Human Sex Slave Trafficking
Fuk... I can't believe this stuff still Exists...
Article:
Corruption stalls Balkans recovery
Trafficking leads crimes trumping rule of law in war-torn region
Romanian and Moldovan victims of forced prostitution await questioning after the Bosnian nightclub where they worked was raided by special police.
By Preston Mendenhall
MSNBC
VELESTA, Macedonia, Jan. 2 — In this village on Macedonia’s western flank, where bellowing donkeys pulling hay-laden carts fight for road space with late model European sports cars, international attempts to preserve peace in the Balkans are being severely tested.
AFTER SPENDING BILLIONS of dollars on military and humanitarian interventions to douse the flames of four Balkans wars, international efforts to maintain a delicate peace between warring ethnic groups are increasingly threatened by rampant corruption and the unchecked flow of guns, drugs and human smuggling through the region.
Diplomats and local officials say the lack of resolve by top bureaucrats to get tough on corruption and police fears that a crackdown on crime syndicates could spark a new bloodbath along ethnic lines are preventing the region’s recovery from a decade of conflict.
The western Macedonian town of Velesta, population 3,000, epitomizes the problem.
Beyond the busy central market with its signs for ironmongers and butchers are businesses with names like Bela Dona and Safari Club — brothels that give Velesta and other small towns in the Balkans a bad name.
SEX TRADE FLOURISHES
From Bosnia to Serbia and Montenegro to Albania, bars like those in Velesta are packed with thousands of women and girls — mostly from Moldova, Ukraine and Romania — who are tricked or kidnapped by traffickers and forced to work as prostitutes. Of the up to 4 million women and girls trafficked for prostitution worldwide each year, some 200,000 pass through the Balkans, according to the U.S. State Department.
The trade in humans is visible everywhere, even in the Macedonian capital. After the closure of the Panorama Hotel bar, perched on a hill above Skopje’s government ministries, the flesh market has now resurfaced at the Irish Pub, a downtown watering hole on the Vardar River packed with NATO troops and international workers, who as clients fuel the business. On a recent night, a dozen women watched by a minder left one by one with British, American and German soldiers on 96-hour leaves from Kosovo, where they keep the peace in another Balkans region plagued by trafficking.
One year ago, MSNBC.com infiltrated the brothels of Velesta and interviewed women held as sex slaves. Scarred by countless beatings by clients and “owners,” the women described how they were duped into believing promises of good jobs in Italy and Greece, only to find themselves driven from village to village in the Balkans and forced to sleep with hundreds of men.
Relief officials in Macedonia say that little has been done in the past year to crack down on places like Velesta. Throughout western Macedonia, a region that nearly erupted in all-out war between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Macedonian government forces until the international community intervened, traffickers have put corrupt local police, prosecutors and judges on their payrolls.
Experts say that the same smugglers moving women and children through the region also control contraband in weapons, cigarettes and drugs on their way to Europe and beyond.
A Human Rights Watch report published in November said the same problems plague other Balkans nations, noting that official corruption contributes to more than 200 brothels operating in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone.
“Everyone knows everyone,” said Patsy Sörensen, a Belgian deputy to the European Parliament who monitors human trafficking issues in the Balkans. “There is corruption everywhere. A girl can be having a drink with a policeman one day and be arrested by him the next.”
WESTERN PRESSURE
Western officials say they have taken blunt messages to the governments spawned by the breakup of former Yugoslavia that there is growing concern that unless the corruption fueling problems like human trafficking is stamped out, the recovery of the Balkans will stall.
The problem is perhaps no more acute than in Macedonia, where tensions between ethnic Albanians, who make up one third of a population of 2 million but for years were deprived of equal rights, and Macedonian Slavs still simmer even as a new multi-ethnic government holds power.
State-run media regularly blames the mainly Albanian population in the west for the trafficking of thousands of women across the nearby through the region each year. There is little acknowledgement of the role played by Macedonian police, border guards and prosecutors helping the traffickers, in part by supplying false documents and allowing perpetrators who are caught to go free.
The depth of the corruption, say Western officials, prevents even the most motivated police and prosecutors from cracking down.
“The lack of political will so far to solve the problem is stalling the country’s recovery,” said Bart D’Hooge, the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s official in charge of developing a multi-ethnic police force in Macedonia. “They have to see that one problem is linked to another problem. And if you want to solve one problem, you have to solve them all. It’s a vicious circle.”
Macedonian officials counter that efforts to target criminals in ethnic Albanian areas only lead to accusations of ethnic bias. Fearful of sparking another round of bloodletting between ethnic Albanians and Macedonian Slavs, officials say their hands are tied.
And although Macedonia passed a landmark anti-trafficking law last year, increasing prison terms for human smugglers, the country still lacks “the crucial tools needed to fight this complex form of crime,” like laws allowing for wire-tapping and undercover investigations, says the OSCE’s D’Hooge.
The steep slide into crime couldn’t come at a worse time for the region, where relief officials are struggling with shrinking budgets and, amid the war on terrorism, a decrease in interest in the region. American aid to the Balkans is slated to drop 20 percent next year to $495 million, and money from European donors also is expected to decline. The crime and corruption has kept wary investors away.
RULE OF THE LAND
In Velesta, a group of well-armed smugglers with long criminal records operates with impunity. An estimated 100 women are believed to be held in and around the village, where they are kept under lock and key by their “owners,” who use the dingy night clubs to rape and beat the girls into submission before selling them again on well trodden trafficking routes that lead to Western Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
In a rare interview with MSNBC.com, one of the chief suspects in the human flesh trade accused the Macedonian government of singling out ethnic Albanians for prosecution. “The state knows exactly what’s going on here, because they are part of it,” said Bojku Dilaver, a 40-year-old ethnic Albanian known by his nickname “Leku” who owns bars in Velesta and nearby Struga. Dilaver, who is wanted by Interpol, denied his clubs were anything more than cabarets.
Dozens of trafficking victims rescued from the region say he is lying. “Leku bought and sold young girls before my eyes,” said Svetlana, a 20-year-old Moldovan who escaped from Velesta in September. “He forced us to sleep with clients every hour.”
In the past several months, there have been signs that governments in the Balkans are trying to fight back.
The OSCE’s D’Hooge says key Macedonian ministries have appointed anti-corruption czars. And in September, a Balkans-wide operation under the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative, a regional law enforcement organization, resulted in more than 200 arrests and the rescue of almost 300 victims. Greek police also rescued women from Ukraine and Moldova found rolled up in carpets in an attempt to smuggle them across the Macedonian-Greek border.
Last weekend, Macedonian police raided Velesta and other towns, rounding up several suspected pimps and at least 20 trafficking victims.
At the same time, relief officials say they are seeing a dangerous trend by traffickers to infiltrate the organizations that work with victims in an attempt to exert influence on both the women and aid workers. A victims’ shelter run by Macedonia’s Interior Ministry and administered by the International Organization for Migration seized $10,000 from a woman posing as a victim. Her apparent intention was to pay off rescued women not to testify against their former owners. IOM fired an office driver in Macedonia who had family ties to a trafficker serving time in a Belgian prison.
“It’s like jelly,” said European Parliament member Sörensen, who once had a contract placed on her by a trafficker, now jailed. “You press down on it, and it squirts up somewhere else.”
Preston Mendenhall is MSNBC.com’s international editor.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/842092.asp?vts=010320031025
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