Title: Message
NATO tied to Kosovo sex
trade
Amnesty also points finger
at U.N. peacekeepers
Exploit women and girls as young as 11, report
says
SANDRO
CONTENTA
EUROPEAN
BUREAULONDON—International workers and peacekeepers in Kosovo are responsible
for a growing trade in sex slaves that exploits girls as young as 11, a leading
human rights group says.
In a report released yesterday, Amnesty International accuses United
Nations personnel and NATO-led soldiers in the Serbian province of using the
trafficked women and girls for sex.
The report estimates that international military and civilian
peacekeepers — 2 per cent of Kosovo's population — make up 20 per cent of the
clients of women and girls trafficked to the province.
"Women and girls as young as 11 are being sold into sexual slavery in
Kosovo and international peacekeepers are not only failing to stop it, they are
actively fuelling this despicable trade by themselves paying for sex from
trafficked women," said Kate Allen, Amnesty International's director in Britain.
The number of places in Kosovo where trafficked women are believed to be
working as sex slaves, such as nightclubs, rose from 18 in 1999 to more than 200
in 2003, the report says. U.N. police have made those places "off limits" to
personnel from KFOR, the NATO-led international military force in Kosovo. The
report, based partly on interviews with trafficked women, quotes one woman
saying: "I was forced by the boss to serve international soldiers and police
officers."
And it quotes another young woman describing what her "owner" did to her
when she tried to resist being a prostitute: "He was pointing the gun to my
head, and he was saying, `If you don't do this in the next minute, you will be
dead.'"
KFOR spokesman Lt.-Col. Jim Moran said that in the three months he's been
on the job, he's never heard of soldiers using prostitutes.
"I haven't seen any of it, I haven't heard any of it," Moran told the
BBC. "We have a no walk-out policy, which means no soldier will leave the
(military) installation in civilian clothes. They're not allowed to go out at
night at the bars, and such things."
U.N. police in Kosovo also have a unit dedicated to the crackdown on
traffickers, 58 of whom have been convicted between 2001 and 2003.
Most of the women smuggled to Kosovo are from Moldova, Bulgaria and
Ukraine, says the Amnesty report, titled, "So does that mean I have rights?
Protecting the human rights of women and girls trafficked for forced
prostitution in Kosovo."
`I was forced by the boss to
serve international soldiers and police officers'
Woman trafficked for sex
|
Some are abducted and brought to Kosovo,
but most leave poverty-stricken homes after being tricked into believing they're
going to legitimate jobs in Western Europe.
They're often taken to "trading houses," where they're drugged and
"broken in" before being sold from one trafficker to another for prices ranging
from 50 to 3,500 euros ($84 to $5,860).
"When they reach Kosovo, they are beaten and they are raped," the report
says. "Many are virtually imprisoned, locked into an apartment or room or a
cellar. Some become slaves, working in bars and cafes during the day and locked
into a room servicing 10 to 15 clients a night by the man they refer to as their
`owner.'
"Some find their wages — the reason they were willing to leave their
homes — are never paid, but are withheld to pay off their `debt,' pay off
arbitrary fines, or to pay for their food and accommodation.
"If they are sick, they may be denied access to health care," the report
says.
The report doesn't estimate the size of the sex-slave industry in Kosovo.
It notes that in 2003, more than 400 trafficked women were helped by the
International Organization for Migration to return home from Kosovo. Between
2000 and 2003, another international agency helped more than 200 internally
trafficked women and girls involved in the sex trade — a third of them between
the ages of 11 and 14, the report says.
The sex-trade in Kosovo rose sharply after 1999, when the U.N. took over
administrative control of the Serbian province and some 40,000 international
KFOR soldiers arrived to keep the peace, Amnesty says.
Within a year, international employees made up 80 per cent of the clients
of trafficked women and girls.
From January 2002 to July the following year, between 22 and 27 KFOR
troops "were suspected of offences related to trafficking," according to a
special U.N. police unit set up to deal with the problem.
The report says the police couldn't say whether any of the individuals
were disciplined.
Amnesty officials say Russian, British and French soldiers were among
those involved in the use of trafficked women.
But the organization says it could find no evidence of a criminal
proceeding in any of the 37 KFOR-member countries for trafficking in sex slaves
or for using trafficked women in Kosovo.