away from home and become involved in a highly organised
criminal trade that leaves them little opportunity to escape.
Greek police sources have told IWPR that the transfer of the women from
Bulgaria to Greece is well established, controlled by a tight-knit
group of criminals. The officers say that a man well known to them in
Sandanski controls the whole enterprise - including the taxi firms used
by traffickers to smuggle girls over the border - and is either
tolerated or actively protected by Bulgarian law enforcers.
In April, our team of journalists, posing as potential clients,
questioned taxi drivers in both Sandanski and Petrich about buying
women in the area. Initially reticent, the drivers soon began talking,
saying they could put us in touch with people who could "solve our
problem".
The prices charged for the girls depend on their age and experience. On
average, they are sold for between 2,500 and 3,000 euro. "If the girl
is fresh, very young and not used, the price is higher," one trafficker
told us.
The cost and number of women being smuggled into Greece is expected to
rise during next year's Olympics in Athens, with traffickers apparently
calculating that the prostitution business will be brisk.
The traffickers are highly organised. They go to great lengths to check
out the identity of clients in order to avoid police traps; possess
high-tech instruments such as communication encryption software that
prevents police tracking their mobile phones; and even run illegal TV
stations broadcasting porn and advertising brothels.
THE ALBANIAN MAFIA
On the outskirts of a desperately poor Albanian village, where donkeys
stacked high with fire wood crawled along potholed streets, we
witnessed the bizarre sight of gleaming Audis, Mercedes and even the
odd Lamborghini cruising past.
In this impoverished country, this sort of conspicuous wealth is
associated with organised crime, which has filled the vacuum left by
the communists and spread its tentacles throughout Europe. In June, the
World Markets Research Centre said in a report that Albanian mafia
groups have established a reputation in continental Europe as being
amongst the most efficient drugs pushers and people smugglers on the
continent.
Over the past five years, successive Albanian interior ministers, and
two chief prosecutors, have admitted that Albania is a transit country
for prostitutes on their way to Western Europe and that significant
numbers of Albanian girls were being coerced into the trade.
In this strongly conservative society, prostitution is beyond the pale,
but trafficking girls across to Italy and other EU countries is not.
The IOM's 2001 Victims of Trafficking in the Balkans report notes that
the smuggling of girls through Albania "is primarily orientated" to the
EU through its Adriatic ports of Vlore and Durres.
Once in Italy, the girls continue to run considerable risks. The
Italian ministry of interior reported in 2001 that 168 foreign
prostitutes had been murdered, mainly by their pimps. The majority of
the former were either Albanian or Nigerian.
The trafficking of Albanian girls into Italy has become so bad that it
prompted a change in Italian legislation in 1998. Article 18 of the
Aliens Law provided for a care programme - run by over 200 NGOs with
the Italian ministry for equal opportunities - for those brought into
the country for sexual exploitation. Figures from the programme from
March to December 2000 show that 20 per cent of the girls that were
helped came from Albania.
In the central Albanian town of Fier, three little metal huts with a
few ancient bunk beds and some desks provide shelter for girls that
have managed to escape the clutches of the traffickers.
The facility was established by Colonel Xhavit Shala, a former senior
police official and presently serving in the statistics and analysis
office in the interior ministry. He raised 18,000 US dollars from local
businesses to fund the project when the government refused to help.
Shala has held talks with local leaders, teachers, business people and
residents to explain how the trafficking trade is wrecking village life
in the country.
Speaking to IWPR, he was adamant that if trafficking through and from
Albania is to be tackled and locally trafficked girls are to be
reintegrated back into society then it will require a massive change of
heart, particularly from the girls' families.
"Albanians need to learn to treat these women as victims and not
prostitutes. We tell families that it is not only their daughters'
responsibility for falling into prostitution but their own," he said.
"Statistic's show that their daughters were deceived into becoming
prostitutes. We ask them why their families permitted them to be
deceived."
Such is the fear of falling victim to trafficking that many girls are
refusing to go to school. Save the Children reported in 2001 that "in
remote areas, where pupils may have to walk for over an hour to get to
school, research has discovered that as many as 90 per cent of girls no
longer receive a high school education". One of the main factors was
parents' concern that their children would be abducted on the way to
class.
People smuggling has become so endemic in Albania that even the police
are implicated. During the first five months of 2002, 102 officers were
identified as being involved in the trade following a major police
crackdown that was prompted by international pressure to stem the tide
of girls reaching Europe. Sixteen of the suspects have been jailed, 12
transferred to other jobs and 15 given minor punishments, according to
the Albanian interior ministry.
The extent of human trafficking from Albania is revealed in a secret
internal government report seen by IWPR. According to the document,
more than 100,000 Albanians were smuggled out of the country between
1993-2001. How many have ended up as prostitutes across Europe is hard
to establish. But evidence from the streets tells its own story.
According to IOM's 2001 survey, the majority of prostitutes in London's
Soho area are either from Albania or Kosovo.
MACEDONIA'S POROUS BORDERS
We made our way north through Macedonia to Kumanovo along the
picturesque roads that climb high into Sharplanina mountains. Amid the
town's busy streets, we came across a jeweller whose trade seemed to be
thriving. "So many women pass through Kumanovo, so my business is
safe," said the owner of the shop in the centre of town. "I sell so
many rings for women from Ukraine, Romania and Albania. Sometimes I
sell the jewelry to the man who is in charge of them. He needs to have
beautiful women so that he can do his business."
If Romania is often the beginning of the trafficking journey and
Albania the end, one country, Macedonia, plays the role of a key mid
point. It has more shared borders than any other former Yugoslav
republic and its mountainous, poorly patrolled borders are ideal for
traffickers. According to Kosovan law enforcement sources, the
country's frontier with the protectorate is probably the most porous in
Europe.
Sitting on a plastic chair in the baggy sports clothes provided by the
centre that rescued her, Julijana Sherban talks to the floor, red
rimmed eyes peering out from behind her long, dark hair.
The 21-year-old Romanian girl doesn't want to say much. After what
she's been through, it's no surprise. But Julijana is lucky, she is one
of the few in Macedonia to have escaped the clutches of her pimp and
testified against him in court, having been placed on a witness
protection programme. Surrounded by other girls in the shelter in
Skopje, she begins to tell her story.
Her case reveals the enormous trade in women that runs through the town
of Tetevo and Valesta and Struga further south.
Her pimp, Dilaver Bojku Leku, was convicted of soliciting in a court in
Struga in March and received a six-month jail sentence. Leku is thought
to have controlled the biggest prostitution ring in Macedonia, running
10 bars in the region, recruiting Moldovan, Romanian and Ukrainian
girls who had been sold on by several gangs on the route from Romania
through Serbia.
"I was told that I would work in Greece, but I didn't expect they would
sell me. I was sold in Serbia a dozen times. I arrived in Macedonia in
2001, in Velesta, where I stayed for five months working in Leku's bar,
Expresso," Julijana told IWPR.
In a public relations disaster for the Macedonian government, Leku
escaped on June 20 and fled to Montenegro where he was eventually
caught and extradited on July 4. He is currently awaiting a retrial
along with four others.
The case has attracted the attention of the international community
eager to see the south Balkans crack down on organised crime and stop
the flow of girls into the EU. Lawrence Butler, the US ambassador to
Macedonia, expressed serious misgivings about the country's sentencing
in prostitution cases earlier on this year. "The failure to [impose
long jail terms] opens new questions such as: are you afraid? Are you
corrupt or incompetent?" he said at the annual launch of the State
Department's report on human trafficking.
SERVICING THE INTERNATIONALS
One by one, the three girls start clapping their hands, begging for
applause and money after stripping naked in front of us. Welcome to The
Dancer - a dingy, basement strip joint in downtown Pristina.
In the corner, a short, skinny woman bellows hoarsely at them to make
more of an effort to attract our attention.
