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The brutality of the KLA tactics came as no surprise. The British paratroopers, the first of the NATO forces to be deployed to Pristina, Kosovo, after the NATO offensive, informed me on a daily basis during my visit there of the brutality of the KLA. One medic graphically described the bloody scenes left behind after KLA rebels ruthlessly sledge- hammered aged ethnic Albanians when they refused to give them their possessions; or Serbs who got in their way.
Canadian Gordon Moon, a "tall, strapping 40-year-old detective" as Olivia Ward of The Star describes him, lead an operation to rescue sex slaves in Kosovo, where UN-mandated NATO peacekeepers are maintaining at least enough peace to allow the Albanian rebels to run drugs, arms, women and children. Moon headed the Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit of the U.N. international police force CIVPOL.
The girls are "lured into the racket by promises that they can make hundreds a week as waitresses, dancers or even children's nannies." Moon told The Star. "But the reality is very different … most pimps treat their victims worse than farm animals … there are such disgustingly filthy conditions that it's difficult to imagine how they live … . They get only scraps to eat, and they wear the same clothes every day. There's no running water, and they can't wash. They have no medical treatment and they're suffering from all kinds of diseases. Most live way below starvation level."
Moon's team rescued one girl who had been locked in a room for 15 days, serving 10 clients a night. Others they found chained. One, denied medical help, had to inject herself with penicillin to treat her sexually transmitted disease.
Moon was repulsed to find that peacekeepers and aid workers are some of the abusers. When he demanded that peacekeeping and aid officials make trafficking sites off-limits to their teams, some agreed, but others refused. "It's really amazing to me that people from countries that are supposed to be setting an example here, should engage in such behavior," said Moon.
The Balkans: Divided In Power Plays, United in Greed
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is a land rife with ethnic strife, centuries-old hatreds between the Albanians and the Serbs, but when it comes to profits, ethnic hatreds are put aside. "We're aware of the history of this region, and how much hatred there is between Serbs and Albanians," Moon told The Star. "But in organized crime they co-operate without any problems. It's big business, and it's completely unaffected by the political situation."
The Yugoslav capital of Belgrade is the major transit point. "Serbs buy women from East European traffickers, paying an average of $2,200 each: 65% of the women are Moldovan, 15% are Romanian, the rest are Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Hungarian. They're all young and vulnerable, and most weren't prostitutes to start with." In Serbia, the women are raped and beaten, then sold to Albanian or other traffickers. There was no estimate given of those that do not survive.
Dogged thugs who pocket the profits - $110 an hour, or about $735 a night - become millionaires. Kosovo's 75 bars, dance halls and brothels, The Star was told, take in more than $1.5 million a week. "Little of the money, if any, trickles down to the women who are forced to take on as many as 10 clients a night." Ward writes.
Although Moon launched raids that rescued 270 women in nine months, he expressed to Ward his frustration: "If a couple of women manage to escape, a bar owner can get more within a day or two. Supply is not a big deal for them."
A Russian militiaman looks at three suspected prostitutes detained
during a raid in central Moscow. The raid, according to police, was
part of a campaign to clean up the streets before Moscow’s 850th
anniversary celebrations in 1997.
Numerous efforts have been made to at least make awareness of the problem, or at least limit it. As long as the profits keep rolling, the kingpins, with or without the aid of law enforcement and customs officials, will find a way to keep operating.
"Bernard Kouchner," Ward reports, "a physician and former head of the U.N. administration in Kosovo, introduced new trafficking regulations that have turned sentences of days into years." The legislation allowed law enforcement to close brothels. Within one month more than 10 men were arrested and some notorious hotspots were boarded up.
"All of Macedonia Is Filled with Girls Like Me, and We're All Crying."
An MSNBC photo shows the profile of a slumped unidentified sex slave, dejected, silently weeping. The bent-over fragile figure, with her hands covering and supporting her head, belie the tender age of the victim. Another teenage slave exposes her sore, infected right breast, the result of a bite from a man in a fit of sexual rage. The girls told Mendenhall their stories, despite fearing for their lives, regardless of the promise of anonymity and the clandestine circumstances in which they were interviewed by MSNBC as part of a four-month investigation into the sex trade in Europe.
One made it clear that "her 'owner' would kill her" for exposing her state of captivity. "The cruel conditions under which she is held, and her deteriorating mental and physical health" Mendenhall writes "compelled her to speak out." Others before her had been savagely beaten, sometimes killed.
"There is only one word for this," the girl told Mendenhall. "Slavery."
Velesta, in the neighboring Macedonia, where girls are held in bondage, is considered one of the most dangerous places in Europe. The 120 Moldovan sex slaves are locked-up during the day in kafanes or café-brothels. The girls are paraded in sexy lingerie for their clients, which include NATO peacekeepers from the U.S., Germany, France and Britain, who take their pick. "They (the peacekeepers) were as bad as the rest," one said. "They did anything they wanted to us. And besides, if Meti (her owner) heard me asking them for help, he would have killed me."
