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My old buddy from Guyana was highly agitated. "Rumors have it that the Wall is coming down." He had just spoken to his brother in England. My studies could wait. Destiny never did. I rang the airlines, found a flight to Berlin that day, grabbed the bag that was always packed with bare essentials, and took-off to have a rendezvous with history. I arrived shortly before 2300 hours, when the airport was to close. I met two Eastern Bloc guys and followed them into the unfamiliar town where we parted paths. I pounded the abandoned streets, numb from the penetrating, humid cold, until I stumbled across a most welcome shelter -- a tiny room in a little dive in the heart of town that accommodated construction workers.
West Berlin. Magnificent. Mysterious. Restless. Glimpses of shadowy men in long black trench coats in the most gray, harsh winter in Germany's recent history conjured up images of KGB agents, CIA operatives, double agents, willowy betraying seductresses. Berlin epitomized all of the intrigue of the Cold War that transformed that era into the most unparalleled, spine-tingling, unsettling, dramatic period in history.
Thousands gathered at the Wall that symbolized the division of humanity into two distinctive camps. As some of the obscenely colorful, graffitied wall panels were carefully and methodically hoisted on cranes, with hands nearly frozen from the bitter cold, my nameless new-found friends and I brutally pounded the standing wall, competing as to who could tear down the biggest pieces of history to stuff in our camera bags and pockets. For days, pilgrims and adventurers flocked in from all over the globe. Nationalism was dead. Ethnicity belonged to another moment. Political jealousies did not exist. All was love and forever would be peace. Gratuitous kegs of hot spicy "Gutwine" warmed all. Organ players and their monkeys livened the air with their nostalgic tunes. Most were in tears. Hour after hour, Western Germans were welcoming the streams of brothers and sisters who had been torn away from them decades before. Prayers were said in remembrance of the brave who had been shot down by their brothers as they attempted to scale the wall, who would rather die than face one more moment of their bleak existence.
The Berlin Wall in 1989.
Berlin swarmed in the coming days and nights. Awestruck, wide-eyed, shabbily-dressed East Germans marveled at the abundance of food, the markets, the fashionable shops. They gazed with astonishment, with revulsion or with delight at the pornography that lined the streets, the bookstands and the billboards. They had entered a dazzling, flashy world of topless bars, intoxicated vulgar dancing, smoky prostitution dens, flagrant nudity and unbridled lust.
The Grass Is Seedier on the Other Side
Berlin. Six months later. The streets were cluttered, garbage had piled up, there were not enough homes for the newcomers. Jobs were scarce, forcing homeless to gather in the streets. Disgruntled West Germans wanted their neighbors to go back home. Easterners longed for the shabby existence they had become accustomed to, where at least they had some semblance of security - homes, schools, jobs, and other social programs. But they had tasted freedom and there was no going back.
The transitions in the rest of the former Eastern bloc were far more rugged. The prolonged, violent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia threatened to destabilize Europe. Economic turmoil in these transitioning and emerging states left hundreds of thousands homeless, jobless, and hopeless. Shattered, corrupt political systems that could not support security and law enforcement had no control over the burgeoning underground, crime syndicates and gangsters. A perfect breeding ground had been cultivated for ruthless blood-suckers to take advantage of the desperate.
Come With Me to the Land of Promise
The young were drawn to this new seductive world that offered them glamour, exotic places, fashion, and extravagant lifestyles, never imagining how savagely their hopes and dreams would be shattered. The dictatorial oppressors to which they were accustomed were soon replaced by an unimaginable form of greedy, lecherous, murderous and inhumane tyrants.
"These girls are young, naïve, poor. They see the glamorous stars of television - Baywatch, Dallas, and the exotic models in the journals. They want to escape the villages and the drudgery. They want handsome husbands, homes and cars. The recruiters gain their confidence and trust. They lure them off, having tricked them. Many are never seen again," a former Eastern-Bloc woman told me.
Some desperate fathers from Eastern Europe, no longer able to support their starving families, brought their daughters to Western European brothels. Third World Movement Against Exploitation of Women recounts a New York Times report: "One father came with his 12-year-old daughter. She was terrorized and in terrible pain. I asked him why he did it. 'First of all we are very poor ... she is still too young to get pregnant ... she is very young ... she will forget.'"
"Papa" Lures the Orphans
"Girls in orphanages throughout the former Soviet Union have lived in dread of their 17th birthday," reports the Seattle, Washington-based MiraMed Institute, organized to fight sex-trafficking in the former Eastern Bloc. At 17, the girls are turned out on the streets, penniless, uneducated, with only the clothes they wear. Six out of 10 fall into the hands of sex traffickers.
The orphans were given hope when two job recruiters made the orphanage rounds offering 14-to-17-year-olds training in a cooking school in China. The expenses were to be paid by the recruiters, but the girls had to agree to work two years each as waitresses to pay back their benefactors. Thirty girls from 10 orphanages hopped on a scheduled bus, embarking on their new life.
Instead of sending the girls to China, they drove to Germany, where they took their passports and locked them in an apartment.
The girls were starved and dehydrated for five days. "Then a man with a bodyguard showed up and began buying us. He took me and four others to a small house that we were never allowed to leave. We got food only if we had sex with 10 men a day." The sex slave said. The girls were told they had to pay back their expenses, an impossible task, since they were never paid. "… in a year, I was sold 10 times." The girl said.
World Powers Free the Enslavers
At considerable cost and effort, the Great Superpowers freed the thugs who claimed oppression, and inadvertently empowered them to brutalize their own new victims.
"Ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo, Macedonia and south Serbia - long the masters of drug-running in the Balkans - are deeply involved in the human-smuggling business, using the flesh trade to fund their separatist movements." MSNBC says.
David Binder and Preston Mendenhall, of MSNBC, assert that the sex-slave trade has made crime syndicates rich since, of 1 million women trafficked globally each year, probably 200,000 pass through the Balkans. The trafficking, Binder says, has allowed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the National Liberation Army in Macedonia "to be outfitted with the latest in rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, mortars, sniper rifles and night-vision goggles."
And certain elements of the 40,000 international NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo, the 20,000 in Bosnia, and 700 in Macedonia help flame the fiery demand for the sex slaves.