The night has just begun and we're the only clients in the bar. After a
while the fearsome looking madam comes to our table and asks us if we
are enjoying the striptease. Noticing our disapproving looks, she tells
us that she knows we're not here for the dance but for what she called
"some fun with the girls".
"It's 50 euro for one hour. It's safe. Nobody will enter the bar
unannounced. The local police won't make any problems," added the woman
who introduces herself as Iana.
Security is clearly an issue at The Dancer. The underground bar is like
a small fortress - no windows and reinforced doors. Near the entrance,
hidden behind some breeze blocks, sits a young boy who sells chewing
gum and vets customers as they come in.
"Didn't you like the girls? Maybe this time they're not that good," he
said as we left the club." Frankly, I don't like them very much,
either. Will you come here some other time? We will have fresh girls
soon. They're on their way from Ukraine."
There are numerous such brothels and strip joints in Kosovo. The region
is one of the main destinations for the traffickers. But the girls
aren't looking to entice locals - they're here for the "internationals".
The Kosovan economy is largely dependent on the presence of
international officials and troops in the protectorate. In towns like
Pristina and Prizren, western-style shops, restaurants and pubs have
sprung up all over town to cater for the tastes and pockets of the
thousands of well-paid foreigners.
Many ordinary Kosovans have been sucked into the local prostitution
racket, which the traffickers view as one of the most profitable in
Europe.
"The majority of people here earn their money from trafficking in drugs
or women. They know the routes very well, they know the mined zones and
they go through areas where KFOR never goes," a senior officer in the
Kosovo Protection Force, KFOR, told IWPR.
"KFOR is not intervening because they don't want to risk a conflict and
they're not interested. Not long ago a rocket was launched against a UN
checkpoint. The KFOR guys are not from this area so they don't really
care about what's going on."
POLICE SHORTCOMINGS AND CORRUPTION
The KFOR source said the local Kosovan police are incapable of dealing
with the problem, claiming that some officers are running human
trafficking operations.
" I don't know if we can call them police. The locals become officers
after attending a three-month course in law enforcement. Afterwards,
they're only interested in boosting their salaries and showing off the
uniforms, guns and cars that the international community provided
them," he said.
Elsewhere in the Balkans, the policing problem is just as acute as in
Kosovo. In Bosnia, efforts to curb organised crime gangs and
traffickers have been undermined by premature changes to the
international policing effort in the country, critics of the
authorities believe.
In January this year, the UN's International Police Task force, IPTF,
was replaced by an EU-led police mission, EUPM.
One thousand six hundred IPTF police were posted in some 200 locations
throughout the country to train, equip and monitor local officers.
Latest figures from August 2003 show that EUPM's presence is less
conspicuous, with only 480 members currently deployed around the
country.
Before the scale down in January, the IPTF coordinator for the Special
Trafficking Operations programme, John O'Reilly warned that trafficking
gangs were stepping up their activities, "The criminals are already
bringing in new girls. Of all the bars we closed, there's a number of
them actually being renovated."
Speaking with IWPR, O'Reilly was doubtful whether the EU force would be
up to the job of handling the scale of the human trafficking problem.
"In my humble opinion it won't work. You've got the will but there is a
lot of corruption and a lot of people in important places don't want
this to work," he said.
The situation is similar in neighbouring Montenegro where a recent
human trafficking scandal involving a leading official has seriously
embarrassed the government.
In July, an OSCE commission was invited to investigate the alleged
involvement of the Montenegrin deputy state prosecutor Zoran Piperovic
and three other officials in people smuggling.
Piperovic was arrested along with three others in November last year on
suspicion of involvement in human trafficking following revelations by
a Moldovan woman who escaped from a Montenegrin trafficking gang to a
refuge. She claimed that Piperovic had been involved in her
incarceration, during which time she was drugged and raped.
Piperovic and the three other men deny the charges.
Controversially, the Montenegrin senior state prosecutor, Zoran
Radonjic, ruled in May that there were insufficient grounds for a
prosecution, sparking a major public outcry that prompted the
authorities to invited the OSCE to pass judgment on the case.
OSCE mission chief to Serbia and Montenegro Maurizio Massari said in
July that the Piperovic case "raised the issue of the ability of the
Montenegrin legal system to cope with the complexity of cases related
to human trafficking".
INTO THE MINEFILEDS
Leaving Pristina, we traveled first to Prizren in southern Kosovo and
then on to Qafa i Prushit on the Kosovo-Albanian border. According to
out KFOR source, Qafa i Prushit is a people- and drugs-trafficking hot
spot. The route to the border point goes through villages where the
signs of the last war, the continuing tensions and new wealth are all
too apparent.
Close to the border, in front of the newly built two-storey houses, sit
freshly polished Mercedes. Almost all bear Swiss plates. "Lots of the
cars belong to the Kosovars. Many of them moved to Switzerland during
the conflict and now they come back here to do their business, mainly
in the field of organised crime," our KFOR source told us.
A few kilometres away from Qafa i Prushit lie the minefields. A dusty
road cuts through the deadly terrain. On either side, yellow triangles
with the inscription "minas, minas" and giant concrete structures,
called "dragons teeth", which were put up by the Serb forces to stop
the movement of NATO tanks.
Qafa i Prushit's UN checkpoint, guarded by only a few officers, is
perched up on hills dominating the area. The post's surveillance
activities are assisted by UN mobile patrols that put up roadblocks and
search suspect cars in the valley below. Girls here are being moved in
both directions. According to the IOM, the majority are going to
Albania and then on to Italy, but others are moving into Kosovo and the
buoyant Pristina market place.
Despite the UN efforts at Qafa i Prushit, the trafficking continues to
grow partly because the international and local police will not risk
their lives by leaving the safety of the road to go into the minefields.
To the northeast lies another unguarded border that is regularly used
by traffickers between Kosovo and Montenegro. The crossing point goes
through mountains that soar as high as 2,600 metres. As in other parts
of the Balkans, this geography helps those trafficking people and makes
tracking them extremely difficult.
And the multinational nature of the traffic also makes the task of
stopping the flood of people particularly hard.
"There is no linguistic, religious or any other problem among the
criminals," Jacques Klein, the outgoing head of the UN Mission in
Bosnia told IWPR shortly before he stepped down in December 2002. "They
have no dilemma dealing with each other - it's a very sophisticated
crime structure."
By working together, Balkan criminals of different ethnicity create a
secure trafficking network through which profits and girls can be
controlled. But some do manage to escape.
GIRLS FLEE CAPTORS
Not all the girls we met on our travels were controlled by pimps. In
Bucharest, we came across several who were working alone, having fled
their captors. And in Belgrade, we met with girls who continued to work
in the city, after escaping from Serbian traffickers.
Vera is one such girl. Her modest downtown flat is basic, but clean. On
the bed lies a packet of condoms, in the corner a closet. Nothing else.
She has no pimp, no ties. The 22-year-old takes great pride in telling
us how she, and her housemate, got here.
"In March, I finally managed to run from the traffickers who held me in
a house in Novi Sad [a town north of Belgrade] after they had
disappeared with our passports," she said. " I now have my own
business. I place my adds in the newspapers and I publish my mobile
phone number. We are working for ourselves."
Their relief was palpable, but they remain extremely wary.
Neither would say where they had come from or where the traffickers
were taking them.
"The traffickers sold us, abused us and kept us locked up. Now we only
have to take care who our clients are," continued Vera. " We tell them
it is the wrong number if they ask us in Serbian. We have only foreign
clients. Of course, the money would be better if we'd take Serbians too
but we are afraid they might be traffickers that try to take us back."
Recent clamp downs on organised crime following the murder of prime
minister Zoran Djindic in March is likely to have had some effect on
the gang operations in Serbia.
