NY Times, November 13, 2003 For Albanians, It's Come to This: A Son for a TV By NICHOLAS WOOD
DURRES, Albania, Nov. 11 — Fatmira Bonjaku's husband is in jail, accused by the police of selling their 3-year-old son to an Italian man in return for the television set that six other children watch in the family's dimly lighted room. The police also say her husband had plans to sell their newest born, whom she is breast feeding.
Mrs. Bonjaku, interviewed at her family's two-room shack on the outskirts of this port city, denied that she intended to sell her newborn but admitted trading her son, Orazio, thinking the Italian man "would provide a good life."
Over the past 12 years, since the collapse of Stalinism here, a substantial trade in children has established itself in Albania, Europe's most impoverished and long most isolated country.
No one has exact figures for the number of children involved, but the government estimates that 6,000 children have been sent abroad for use in begging and prostitution rackets, or in some cases sold to Western couples for adoption.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/international/europe/13ALBA.html
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Sunday Herald, Nov. 9, 2003 (Scotland)
Europe’s most desperate corner
In Moldova, the continent’s poorest country, kidneys have become commodities that can buy a better way of life, finds Angus Roxburgh in Chisinau
“I’ll take you up north,” says Captain Victor Pantelei, head of Moldova’s anti-human trafficking squad. “You can meet a man in a village there who sold his kidney. He bought a saxophone with the money.”
And so I join Pantelei and Vasile, his faithful lieutenant, on a drive through heavy snow and rutted roads in Europe’s poorest country, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. Their team is 20-strong, but woefully underfunded. “We haven’t got a single computer,” complains Pantelei on the journey. “We haven’t got proper equipment – and we’re fighting criminal gangs who’ve got everything.”
Victor doesn’t even have petrol for his car. I have to buy it. He earns just $100 a month, and lives in a room in a hostel with his wife and son. How is morale? “Great,” he says. “If only we had the technical means, we could rid Moldova of the traffickers.”
Almost one fifth of Moldova’s 4.3 million people are believed to have gone abroad in search of work and a better life. And a huge majority of those who remain, according to research, would leave if they had the means. With so little hope, the country has become a major centre for trafficking in women, and human organs.
In the town of Edinec I meet Iurie, a young man with dark stubble on his face. He looks tough enough to take care of himself. But tears brim in his eyes as he tells me how gangsters forced him to have a kidney removed.
He had gone to Turkey thinking he would be given work as a stevedore. Instead, he ended up on an operating table. He was sent home, $11,000 richer, but traumatised for life.
Victor takes me to the nearby village of Oknita and introduces me to the mayor. “We live in sheer poverty,” he says. “Look at the village hospital over there. It used to be the best in the district. But there’s been no money for it for 10 years. They closed it down, and it’s just rotting into the ground.”
full: http://www.sundayherald.com/37903
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