http://www.washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=wpni/print&articleid=A1973-2000Apr23
Sex Slavery Flourishes In Kosovo
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday , April 24, 2000 ; A1
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia �� The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of the
major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe, is becoming a serious problem
in
Kosovo, where porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid
workers
and the lack of a working criminal justice system have created almost perfect
conditions
for the trade, U.N. police officials, NATO-led peacekeepers and humanitarian
workers
say.
In the past six months, U.N. police and troops have rescued 50 women--Moldovan,
Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Romanian--from brothels that have begun to appear in
cities
and towns in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.
Police
and aid workers say they fear that hundreds more, lured from their impoverished
homelands with the promise of riches, may also be living in sexual servitude.
"These women have been reduced to slavery," said Col. Vincenzo Coppola,
commander
of a special unit of the Italian carabinieri, or national police, in Kosovo that
has rescued
23 women on raids of brothels in Pristina, the provincial capital, and Prizren.
According to police sources and aid workers, the women--and some girls as young
as
15--were transported along a well-established organized crime network from their
East
European homelands to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south. There, they
were held in motels and sold at auction to ethnic Albanian pimps for $1,000 to
$2,500.
The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo, officials
said,
including some with links to the former anti-Serbian rebel force, the Kosovo
Liberation
Army.
The women, who had been stripped of their passports, were frequently held in
unheated
rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to engage in
unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night, for no payment, according
U.N.
police officers who requested anonymity because of U.N. regulations limiting
their
authority to speak with reporters.
The undermanned U.N. police force is hard-pressed to cope with a variety of
criminal
activities in this war-scarred province, and authorities and aid workers here
have been
slow to respond to the burgeoning sex-slave trade. Moreover, there are limited
humanitarian resources available to protect those women who are able to seek
sanctuary.
In addition, officials said, the trade has flourished because of a lack of
applicable law on
both trafficking and prostitution and because some countries with military
forces here
have tended to dismiss the activity as simple prostitution. German peacekeepers
in
southern Kosovo, for instance, have taken a benign view of the phenomenon in
part
because prostitution is tolerated in Germany.
International aid workers are trying to convince them that these women are
victims. "It's
not classic prostitution," said one aid worker who has interviewed rescued women
and
is working on a draft U.N. regulation to punish people involved in the sex-slave
trade.
"They are not paid. They are never paid. Of the 50 women we have seen, not one
has
received a single deutsche mark, and they are often held in horrendous
conditions."
According to authorities, the women were told that before they could keep any of
their
earnings, they first had to pay the pimps for their purchase price. Often,
however, they
found themselves fined for such infractions as not smiling at customers, so
there was no
way they would ever have enough money to make the payoff. If they protested, the
women said, they were beaten.
A number of the women appear to have contracted sexually transmitted diseases,
officials said, and international groups are attempting to obtain treatment for
them
either in Kosovo or as soon as they can return to their homelands. "This is a
major
problem, and it is going further underground because of police raids," said one
aid
worker. "At first, it was very out in the open, and so-called nightclubs were
popping up.
But now it's moving into private dwellings, and I expect if we get a reliable
phone
network we'll soon see call-girl services."
International organizations recently established a safe house to protect women
who
escape from the brothels until they can be returned home. But it is now full,
with 21
women, and police have had to suspend raids on other brothels until they can
repatriate
some of the former captives.
International officials declined to allow a reporter to speak to any of the
rescued
women. But in bars in Pristina, Gnjilane and Urosevac, there are young Moldovan
and
Ukrainian women who describe themselves as "waitresses" seeking economic
opportunity in Kosovo. "I can earn 400 deutsche marks [$200] a month," said a
Moldovan woman at a cafe in Gnjilane, where beds are set up behind a dank front
bar.
Asked how much cash she had on her possession, the woman said only, "I'm okay,"
as
an ethnic Albanian bar manager looked on.
According to the rescued women, the clientele varies from brothel to brothel,
officials
said. Some serve mostly ethnic Albanians; others cater to a mixture of ethnic
Albanians
and international workers. Peacekeeping troops--including Americans--also were
customers, the women said. U.S. officials deny that American troops visit the
brothels,
pointing out that soldiers are confined to base when they are off duty.
The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October--four months
after
NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province--when French police officers raided a
brothel in Kosovska Mitrovica and found two Ukrainian women, ages 21 and 22, and
two Serbs, one of whom was a minor. The establishment was closed and the Serbs
were
released, but the French did not know what to do with the two Ukrainians, who
had no
travel documents, officials said.
According to sources familiar with the case, the French policemen detained the
women
at a military camp while they appealed, without success, to humanitarian
organizations
for assistance. After two weeks, fearful of a public relations disaster because
of the
presence of "prostitutes" at a military facility, the French policemen took the
two
women to the administrative boundary between Kosovo and Serbia proper and
essentially expelled them. It is unclear what happened to them.
In November and December, further cases of forced prostitution came to light
when
U.N. policemen visited a number of bars in Pristina--bars with such names as
Totos and
the Miami Beach Club--and removed women who appealed to them for help.
On Jan. 22, officers with the Italian police unit entered an establishment on
the outskirts
of Pristina called the International Club, where they were approached by women
asking
for help. The club, now closed, was a crude structure with a small bar and
barren rooms
in the back that were equipped with just a bed and a red light bulb. Some women
were
kept in an attic. The following night, the Italians raided the club and rescued
12 women,
mostly Moldovans and Ukrainians, who appealed for sanctuary.
The Italians were criticized for conducting the raid without coordinating with
the U.N.
police and humanitarian organizations who then had to assume care of the women.
But
their efforts did lead to official recognition of the problem and the creation
of the safe
house in early February.
That has allowed international workers to interview the women and understand the
process by which they were brought into the sex industry. In the last 10 years,
according
to women's advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of women from the former
Soviet
republics and satellites have been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the
United
States. Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no trafficking problem
before the
peacekeepers arrived after the Kosovo war ended last June, is just another new
market,
officials said.
Most of the women interviewed responded to newspaper ads seeking "attractive
women" to work in the West and, in fact, knew they would work in the sex
industry. A
small minority told police they had been kidnapped or were completely deceived
when
they applied for jobs in the West, including one Moldovan teenager who got
pregnant in
Kosovo, police officials said.
"The women we've spoken to left their countries of their own volition and
basically
knew they would work as prostitutes," said a U.N. police officer in Gnjilane.
"But they
thought they could earn thousands of dollars in some exotic location like Italy
or Spain
and then go home rich. Instead, they end up imprisoned here without a dime."
� 2000 The Washington Post Company
--
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