One result of police action against prostitution has been to spread the
problem beyond central Belgrade. The 2002 OSCE report on human
trafficking in the region noted that "due to control and raids by the
police, the number of bars has decreased and part of the trafficking
business has moved from the centre into the suburbs and less obvious
locations".
In much of the Balkans, substantial amounts of international funds have
been directed at curbing trafficking, but Serbia has not fared as well
in this regard.
Nonetheless, NGO pressure here has kept the issue of trafficking on the
political agenda. In July 2001, the interior ministry allocated space
for a shelter for trafficked women and legislative changes increased
penalties for traffickers.
A REGIONAL ANTI-TRAFFICKING STRATEGY
From Serbia, we traveled back to where we began, Romania. There we paid
a visit to Iana Matei, the director of the Reaching Out project, which
provides a refuge for girls who've managed to escape the clutches of
the traffickers. So far, Matei and his colleagues have managed to
build a few apartments for the girls in the town of Pitesti - 100 km
north of Bucharest - home to the massive, belching Dacia car plant.
In this unappealing town many of the girls have found some respite. But
the exact location of the shelter has to be kept secret for fear that
traffickers will hunt the girls down.
It's here that we met up again with Diana. Back in January, IWPR
reported on an undercover investigation into Romanian smugglers, in
which our reporters bought her from a Bucharest pimp for 400 US
dollars. Just like Marcu, we could have taken Diana down to the
prostitution centres in the Balkans or sold her on to Serbian gangs in
Timisoara.
Then, she was cold, terrified, almost naked and starving. She had spent
the previous New Years Eve in Bucharest, chained to a dog cage.
But now, with the shelter's help, she is making progress back to a
relatively normal life. She is sharing a flat with some other girls,
learning how to look after herself and how to live without fear.
It will be a long road for Diana. The mental scars of years of physical
and sexual abuse by pimps and clients have taken their toll.
Analysts agree that human trafficking through the Balkans is a major
international problem that will require a coordinated response from
regional and Western European governments and their respective law
enforcement agencies.
To this end, the EU set up a group of 20 independent experts in March
to recommend further actions on coordinating the fight against
trafficking. The panel is just one of several moves coming from last
year's EU conference on combating the crime.
The conference recommended further coordination between EU member
states on legislation and policing, urging greater harmonisation of
national laws, so that traffickers face the same penalties in whichever
member state they are caught. Brussels has made funding available under
the AGIS programme for police and judicial cooperation across the EU to
tackle the problem.
Julie Bindel, a member of the EU panel and a researcher with the child
and women abuse unit at the University of North London, says that
although Brussels is looking hard into the issue, progress is slow, and
concentrating on tightening and coordinating EU law on the issue is not
enough.
"The problem starts mainly in the Balkans and the EU needs to be doing
more in the region. What legislative and funding changes there have
been are pretty piecemeal, and are only aimed at tackling things at one
end of the chain," she said.
"For example, the UK foreign office has provided some funds to compile
a database of all NGOs working on the human trafficking issue, and
money has been made available to tackle child prostitution but its
still the case that there are less than 20 officers based at Charing
Cross police station who deal specifically with human trafficking and
this is for the whole of London."
As Balkans countries begin to eye up EU accession, many will have to do
more to tackle the traffickers if they are to stand a chance of ever
gaining entry. The Treaty of the European Union explicitly refers to
trafficking of human beings and demands that members comply with
overall standards of policing and legislation on the issue. Right now,
few Balkan countries are even close to this.
But there are signs that a regional approach to the problem is
beginning to take shape.
In September 2002, the Romanian based Southeast European Cooperative
Initiative Centre for Combating Trans-Border Crime, SECI, launched the
first regional anti-human trafficking operation. Code-named MIRAGE, the
initiative brought together police forces from ten countries including
Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece and the
UN Mission in Kosovo.
By January 2003, SECI concluded in its report on the operation that 237
victims of trafficking and 293 traffickers had been arrested after over
20,000 raids on nightclubs, discos, restaurants and border crossing
points in the Balkans.
But while MIRAGE was a relative success, it did expose corrupt
practices among many Balkans police forces that go someway to
underpinning the trade. Indeed, numerous investigations during MIRAGE
pointed to policemen being involved in trafficking. It's a sobering
assessment - and one that underlines the difficulties governments face
in tackling this terrible scourge.
This report was coordinated by Paul Radu in Romania and compiled by
David Quin, IWPR's assistant investigations editor in London. The
following contributed to the research: Stefan Candea and Sorin Ozon in
Romania, Julie Harbin and Nidzara Ahmetasevic in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Gazmend Kapllani in Greece, Milorad Ivanovic in Serbia, Kaca Krsmanovic
and Boris Darmanovic in Montenegro, Zylyftar Bregu in Albania, Zoran
Jachev and Zaklina Gjorgjevic in Macedonia.
***
Balkan Crisis Report is supported by the Department for International
Development, the European Commission, the Swedish International
Development and Cooperation Agency, The Netherlands Ministry for
Foreign Affairs, and other funders. IWPR also acknowledges general
support from the Ford Foundation.
For further details on this project, other information services and
media programmes, visit IWPR's website: www.iwpr.net
1. Prostitution Rampage Through Macedonia: Teenagers Bought, Raped,
Sold (Vest, FYROM, 24/6/2003)
2. Macedonia: 'Obvious Mishap' - Ethnic Albanian Slaver Escapes Prison
(A1 TV, FYROM, 23/6/2003)
3. SERBIA/MONTENEGRO: POLIZIA SCOPRE 24 DONNE VITTIME DI SFRUTTATORI
(ANSA, 23/7/2003)
4. Sex Trafficking Victims Find Refuge in Belgrade (Politika/TOL,
24/7/2003)
5. Letter from the Balkans: An Underreported Horror Story.
Writing about the sex-slave trade is a dangerous assignment.
(Sherry Ricchiardi, American Journalism Review, Aug. 2003)
6. TRADING IN MISERY. Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are
falling victim to the Balkan sex trade.
(IWPR'S Balkan Crisis Report, No. 460, Sept. 15, 2003)
See also / vedi anche:
Albanian connection to the teenage sex slaves in London
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/2584
Sex Slave Recounts Her Ordeal (by Nidzara Ahmetasevic)
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr3/bcr3_200303_415_3_eng.txt
Europe's cash and carry sex slaves (by Gaby Rado)
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4641858,00.html
Sex Slavery / La tratta delle bianche nei Balcani - LINKS:
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/2384
=== 1 ===
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=2641
Web posted
June 24, 2003
Source: Vest, #888
Prostitution Rampage Through Macedonia: Teenagers Bought, Raped, Sold
Bitola police arrested a gang of seven who used to buy and sell
juveniles, forcing them to offer sex services for money. The suspects
Sh.K. (46) from Kichevo, owner of the cafe bar "Sedum Brakja" (7
Brothers), D.B. (56) from Ohrid, owner of cafe bar "Persa," M.A. (32)
and D.N. (28) from Bitola, the woman S.I. from Kichevo, and her lady
friend R.I. (44) from Bitola who used to trade three teenage girls
among themselves. After the arrest, the investigative judge detained
the cafe owners Sh.K. and D.B. for 30 days.
The police discovered the group after one of the abused girls reported
that she's been a victim of human trafficking. According the
preliminary reports, the girl R.A. was forced twice into whoring with
Greek citizens. In March this year, the suspects M.A. and A.N. sold
the girl to Sh.K. from Kichevo for 150 Euros. He and his unwed wife
forced the girl to serve them in their bar. The bosses sold the girl
to the Ohrid resident D.B. for 100 Euros June 6, 2003. He also forced
the girl into prostitution in his bar "Persa."
The same day, the accused Sh.K. bought the 14-year old girl A.M.
(native of Prilep) from some man from Bitola, paying 50 Euros. Sh.K.
forced the girl to prostitute herself. Several days afterward, D.B.
bought the girl A.N., also to force her to work as a servant and
prostitute. Since she refused the orders of her owners, she endured
repeated raping between June 14 and June 17, 2003.
