BALKANS
Trafficking of women: the Balkan Red Road
Terrelibere.it
Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are falling victim to the Balkan sex trade.
Trafficking of women: the Balkan Red Road
A special investigation realizad by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2003.
Tens of thousands of Eastern European women are falling victim to the Balkan sex trade.
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.