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Mariana and the scars that won't heal: Poverty has turned a once-thriving
Soviet state into a leading source of prostitutes. Stefan Wagstyl reports
on the growing traffic in young women
Financial Times; Jan 12,
2002
By STEFAN WAGSTYL
Mariana will always carry a reminder of the terrible months she endured
as a sex slave - the deep blue lines on her pale forearms, where an
unknown man sliced her repeatedly with a butcher's knife.
"It is impossible to forget the pain. Even now that I am safe, it is
very hard to sleep at night," says the 24-year-old woman, sitting in a
run-down cafe in the suburbs of Chisinau, capital of Moldova. As she speaks, her hands tremble and her eyes
dart about nervously as if she is on the lookout for danger. The
psychological damage is as palpable as her scars.
Mariana is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of young Moldovan women
who are taken abroad each year, mainly to the former Yugoslavia, and put
to work as prostitutes. She is one of a few who have managed to escape
from the Balkans and return to their native land.
While poverty can drive women into prostitution the world over,
Moldovans are especially vulnerable. Wedged between the Ukraine and
Romania, theirs is the poorest country in Europe.
It was split in the early 1990s by a civil war that has left it divided
between an official government in Chisinau in the west, and an unofficial
administration in Tiraspol in the east. Corruption and organised crime are
rampant. As well as young women, almost anything is for sale - guns,
drugs, contract killings and even body parts.
When Mariana was growing up in Soviet times in a farming village in
southern Moldova, nobody predicted this nightmare.
With its fertile land, Moldova was famed in the
Soviet bloc for its food and its wine. KGB officers retired to Moldova because life was so good. They and their wives
liked to stroll around the elegant parks of central Chisinau, the greenest
city in eastern Europe, according to its residents.
The fragmentation of the Soviet Union has since destroyed Moldova's stability, plunging people into deep poverty.
Factories have closed. Farms and vineyards have been abandoned. At least
600,000 of Moldova's 4m population have gone abroad
to work. In some districts as much as half the working-age population has
moved away.
Mariana herself moved from her home village to Chisinau in the
mid-1990s in search of work, which she eventually found in a textiles
factory. She met a man, they married, and she became pregnant.
When her son was born, she was put on extended maternity leave, with
payments of less than Dollars 30 a month. She barely had enough money to
survive; her husband gave her nothing and then left her.
Desperate for money at the end of 2000, she answered a job
advertisement in Makler, a newspaper. The advertisement promised, she
says, good pay for work abroad. She telephoned the number in the
advertisement, spoke to a woman, and arranged to meet.
"I'll never forget her. She had a scar across her face, like she had
been cut with a knife. It should have been a warning to me. But I didn't
guess what was happening," says Mariana.
The scar-faced woman promised her Dollars 300 a month for dancing in
bars in Yugoslavia. "I said I couldn't dance. The woman said that didn't
matter, I could learn."
Mariana did not think twice. She left her child with her parents and a
few days later joined three other young women in a car travelling from
Chisinau to the Romanian border. There she expected to a meet a Yugoslav,
but instead was greeted by a surly Romanian. Mariana began to feel worried
as they sped hundreds of kilometres by car, stopping only to fill up with
fuel.
Finally, they halted in Turnu Severin, a handsome, if dilapidated, town
on the Danube. Across the other side of the river lay Serbia. "Here, I
finally guessed what was happening to me. I told the man I wanted to go
back to Moldova. He said 'I've paid for you and I'm
not releasing you'," says Mariana.
The journey's physical hardships were compounded by fear. The women
were taken across Serbia, Montenegro, and United Nations-administered
Kosovo to the Macedonian border where they were made to walk eight hours
along mountain trails to avoid the guards.
About 10 days after leaving Chisinau, the women were installed in a
flat in the Macedonian capital of Skopje and put to work by their pimps.
Mariana was never entirely sure who these men were. Sometimes they were
ordered around by ethnic Macedonians, sometimes by ethnic Albanians. But
when Macedonian was spoken, she could understand it, as it is similar to
Russian, which was taught throughout Moldova in
Soviet times.
Occasionally, men who seemed like police would call at the flat,
sometimes to talk with the pimps, sometimes for sex. Once the police
raided the flat when she was out buying food. She says she was rushed away
by her pimps and hidden in a cellar for two weeks.
Mariana says that at this time she refused sex work. Instead, she
cooked and cleaned for the other women. But in early January she was sold
to an ethnic Albanian gang in Tetovo, the western Macedonian city
dominated by ethnic Albanians.
She was housed with other women in a dingy flat above a bar on the
outskirts of the city.
Here, she finally stopped resisting and agreed to service clients
herself. "It was terrible. I felt disgusted," she says.
But there was no going back. She was scared of the pimps and scared of
going to the police. "If you spoke badly about your patron, you could be
hurt or even killed."