(K.M.)
=== 2 ===
http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=2634
Web posted
June 23, 2003
Source: A1 TV
Macedonia: 'Obvious Mishap' - Ethnic Albanian Slaver Escapes Prison
Background: Ali Ahmeti, the amnestied Albanian terrorist turned
favorite politician of Great Powers, basically admitted in an interview
for MSNBC that money comming from sex slavery financed his "human
rights" war, confirming numerous reports about the connections of
Albanian mafia with Albanian nationalist militants.
From the report by Vasko Popetrevski
http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/vest.asp?VestID=21399
Meri Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska, Deputy Justice Minister, raises doubts
about whole Leku's case.
There has been obvious mishaps in the transport procedure of Dilaver
Bojku, AKA Leku, from the Struga to Ohrid prison, including not
implementing all necessary meaures, remarked Deputy Minister of Justice
Meri Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska, after she talked to the management of
the prison and the officers who escorted the "boss pimp."
"The claim that Bojku wasn't handcuffed is true, although it should
have been necessary. This is not a major violation of the regulations,
but considering the identity of the convict, the wardens should have
assumed what could happen and should have taken more serious measures
to secure him," said Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska.
The Ministry of Justice has not made a decision about the disciplinary
measures for the resposnible officers, including wether Dragan Petreski
will continue working as the prison manager. The Ministry of Interior
also conducts a parallel investigation on the responsibility of prison
employees for the Friday debacle.
When asked if Dilaver Bojku's escape was well organized, the Deputy
Minister did not reply directly, but repeated the testimony of the
prison employees, which leads to such a conclusion.
"About hundred meters from the prison van, a black car appeared. Bojku
entered the car and dissapeared," said Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska.
Mladenovska-Gjorgjievska designated the whole case of Dilaver Bojku -
Leku as "specific" - starting from the proceedings to the judgement.
She considers his 6-months-only sentence [for pimping] as "debatable."
"Judiciary which considers itself an anarchy does not mean
independence, but turns into the other extreme of what it should be. If
the judiciary branch does not fulfill it's profesional and expert
obligations, all efforts by the executive and legislative parts of the
Goverment are in vain," said Mladenovska Gjorgjievska.
From the report by Nina Kepevska
http://www.a1.com.mk/vesti/vest.asp?VestID=21398
Dilaver Bojku, AKA Leku
Dilaver Bojku, AKA Leku, is still at large. The Ministry of Internal
Affairs issued a national warant for his arrest, and intensified the
police controls around Struga region, especially his village of
Veleshta, and at the border crossings.
The investigation of the escape continues. The manager of Struga prison
could not be reached for comments.
Following details about the event surfaced: Leku was accompanied by the
prisoner Veljanovski who was standing at the prison gate just prior to
the incident. The warden Gjore Pejchinovski and his assistants
accompanied the Albanian slaver [whose involvement in human trafficking
was proven in a court of law]. When one of the officers wanted to open
the van which was supposed to transport Bojku to Ohrid prison, the
mafiozo used his arms to push his gards and run to a black car parked
about 100 meters from the prison.
All this confirms the suspicions that the whole action was planned in
advance. The news of Leku's escape didn't stir the local public too
much. People of struga consider the whole thing a set-up. They are not
surprised, since during his stay in the minimum-security prison
facility in Struga, Bojku would often spend his time in the city pubs
during the day, and go to prison only to get a good night's rest.
=== 3 ===
http://www.ansa.it/balcani/
SERBIA/MONTENEGRO: POLIZIA SCOPRE 24 DONNE VITTIME DI SFRUTTATORI
(ANSA) - BELGRADO, 23 LUG - La polizia di Belgrado ha scoperto presso
alberghi serbi 24 donne provenienti da Moldavia, Romania e Ukraina
costrette alla prostituzione da una rete di sfruttatori.
Le donne si trovavano in un gruppo di 133 stranieri fermati e trovati
senza permesso di soggiorno. Molti di essi saranno espulsi.
La polizia ha anche denunciato i proprietari degli alberghi in cui le
giovani si vendevano.
Serbia e Montenegro, che costituiscono un unico stato, sono una meta
costante del traffico di esseri umani.
COR 23/07/2003 17:23
=== 4 ===
http://www.tol.cz/look/wire/
article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=10&NrIssue=733&NrSection=1&NrArti
cle=10185
posted on TOL Wire on 24 July 2003
Sex Trafficking Victims Find Refuge in Belgrade
from Politika
Editor's note: Politika was founded in 1904 and is the oldest newspaper
publisher in the Balkans, and one of the oldest in Europe.
It is just one of many statistics that make it clear why human
trafficking is not only a problem for the police and justice system.
European Union countries are paying more attention to the problem
because sex trafficking is just the tip of an ugly iceberg that
includes human trafficking and scores of mafia-linked activities such
as mass border crossings, forced labor, and begging
In particular, Serbia and Montenegro is being pressured to confront
this growing problem within its borders; the EU has done no less than
assign it the role of guarding the gates of the “European Fortress.”
Experts from the British police recently trained the country's border
police to recognize a forged passport, with special instruction on
Chinese ones, since Chinese traffickers are known as masters of
document forgery.
A year ago, only the police were grappling with these problems. No
other official body regarded trafficking as a serious issue.
At the start of 2002, the nongovernmental Council Against Family
Violence opened its shelter for female victims of human trafficking.
The shelter is in Belgrade but the address is kept secret. It is the
only organization of its kind in Belgrade and is funded by the Austrian
government.
According to the shelter's coordinator, Vesna Stanojevic, the first
women arrived on 14 February 2002. Since then, 76 women--35 Moldovan,
12 Romanian, 15 Ukrainian, three Russian, and eight from Belgrade--and
six girls under the age of 18 have passed through its doors in search
of safety. Stanojevic said the shelter was established with the goal of
helping victims restore their health and emotional well-being, learn
how not to be dragged again into the criminal underworld, and return
safely to their home country.
The women who seek help in the volunteer-run shelter receive a
complete medical workup that includes treatment by a range of
specialists, including a gynecologist and psychiatrist. Many arrive at
the shelter alcohol-dependent because their pimps forced them to drink
constantly; a few are drug addicts. The shelter provides legal
assistance and helps the victims navigate local laws on illegal
immigrants and border crossings. The shelter lawyer escorts victims to
the police station and the courts, if necessary.
The majority of the victims are married and have children, but poverty
has forced them to make the risky trip to foreign countries to work.
The victims range from underage girls to women of 40. Stanojevic said
the shelter requires women and girls who show up and ask for help to
agree to stay in Belgrade for at least 20 days, but the prospect of
staying isn't easy for those who fear they will be caught by their
"minders" or the police. Stanojevic recalled a case in Mladenovac,
where she went with three Moldovan women who were set to testify in
court against a trafficker. When they stopped to ask a police officer
for directions to the courthouse, the women recognized him as one of
the regulars at the brothel where they had been forced to work.
In sex trafficking cases, Stanojevic said, the justice system is
inefficient. Dozens of trials against traffickers have dragged on
endlessly. The women the system is meant to help are re-victimized and
traumatized, she said, compelled to testify over and over again and
relive experiences they would rather forget, first in front of the
police, then the investigator, and finally in court.
By Milos Z. Lazic. Translated by Mirna Skrbic.
=== 5 ===
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3080
AMERICAN JOURNALISM REVIEW (USA)
August 2003 issue
Letter from the Balkans: An Underreported Horror Story
Writing about the sex-slave trade is a dangerous assignment.
By Sherry Ricchiardi
Sherry Ricchiardi is an AJR senior writer.
A story smoldering in the war-bedraggled Balkans has all the earmarks
of a Pulitzer Prize. At the core is a medieval sex-slave trade
masterminded by cutthroat crime cartels. The tentacles reach into
Italy, Germany and even the United States.