The girl with the breast wound was "virtually kidnapped" when she played hooky from school. Wanting to escape her abusive family, she headed for a job in Italy. Instead, a Serb smuggler "Dragan" took her in a car trunk to Romania, and with 10 other girls crossed the Danube to Yugoslavia by boat. She was sold to an Albanian owner.
"There were clients on the very first night" the girl told MSNBC. Her owner repeatedly raped, beat, and shamed her until she was broken.
"Meti made me clean the toilet with my tongue. It was horrible and dirty." The Albanian "made me lick another girl's … you know, down there. And then he laughed." She had been in captivity for a year.
An Albanian kingpin Bojku Dilaver, on the "Most Wanted" list of sex traffickers, purchased a 32-year-old Moldovan for $700, after which he repeatedly raped her and sold her to others. The elusive Dilaver, in cahoots with local officials, has escaped the law by being forewarned of impending raids. Ljube Boskovski, Macedonian interior minister, admits his officers are on the smuggler's payroll.
Each brothel takes on a warped life of its own. The slaves told how "owners" favor one slave better than the others. To survive, a favored, which the girls call "Mama" becomes the pimp's lover. "Mama" becomes "Papa's" spy, warning of any intended escape plots. One girl spoke of the "good clients" among the thousands of men she was forced to service. When Mendenhall pressured her into explaining what could be "good" about men who were raping her, she replied. "They are good if they don't beat you. They are good if they just have sex. Sometimes they bring me a present."
One Moldovan woman was rescued by an Albanian client who took pity on the weeping girl. He paid 5,000 Deutsch Marks ($2,500) to her owner, but only after he (the owner) had raped her three times. With the aid of international agencies and officials, the girl, back home in Moldova, speaks of her difficulty. "We do not have money to buy bread. We do not have money to pay for electricity … . I am very weak and have no strength. I have awful headaches, and I tremble all the time. If I ever saw him [the owner] again," she told Mendenhall, "I wouldn't use words [to speak to him]. I would use a gun."
From Chains of Caushescou to Nets of Barbaric Slave Traders
A middleman for several prostitution ringleaders described activities in the Bucharest headquarter, of prostitution rings which have branches in Moldova, Ukraine and Russia to Binder of MSNBC:
"There are 'agencies' that sell 'dancers' to Albania, Japan, Israel, Greece, Turkey," "Women sign a 'contract' with a so-called impresario, who has them photographed for an album - 1,000 of them per album. But it is only for prostitution. Then they disappear. They are sold for 2,500 Deutsche Marks."
The methods of the crude, primitive selling of one human being by another into the bondage of a third have not changed, but the means by which they are sold have become more sophisticated. Rather than displaying their merchandise like cattle on a block in a market place as is done in many parts of Africa, one branch of the Bucharest ring that keeps 4,200 girls on reserve sells them by numbered videocassettes. Pimps, individuals, or private owners choose the video or videos that satisfies their sordid, perverted desires. The rejected girls are sent to Oradea on the Hungarian border, to a Turk. "He works with a Hungarian on other side." He explained to Binder, "They travel in big trucks. They use ex-soccer stars to smuggle women. Then the traffickers pay $500 per fake Hungarian passport."
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The players along the way pave the road for the traffickers. As Binder points out, The U.S. State Department report on human rights for 2001 noted that "instances of corruption and involvement of police in trafficking in persons occurred on the local level," referring to the Balkans.
The cover-ups are well thought out, and as devious as the methods used to lure and entrap the victims. The tables are turned, and the blame is put on the abused rather than their abusers. In an interview with MSNBC, Vitalie Cura-rari, the head of Moldova's anti-trafficking police, lashed out at the media for "sensationalizing" sex slavery and placed much of the blame for trafficking on the women themselves. "Fifty percent of our women just go abroad to find another man and then come back to divorce their husbands."
"Mothers ask the cops to locate their daughters," the middleman tells Binder. "But permission has already been given for their export by the state police."
An impressively documented article by the organization. "Safe4kids," confirms that it is prostituted women and children who are being prosecuted and harassed by the police, and not the customers.
Those attempting to escape not only risk personal brutality, but the thugs use the age-old psychological terror tactic of threatening parents, siblings and other loved ones.
Some are chained. Others are locked in. One brothel from which prostitutes were freed was surrounded by barbed wired and an electrified fence.
Dr. Engel, Head of MiraMed institute, told of one who escaped from Russian traffickers and made it home. But the mafia tracked her down and killed her. "Her head was found rolling in the gutter."
In 1998, in Istanbul, Turkey, as re-ported by Ukrainian police investigators, two women were thrown to their deaths from a balcony while six of their Russian friends watched. In Serbia, in 1998, one who had escaped testified that a fellow enslaved girl who refused to work as a prostitute was beheaded in public.
A frequent contributor to SOF, Dr. Martin Brass is an international lawyer.