To make life worse, the tensions which had long divided ethnic
Macedonians and ethnic Albanians in Macedonia erupted into violence. In
the early spring, ethnic Albanian guerrillas began fighting in and around
Tetovo.
Macedonian police and troops hit back with clumsy attempts to kill or
capture the fighters.
Mariana's most frightening moment was when a group of men burst into
the flat. She was alone with one other Moldovan woman. The men were not in
uniform, but she assumed they were ethnic Macedonian policemen from their
manner and the official-sounding language they used.
"They wanted to know about our ethnic Albanian patrons. They were
looking for the UCK (the ethnic Albanian liberation army). We said
nothing.
"Suddenly, one of the men brought out a butcher's knife. It was so
sharp it would cut you if you just touched the blade. He cut me on both
arms. The blood went everywhere."
The men left as quickly as they had arrived, says Mariana. To prove her
story, she pulls up her her sleeves and shows the blue scars that she says
were made by the knife. There are four or five deep blue marks on both
arms just above her wrists, which doctors say will never disappear.
Mariana and her friend wrapped cloths around the wounds and rested to
get over the shock. But they had no time to recover. With the fighting
continuing between the guerrillas and the Macedonian security forces, they
were kept awake at night by the sounds of shelling. "We were in a war,"
says Mariana.
But still the girls had to keep working. Mariana says that, as well as
ethnic Albanians and ethnic Macedonians, her clients included western
European soldiers from the Nato-led forces stationed in Macedonia.
She then fell ill with a liver complaint, she says. When she recovered
she refused to return to prostitution and worked instead in bars.
Her salvation came from an unexpected quarter. An ethnic Albanian man
who lived in the neighbourhood took pity on her and another Moldovan woman
called Zana. One day in the late spring, he offered to hide them in an
empty flat, away from their pimps. Mariana says they suspected he would
want sex. But he demanded nothing. "He was very kind."
Mariana says she and Zana lived in the flat for several months living
on food supplied by their Good Samaritan. In the confusion of the
fighting, their pimps did not find their hiding place. In summer, the
fighting in Macedonian ended in an uneasy truce and the women's benefactor
become increasingly worried they would be captured.
He went to Skopje to ask for support from the Romanian embassy, which
looks after Moldovan interests in Macedonia. The ambassador agreed to
help. On September 3, the women boarded a bus from Tetovo to Skopje.
Mariana says they were terrified they would be stopped by their pimps
as they made the one-hour journey along the dual-carriageway between the
two cities. But they reached the embassy, where the ambassador called a
senior Macedonian police officer who organised an escort to the offices of
Unicef, the United Nations children's organisation. A week later they were
home in Moldova.
Mariana was overwhelmed to see her parents and her son again. She told
her father and mother that she had been working abroad but not what she
had been doing. She does not know whether they will guess the truth. She
says she has learnt a lesson. "If anybody asks me, I will say, 'Never,
never do what I did'."
The outline of Mariana's story is confirmed by La Strada, an
international non-governmental organisation that rescues prostitutes and
is now caring for Mariana in Chisinau.
Jana Costachi, director of the centre for the prevention of trafficking
in women, another prostitution-linked NGO in Chisinau, says there is no
way of knowing how many women work abroad as prostitutes - or how many are
held against their will. "They are young and naive. It is hard to
establish how much they know before they leave."
Vladimir Voronin, the Moldovan president, insists that the government
is doing its best. "We are fighting against the mafia in all sorts of
directions."
The state recently introduced a new law outlawing the recruitment of
sex workers and clamping down on suspect travel agencies that handle
tickets and documents for the young women.
But Moldovan government officials say there is little that can be done,
unless there is concerted action against prostitution in the countries
where the women work, including UN-administered Kosovo. With so many
demands on their resources, the governments of the former Yugoslavia are
doing little to help, say the officials in Chisinau.
The trade goes on with new women recruited daily. A recent edition of
Makler advertised jobs for women in Austria. A telephone call quickly
established that what was required were young women "who are at least 160
centimetres tall, no older than 24 and must look good . . . We are talking
about intimate relations here," said the person who answered the telephone
at the advertised number.
The police have had some notable successes. A few months ago, they
raided the check-in desks at Chisinau airport and arrested a female
Moldovan trafficker who was taking eight young women out of the country.
The detective who led the raid said: "There was uproar. Four of the young
women were upset because they wanted to leave the country and we had
stopped them. The other four seemed relieved."
But the police unit handling prostitution also deals with organised
crime and lacks the money to concentrate on stopping human traffic.
Its head, a hard-bitten police chief called Constantin Clipa, says that
while his force does its best, there is nothing it can do about the root
cause, which is "poverty and the lack of jobs in Moldova". | 