Thousands of women, tortured, raped and imprisoned in seedy "night
bars," are the mainstay of the multimillion-dollar industry. Armed
thugs, bearing tattoos and buzz-cuts, are part of the decor in the
makeshift brothels.
The script of "white slavery," as it commonly is known in this region,
resembles a hard-core porn flick. Traumatized victims describe being
locked in cages, chained to beds, starved, burned with cigarettes,
punched and gang raped until they are broken and forced to perform
sex-on-demand.
Some women tell of being hawked at auctions outside of Belgrade,
ordered to dance naked for prospective buyers who pay thousands of
Euros for lithe, full-bosomed blondes. Most are lured from dirt-poor
countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Romania by the promise of jobs as
waitresses, au pairs or dancers. The human slave trade operating here
has been
compared to African slave auctions in 18th-century Europe.
Once they are sold, owners make it clear that if they attempt to
escape, family members might take a bullet in the head or a younger
sister might be kidnapped and sold.
"It is one of the great underreported stories of our time," says
DrewSullivan, an American journalist working in southeastern Europe.
It's also one of the riskiest.
So far, there is no evidence of reporters being killed for delving into
the sex-slave industry. That's because none has penetrated its inner
workings, explained Sullivan over lunch in Sarajevo. "The closer you
get to the heart of trafficking, the closer you get to the Serbian,
Albanian and Russian Mafia. It is well known they will kill anybody to
protect their business," says Sullivan, who has interviewed more than a
dozen
survivors.
The issue of forced prostitution has been largely ignored or glossed
over by the local and international press corps. In Montenegro, a
country in the thick of the trafficking, the government line has been
"there is no problem here." In fact, up to 200,000 women are bartered
in the Balkan region every year, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration. A 2002 United Nations report calls trafficking the
fastest-growing transnational organized criminal activity and a major
violation of human rights.
Most stories on the topic have focused on victims who have escaped or
have been rescued, on police raids and on minor players in the trade.
Few reporters have dug deeper.
A highly detailed story by Sebastian Junger appeared in the July 2002
issue of Vanity Fair. The author traced the path of one Moldovan woman
and delved into the corruption, local laws and victims' fear of
testifying that hinder prosecutors.
Around the same period, Preston Mendenhall, MSNBC. com's international
editor, aired a series on sex slaves in Europe, including accounts from
women who had been rescued and were in hiding. One of them displayed an
infected wound on her breast and described how a client had bitten her.
A Lexis-Nexis search found few significant stories under the label of
human or sexual trafficking in southeast Europe or the Balkans over the
past two years.
A handful of regional journalists have worked the story despite living
alongside the killers. In 1998, reporter Dzenana Karup Drusko set out
to document that crime cartels were trafficking in women in Bosnia. At
the time, the government and the public were in denial. "You can't
report on [criminals] unless you get into their minds," she said during
an interview in a café across from her newsroom. "If you show fear, it
doesn't work."
Across the border in Croatia, veteran investigative journalist Sasa
Lekovic poses a series of ethical questions to guide his reporting on
trafficking. "Is it ever OK to buy a woman to get her story or to pay
for her time?" asks Lekovic, who once tracked a 17-year-old to Italy
and helped bring her home. "Should a journalist ever try to rescue a
victim? How far should we go to protect their identity if they
interview with us?"
Human Rights Watch has said members of the international community,
including United Nations peacekeepers and NATO officials, were regular
clients of the night bars.
In May 2000, an investigation by the U.S. Army concluded that up to
five U.S. government workers were involved in "white slavery." Sources
stated that they purchased women from local Mafia to live in their
homes for "sexual and domestic" purposes.
When women are freed, there is little chance they will testify against
their tormentors. To date, no viable witness protection exists.
Operating behind the scenes are such organizations as the International
Center for Journalists and the International Research and Exchange
Board, who send media trainers--myself and Drew Sullivan among them--to
help local journalists create strategies for covering trafficking.
The U.S. State Department, which sponsors some of the training, has
taken a leading role in helping to create a legal framework to further
prosecution of traffickers in the Balkans. Still, local watchdogs
operate on their own in tightly knit communities.
In June, I traveled to a Bosnian town to join a reporter who was
following a hot tip. A notorious crime boss, sentenced to prison
earlier this year, had been spotted freely walking the streets on
certain days of the week. The night bar he ran continued to thrive.
"Will you be able to write the story?" I asked.
A finger across the throat was the reply. "Not if I want to live," the
reporter said.
=== 6 ===
IWPR'S BALKAN CRISIS REPORT,
No. 460, September 15, 2003
TRADING IN MISERY
Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are falling victim to the
Balkan sex trade.
By IWPR's Balkan reporting team
Marcu scratches his unshaven face and stares intently out of the window
at the queue of battered tankers, trucks and cars beyond.
He's nervous, tired and desperate. Sitting in a small café on the
Greek-Bulgarian border, he hesitates over his coffee before asking us a
favour, a big favour.
"Look, I know you're Romanians. May I ask you to take these two girls
in your car and drive them over to Greece?" he said, pointing to a car
outside where a couple of young girls are sitting in the back seat.
He's figured out where we're from by the plates on our vehicle.
"They're from Brasov [a town in central Romania] and need to get to
Thessaloniki [northern Greece]. I'll pay you good money. Their papers
are OK," he added enthusiastically.
Marcu tells us he is trying to make a living by trafficking the two
girls. "I'll find them good positions in a club in Thessaloniki. I have
an address and I'll get good money from this. You know how hard it is
to make a living nowadays. The girls are poor too, they're sisters and
their parents are drunkards," he said.
"Greece is a much better future for them. I arrived here with them by
bus but now I'm afraid to cross the border together with them because I
heard the Greek custom officers are very suspicious and can stop us
from entering."
Leaning over the table, Marcu began to look worried, "Please help me,
take the two girls in your car and then we'll meet on the other side
and you'll get some easy money."
"Why don't you just take a cab across?" we asked.
"No, I don't want to hire a cab because these guys are crooks, they can
rob me," he snapped back.
Marcu was getting edgy and wanted us to do a deal to take the girls
across and quickly. Leaving the coffee shop, he followed, shuffling
along to our car. We were about to talk to him further when, nervously
examining our distinctive Romanian Dacia, he noticed we had made a
mistake. On the back seat were our cameras and equipment: our cover was
well and truly blown.
He didn't look back as he sprinted away down the road, getting into his
car and disappearing round a bend into Bulgaria. He will no doubt be
back to try another day.
Marcu is one of the hundreds of traffickers working across this and
many other borders in the Balkans, smuggling not guns, drugs or stolen
cars but women.
HOW THE TRADE WORKS.
In November 2002, an the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, OSCE, conference on the trafficking of human beings estimated
that some 200,000 women in the Balkans had fallen victim to a smuggling
network that extends across the region into the European Union.
According to the latest figures from International Organisation for
Migration, IOM, the four biggest exporters of girls to Western Europe
are Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Russia.
Romania is the nexus of the trade for two reasons: its geographic
location makes it a good transit country and the presence of large
numbers of impoverished women desperate to make money provide a ready
source of trafficking victims.
Two main smuggling routes begin here: one going north into Hungary,
southwest through the former Yugoslavia to Albania and then across the
Adriatic by speedboat to Italy; the other runs directly south, through
Bulgaria to Greece.
With the first route, girls are taken to Romanian cities such as
Bucharest and Timisoara, near the Serbian border. Many are then sold to
Serbian gangs who move them south, putting them to work as prostitutes
in Belgrade or selling them to criminal groups in Bosnia, Kosovo or
Montenegro. Some will be smuggled into Albania, and then on to Italy
and other European countries.
The second route runs from Romania directly south through Bulgaria to
Greece. In Bulgaria, some of the girls are sold to gangs who smuggle
them into Macedonia, then Albania and on to Italy.
The trade is a coalition of interests that crosses ethnic divides.
Well-organised groups, familiar to each other from drugs or gun deals,
trade across frontiers, as do lone traffickers.
War has made the Balkans a traffickers dream. Their illicit trade has
been able to flourish as a result of the chaos of the last decade,
which has weakened border controls and fractured and impoverished
communities that were once held together by rigid moral codes.
Throughout the Balkans, checkpoints are badly policed by often corrupt
officials, well used to taking bribes as guns and drugs moved through
the region during the wars. Forged or stolen passports are easily
available and visa regulations are flouted.
The wars have has also created a market for girls inside the Balkans.
The influx of cash from the international community policing the peace
in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia has swelled the trade in prostitution.
One United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, source told IWPR in August
that the market is now so developed that many of the girls smuggled
into the protectorate now willingly work as prostitutes. Their profits
are good, their pimps are treating them decently and, they say, it's "
better than returning to Moldova", the source said.
Of the 826 girls helped by IOM's projects in the region from May 2001
to December 2002, 590 - 77 per cent - were reportedly destined for
either Kosovo, Bosnia or Montenegro.
There are several methods of recruiting girls. One is through newspaper
advertisements promising menial jobs such as waitressing in Western
Europe. Others are attracted by promises of marriage to EU nationals.
After luring the girls, the traffickers seize their passports, then
take them to major regional sex trade centres, where they are forced to
work as prostitutes.
Some escape from their captors. We met several girls who had managed to
flee. But a number of those who do are often recaptured by the
traffickers or are hounded by them when they seek refuge in womens'
shelters.
In a major investigation, involving IWPR reporters in eight Balkan
countries, we set out to explore this massive trade in people across
the region. Our teams followed the trafficking routes, going from
Romania, south into Bulgaria and Greece, across to Albania and then
north through former Yugoslavia.
We visited clubs, bars, hotels and brothels, speaking with the
traffickers, the pimps, the authorities and the girls themselves, to
build up a picture of how this cross-border network of criminal gangs
smuggling women operates.
TRAFFICKING FOR THE OLYMPICS
At the Kulata border crossing between Greece and Bulgaria, dozens of
taxis line up on the Bulgarian side of the frontier. According to a
Bulgarian police source, some of the vehicles are waiting to ferry
Greek traffickers to two local towns, Sandanski and Petrich, which have
become regional sex trade centres - market places for girls from all
over the Balkans and the former Soviet Union who are bought and sold
with impunity. Some are destined to be smuggled to Italy and other EU
countries, but the majority are purchased by nightclub owners from
northern Greece.
In a bitter twist of irony, Sandanski is also well known for being the
birthplace of the world's most renowned slave, Spartacus. But today's
young slaves are not likely to rebel against their captors. They're too
weak, too far away from home and become involved in a highly organised
criminal trade that leaves them little opportunity to escape.
Greek police sources have told IWPR that the transfer of the women from
Bulgaria to Greece is well established, controlled by a tight-knit
group of criminals. The officers say that a man well known to them in
Sandanski controls the whole enterprise - including the taxi firms used
by traffickers to smuggle girls over the border - and is either
tolerated or actively protected by Bulgarian law enforcers.
In April, our team of journalists, posing as potential clients,
questioned taxi drivers in both Sandanski and Petrich about buying
women in the area. Initially reticent, the drivers soon began talking,
saying they could put us in touch with people who could "solve our
problem".
The prices charged for the girls depend on their age and experience. On
average, they are sold for between 2,500 and 3,000 euro. "If the girl
is fresh, very young and not used, the price is higher," one trafficker
told us.
The cost and number of women being smuggled into Greece is expected to
rise during next year's Olympics in Athens, with traffickers apparently
calculating that the prostitution business will be brisk.
The traffickers are highly organised. They go to great lengths to check
out the identity of clients in order to avoid police traps; possess
high-tech instruments such as communication encryption software that
prevents police tracking their mobile phones; and even run illegal TV
stations broadcasting porn and advertising brothels.
THE ALBANIAN MAFIA
On the outskirts of a desperately poor Albanian village, where donkeys
stacked high with fire wood crawled along potholed streets, we
witnessed the bizarre sight of gleaming Audis, Mercedes and even the
odd Lamborghini cruising past.
In this impoverished country, this sort of conspicuous wealth is
associated with organised crime, which has filled the vacuum left by
the communists and spread its tentacles throughout Europe. In June, the
World Markets Research Centre said in a report that Albanian mafia
groups have established a reputation in continental Europe as being
amongst the most efficient drugs pushers and people smugglers on the
continent.
Over the past five years, successive Albanian interior ministers, and
two chief prosecutors, have admitted that Albania is a transit country
for prostitutes on their way to Western Europe and that significant
numbers of Albanian girls were being coerced into the trade.
In this strongly conservative society, prostitution is beyond the pale,
but trafficking girls across to Italy and other EU countries is not.
The IOM's 2001 Victims of Trafficking in the Balkans report notes that
the smuggling of girls through Albania "is primarily orientated" to the
EU through its Adriatic ports of Vlore and Durres.
Once in Italy, the girls continue to run considerable risks. The
Italian ministry of interior reported in 2001 that 168 foreign
prostitutes had been murdered, mainly by their pimps. The majority of
the former were either Albanian or Nigerian.
The trafficking of Albanian girls into Italy has become so bad that it
prompted a change in Italian legislation in 1998. Article 18 of the
Aliens Law provided for a care programme - run by over 200 NGOs with
the Italian ministry for equal opportunities - for those brought into
the country for sexual exploitation. Figures from the programme from
March to December 2000 show that 20 per cent of the girls that were
helped came from Albania.
In the central Albanian town of Fier, three little metal huts with a
few ancient bunk beds and some desks provide shelter for girls that
have managed to escape the clutches of the traffickers.
The facility was established by Colonel Xhavit Shala, a former senior
police official and presently serving in the statistics and analysis
office in the interior ministry. He raised 18,000 US dollars from local
businesses to fund the project when the government refused to help.
Shala has held talks with local leaders, teachers, business people and
residents to explain how the trafficking trade is wrecking village life
in the country.
Speaking to IWPR, he was adamant that if trafficking through and from
Albania is to be tackled and locally trafficked girls are to be
reintegrated back into society then it will require a massive change of
heart, particularly from the girls' families.
"Albanians need to learn to treat these women as victims and not
prostitutes. We tell families that it is not only their daughters'
responsibility for falling into prostitution but their own," he said.
"Statistic's show that their daughters were deceived into becoming
prostitutes. We ask them why their families permitted them to be
deceived."
Such is the fear of falling victim to trafficking that many girls are
refusing to go to school. Save the Children reported in 2001 that "in
remote areas, where pupils may have to walk for over an hour to get to
school, research has discovered that as many as 90 per cent of girls no
longer receive a high school education". One of the main factors was
parents' concern that their children would be abducted on the way to
class.
People smuggling has become so endemic in Albania that even the police
are implicated. During the first five months of 2002, 102 officers were
identified as being involved in the trade following a major police
crackdown that was prompted by international pressure to stem the tide
of girls reaching Europe. Sixteen of the suspects have been jailed, 12
transferred to other jobs and 15 given minor punishments, according to
the Albanian interior ministry.
The extent of human trafficking from Albania is revealed in a secret
internal government report seen by IWPR. According to the document,
more than 100,000 Albanians were smuggled out of the country between
1993-2001. How many have ended up as prostitutes across Europe is hard
to establish. But evidence from the streets tells its own story.
According to IOM's 2001 survey, the majority of prostitutes in London's
Soho area are either from Albania or Kosovo.
MACEDONIA'S POROUS BORDERS
We made our way north through Macedonia to Kumanovo along the
picturesque roads that climb high into Sharplanina mountains. Amid the
town's busy streets, we came across a jeweller whose trade seemed to be
thriving. "So many women pass through Kumanovo, so my business is
safe," said the owner of the shop in the centre of town. "I sell so
many rings for women from Ukraine, Romania and Albania. Sometimes I
sell the jewelry to the man who is in charge of them. He needs to have
beautiful women so that he can do his business."
If Romania is often the beginning of the trafficking journey and
Albania the end, one country, Macedonia, plays the role of a key mid
point. It has more shared borders than any other former Yugoslav
republic and its mountainous, poorly patrolled borders are ideal for
traffickers. According to Kosovan law enforcement sources, the
country's frontier with the protectorate is probably the most porous in
Europe.
Sitting on a plastic chair in the baggy sports clothes provided by the
centre that rescued her, Julijana Sherban talks to the floor, red
rimmed eyes peering out from behind her long, dark hair.
The 21-year-old Romanian girl doesn't want to say much. After what
she's been through, it's no surprise. But Julijana is lucky, she is one
of the few in Macedonia to have escaped the clutches of her pimp and
testified against him in court, having been placed on a witness
protection programme. Surrounded by other girls in the shelter in
Skopje, she begins to tell her story.
Her case reveals the enormous trade in women that runs through the town
of Tetevo and Valesta and Struga further south.
Her pimp, Dilaver Bojku Leku, was convicted of soliciting in a court in
Struga in March and received a six-month jail sentence. Leku is thought
to have controlled the biggest prostitution ring in Macedonia, running
10 bars in the region, recruiting Moldovan, Romanian and Ukrainian
girls who had been sold on by several gangs on the route from Romania
through Serbia.
"I was told that I would work in Greece, but I didn't expect they would
sell me. I was sold in Serbia a dozen times. I arrived in Macedonia in
2001, in Velesta, where I stayed for five months working in Leku's bar,
Expresso," Julijana told IWPR.
In a public relations disaster for the Macedonian government, Leku
escaped on June 20 and fled to Montenegro where he was eventually
caught and extradited on July 4. He is currently awaiting a retrial
along with four others.
The case has attracted the attention of the international community
eager to see the south Balkans crack down on organised crime and stop
the flow of girls into the EU. Lawrence Butler, the US ambassador to
Macedonia, expressed serious misgivings about the country's sentencing
in prostitution cases earlier on this year. "The failure to [impose
long jail terms] opens new questions such as: are you afraid? Are you
corrupt or incompetent?" he said at the annual launch of the State
Department's report on human trafficking.
SERVICING THE INTERNATIONALS
One by one, the three girls start clapping their hands, begging for
applause and money after stripping naked in front of us. Welcome to The
Dancer - a dingy, basement strip joint in downtown Pristina.
In the corner, a short, skinny woman bellows hoarsely at them to make
more of an effort to attract our attention.
The night has just begun and we're the only clients in the bar. After a
while the fearsome looking madam comes to our table and asks us if we
are enjoying the striptease. Noticing our disapproving looks, she tells
us that she knows we're not here for the dance but for what she called
"some fun with the girls".
"It's 50 euro for one hour. It's safe. Nobody will enter the bar
unannounced. The local police won't make any problems," added the woman
who introduces herself as Iana.
Security is clearly an issue at The Dancer. The underground bar is like
a small fortress - no windows and reinforced doors. Near the entrance,
hidden behind some breeze blocks, sits a young boy who sells chewing
gum and vets customers as they come in.
"Didn't you like the girls? Maybe this time they're not that good," he
said as we left the club." Frankly, I don't like them very much,
either. Will you come here some other time? We will have fresh girls
soon. They're on their way from Ukraine."
There are numerous such brothels and strip joints in Kosovo. The region
is one of the main destinations for the traffickers. But the girls
aren't looking to entice locals - they're here for the "internationals".
The Kosovan economy is largely dependent on the presence of
international officials and troops in the protectorate. In towns like
Pristina and Prizren, western-style shops, restaurants and pubs have
sprung up all over town to cater for the tastes and pockets of the
thousands of well-paid foreigners.
Many ordinary Kosovans have been sucked into the local prostitution
racket, which the traffickers view as one of the most profitable in
Europe.
"The majority of people here earn their money from trafficking in drugs
or women. They know the routes very well, they know the mined zones and
they go through areas where KFOR never goes," a senior officer in the
Kosovo Protection Force, KFOR, told IWPR.
"KFOR is not intervening because they don't want to risk a conflict and
they're not interested. Not long ago a rocket was launched against a UN
checkpoint. The KFOR guys are not from this area so they don't really
care about what's going on."
POLICE SHORTCOMINGS AND CORRUPTION
The KFOR source said the local Kosovan police are incapable of dealing
with the problem, claiming that some officers are running human
trafficking operations.
" I don't know if we can call them police. The locals become officers
after attending a three-month course in law enforcement. Afterwards,
they're only interested in boosting their salaries and showing off the
uniforms, guns and cars that the international community provided
them," he said.
Elsewhere in the Balkans, the policing problem is just as acute as in
Kosovo. In Bosnia, efforts to curb organised crime gangs and
traffickers have been undermined by premature changes to the
international policing effort in the country, critics of the
authorities believe.
In January this year, the UN's International Police Task force, IPTF,
was replaced by an EU-led police mission, EUPM.
One thousand six hundred IPTF police were posted in some 200 locations
throughout the country to train, equip and monitor local officers.
Latest figures from August 2003 show that EUPM's presence is less
conspicuous, with only 480 members currently deployed around the
country.
Before the scale down in January, the IPTF coordinator for the Special
Trafficking Operations programme, John O'Reilly warned that trafficking
gangs were stepping up their activities, "The criminals are already
bringing in new girls. Of all the bars we closed, there's a number of
them actually being renovated."
Speaking with IWPR, O'Reilly was doubtful whether the EU force would be
up to the job of handling the scale of the human trafficking problem.
"In my humble opinion it won't work. You've got the will but there is a
lot of corruption and a lot of people in important places don't want
this to work," he said.
The situation is similar in neighbouring Montenegro where a recent
human trafficking scandal involving a leading official has seriously
embarrassed the government.
In July, an OSCE commission was invited to investigate the alleged
involvement of the Montenegrin deputy state prosecutor Zoran Piperovic
and three other officials in people smuggling.
Piperovic was arrested along with three others in November last year on
suspicion of involvement in human trafficking following revelations by
a Moldovan woman who escaped from a Montenegrin trafficking gang to a
refuge. She claimed that Piperovic had been involved in her
incarceration, during which time she was drugged and raped.
Piperovic and the three other men deny the charges.
Controversially, the Montenegrin senior state prosecutor, Zoran
Radonjic, ruled in May that there were insufficient grounds for a
prosecution, sparking a major public outcry that prompted the
authorities to invited the OSCE to pass judgment on the case.
OSCE mission chief to Serbia and Montenegro Maurizio Massari said in
July that the Piperovic case "raised the issue of the ability of the
Montenegrin legal system to cope with the complexity of cases related
to human trafficking".
INTO THE MINEFILEDS
Leaving Pristina, we traveled first to Prizren in southern Kosovo and
then on to Qafa i Prushit on the Kosovo-Albanian border. According to
out KFOR source, Qafa i Prushit is a people- and drugs-trafficking hot
spot. The route to the border point goes through villages where the
signs of the last war, the continuing tensions and new wealth are all
too apparent.
Close to the border, in front of the newly built two-storey houses, sit
freshly polished Mercedes. Almost all bear Swiss plates. "Lots of the
cars belong to the Kosovars. Many of them moved to Switzerland during
the conflict and now they come back here to do their business, mainly
in the field of organised crime," our KFOR source told us.
A few kilometres away from Qafa i Prushit lie the minefields. A dusty
road cuts through the deadly terrain. On either side, yellow triangles
with the inscription "minas, minas" and giant concrete structures,
called "dragons teeth", which were put up by the Serb forces to stop
the movement of NATO tanks.
Qafa i Prushit's UN checkpoint, guarded by only a few officers, is
perched up on hills dominating the area. The post's surveillance
activities are assisted by UN mobile patrols that put up roadblocks and
search suspect cars in the valley below. Girls here are being moved in
both directions. According to the IOM, the majority are going to
Albania and then on to Italy, but others are moving into Kosovo and the
buoyant Pristina market place.
Despite the UN efforts at Qafa i Prushit, the trafficking continues to
grow partly because the international and local police will not risk
their lives by leaving the safety of the road to go into the minefields.
To the northeast lies another unguarded border that is regularly used
by traffickers between Kosovo and Montenegro. The crossing point goes
through mountains that soar as high as 2,600 metres. As in other parts
of the Balkans, this geography helps those trafficking people and makes
tracking them extremely difficult.
And the multinational nature of the traffic also makes the task of
stopping the flood of people particularly hard.
"There is no linguistic, religious or any other problem among the
criminals," Jacques Klein, the outgoing head of the UN Mission in
Bosnia told IWPR shortly before he stepped down in December 2002. "They
have no dilemma dealing with each other - it's a very sophisticated
crime structure."
By working together, Balkan criminals of different ethnicity create a
secure trafficking network through which profits and girls can be
controlled. But some do manage to escape.
GIRLS FLEE CAPTORS
Not all the girls we met on our travels were controlled by pimps. In
Bucharest, we came across several who were working alone, having fled
their captors. And in Belgrade, we met with girls who continued to work
in the city, after escaping from Serbian traffickers.
Vera is one such girl. Her modest downtown flat is basic, but clean. On
the bed lies a packet of condoms, in the corner a closet. Nothing else.
She has no pimp, no ties. The 22-year-old takes great pride in telling
us how she, and her housemate, got here.
"In March, I finally managed to run from the traffickers who held me in
a house in Novi Sad [a town north of Belgrade] after they had
disappeared with our passports," she said. " I now have my own
business. I place my adds in the newspapers and I publish my mobile
phone number. We are working for ourselves."
Their relief was palpable, but they remain extremely wary.
Neither would say where they had come from or where the traffickers
were taking them.
"The traffickers sold us, abused us and kept us locked up. Now we only
have to take care who our clients are," continued Vera. " We tell them
it is the wrong number if they ask us in Serbian. We have only foreign
clients. Of course, the money would be better if we'd take Serbians too
but we are afraid they might be traffickers that try to take us back."
Recent clamp downs on organised crime following the murder of prime
minister Zoran Djindic in March is likely to have had some effect on
the gang operations in Serbia.
One result of police action against prostitution has been to spread the
problem beyond central Belgrade. The 2002 OSCE report on human
trafficking in the region noted that "due to control and raids by the
police, the number of bars has decreased and part of the trafficking
business has moved from the centre into the suburbs and less obvious
locations".
In much of the Balkans, substantial amounts of international funds have
been directed at curbing trafficking, but Serbia has not fared as well
in this regard.
Nonetheless, NGO pressure here has kept the issue of trafficking on the
political agenda. In July 2001, the interior ministry allocated space
for a shelter for trafficked women and legislative changes increased
penalties for traffickers.
A REGIONAL ANTI-TRAFFICKING STRATEGY
From Serbia, we traveled back to where we began, Romania. There we paid
a visit to Iana Matei, the director of the Reaching Out project, which
provides a refuge for girls who've managed to escape the clutches of
the traffickers. So far, Matei and his colleagues have managed to
build a few apartments for the girls in the town of Pitesti - 100 km
north of Bucharest - home to the massive, belching Dacia car plant.
In this unappealing town many of the girls have found some respite. But
the exact location of the shelter has to be kept secret for fear that
traffickers will hunt the girls down.
It's here that we met up again with Diana. Back in January, IWPR
reported on an undercover investigation into Romanian smugglers, in
which our reporters bought her from a Bucharest pimp for 400 US
dollars. Just like Marcu, we could have taken Diana down to the
prostitution centres in the Balkans or sold her on to Serbian gangs in
Timisoara.
Then, she was cold, terrified, almost naked and starving. She had spent
the previous New Years Eve in Bucharest, chained to a dog cage.
But now, with the shelter's help, she is making progress back to a
relatively normal life. She is sharing a flat with some other girls,
learning how to look after herself and how to live without fear.
It will be a long road for Diana. The mental scars of years of physical
and sexual abuse by pimps and clients have taken their toll.
Analysts agree that human trafficking through the Balkans is a major
international problem that will require a coordinated response from
regional and Western European governments and their respective law
enforcement agencies.
To this end, the EU set up a group of 20 independent experts in March
to recommend further actions on coordinating the fight against
trafficking. The panel is just one of several moves coming from last
year's EU conference on combating the crime.
The conference recommended further coordination between EU member
states on legislation and policing, urging greater harmonisation of
national laws, so that traffickers face the same penalties in whichever
member state they are caught. Brussels has made funding available under
the AGIS programme for police and judicial cooperation across the EU to
tackle the problem.
Julie Bindel, a member of the EU panel and a researcher with the child
and women abuse unit at the University of North London, says that
although Brussels is looking hard into the issue, progress is slow, and
concentrating on tightening and coordinating EU law on the issue is not
enough.
"The problem starts mainly in the Balkans and the EU needs to be doing
more in the region. What legislative and funding changes there have
been are pretty piecemeal, and are only aimed at tackling things at one
end of the chain," she said.
"For example, the UK foreign office has provided some funds to compile
a database of all NGOs working on the human trafficking issue, and
money has been made available to tackle child prostitution but its
still the case that there are less than 20 officers based at Charing
Cross police station who deal specifically with human trafficking and
this is for the whole of London."
As Balkans countries begin to eye up EU accession, many will have to do
more to tackle the traffickers if they are to stand a chance of ever
gaining entry. The Treaty of the European Union explicitly refers to
trafficking of human beings and demands that members comply with
overall standards of policing and legislation on the issue. Right now,
few Balkan countries are even close to this.
But there are signs that a regional approach to the problem is
beginning to take shape.
In September 2002, the Romanian based Southeast European Cooperative
Initiative Centre for Combating Trans-Border Crime, SECI, launched the
first regional anti-human trafficking operation. Code-named MIRAGE, the
initiative brought together police forces from ten countries including
Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece and the
UN Mission in Kosovo.
By January 2003, SECI concluded in its report on the operation that 237
victims of trafficking and 293 traffickers had been arrested after over
20,000 raids on nightclubs, discos, restaurants and border crossing
points in the Balkans.
But while MIRAGE was a relative success, it did expose corrupt
practices among many Balkans police forces that go someway to
underpinning the trade. Indeed, numerous investigations during MIRAGE
pointed to policemen being involved in trafficking. It's a sobering
assessment - and one that underlines the difficulties governments face
in tackling this terrible scourge.
This report was coordinated by Paul Radu in Romania and compiled by
David Quin, IWPR's assistant investigations editor in London. The
following contributed to the research: Stefan Candea and Sorin Ozon in
Romania, Julie Harbin and Nidzara Ahmetasevic in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Gazmend Kapllani in Greece, Milorad Ivanovic in Serbia, Kaca Krsmanovic
and Boris Darmanovic in Montenegro, Zylyftar Bregu in Albania, Zoran
Jachev and Zaklina Gjorgjevic in Macedonia.
***
Balkan Crisis Report is supported by the Department for International
Development, the European Commission, the Swedish International
Development and Cooperation Agency, The Netherlands Ministry for
Foreign Affairs, and other funders. IWPR also acknowledges general
support from the Ford Foundation.
For further details on this project, other information services and
media programmes, visit IWPR's website: www.iwpr.net