UNMIK on AIR

Trafficking in women

August 9^th

Music up and under

CUT 1 We are a very poor family and we have suffered much damage due to the war. After the war ended we started to rebuild our house and even got a cow. My mom gave me the milk to sell it in the city. One day, a car stopped in front of me on the outskirts of the city. A young woman got out and asked whether I knew the road to the city. She said, “don’t be afraid, why are you standing so far? I approached her saying that I did not fear anyone. I saw her pull out something white. When I woke up, I saw cameras above me; I was naked and lying on the floor of a house I’d never been in before. Many men, young and old raped me - locals and internationals. We were about 20 people in that house. Only two were from Moldova and all the rest Albanian…I managed to escape. We were supposed to stay there and later on continue our trip abroad, to Italy.

LINK: A harrowing testimony, one amongst countless compiled by the Centre for Protection of Women and Children. This woman lived to tell the tale – but thousands of others, women forced to live as sexual slaves, are still in the hands of their traffickers. And there are those who never had a chance to say what happened to them - after being abused they were brutally killed.

Hello and welcome to this special edition of UNMIK on AIR.

LINK: An estimated three million women are victims of trafficking across the world - 200.000 alone from Eastern Europe and Russia, according to data compiled by the International Organisation for Migration, IOM.

A medieval sex-slave trade masterminded by cutthroat crime cartels is how one journalist described it. Thousands of women, tortured, raped into submission and imprisoned in seedy night bars are the mainstay of what has become a multimillion-dollar industry with links to Western Europe and even the US.

White slavery as it is often called, has been compared to African slave auctions in 18^th century Europe. Some women say they were hawked at auctions and ordered to dance naked for prospective buyers who are willing to pay thousands of Euros for fresh, read, young, white flesh.

Music up and down

From being a destination and place of transit for these unfortunate women, Kosovo has now become a source as well. The Prishtina based Center for Protection of Women and Children says it provided facilities and assistance to 271 women in Kosovo in 2001 and in 2002.

Poverty is clearly a major reason for the scourge of sex slavery – most of the victims are lured by promises of jobs as waitresses or au pair girls in Western Europe. 

According to Ruchira Gupta, an anti-trafficking expert working with the American NGO Development Alternatives, there are no essential differences between countries when it comes to trafficking. Post-conflict areas across the world typically throw up such scenarios, she says.

CUT 2 (ruchira) Kosovo is also a post conflict area and trafficking spreads a lot in many post conflict areas because of few reasons. One is that rape has been used as a weapon of war in the Balkans and we have seen that women that are victims of rape are having law self-esteem, families also discard them. (edit to) and there are many, many displaced families, husbands are separated from wives, daughters are separated from fathers. There women handing households, they don’t have any way of earning an income…

LINK: The Center for Protection of Women and Children has been helping victims of trafficking for several years. The number of victims hasn’t ceased rising, says Sevtija Ahmeti who heads the organization, including women and girls from Kosovo itself. The number of local victims doubled in 2002, compared to the previous year.

CUT 3 (Sevdija) Poverty is the first reason. (edit to.)The economic status is very poor. Second thing is the lack of education. Third thing is the lack of security and proper action, efficient action. (edit to) In side Kosova there is another problem. We don’t know the address, where to apply for justice and for security. There is no name. If we go to UNMIK they say go to your Government, but we don’t have a ministry of justice and Ministry of security, internal affairs. When we go to our Government they say we don’t have the right to decide anything or to undertake anything because we are not the ones to bring the laws.

LINK: It’s not the absence of regulations and laws that keeps this horrible business going, complain activists, it’s more the non-implementation of existing rules. Fatmire Tedevci from the daily Koha Ditore, one of the few journalists in Kosovo writing on this issue.

CUT 4: Fatmire Trafficking has become a big issue with the entry of peacekeeping forces in Kosovo in 1999. Even if there was a problem before, it did not exist to this extent. This is due to border police control, lack of regulations, or sometimes because of non-implementation of those regulations that are in force and of course because of the huge international presence here.

Atmosphere (I’ll record some bars strikes or smth like that)

LINK: In 2000, UNMIK set up a special police squad TPIU to deal with trafficking in people and prostitution. But gathering information and bringing criminals to book is an uphill task - many of the rescued girls are not willing to admit what happened to them, explains TPIU officer Irinel Cococ, but fear is only one reason.

CUT 5 (TPIU) We cannot help them against their own will. And the problem is that everything is changing now. Before we had a quite high number of victims. Now, even the number of the victims is decreasing. Because actually the owners of the bars, the pimps, they changed their mentality. We arrested a lot of them. Before, they didn’t pay the victims, the girls. They were just taking the money. They were forcing them into prostitution. We still have these kinds of cases but now some things have changed. Their living conditions are improving. They get money; they can go outside if they want to. Maybe they were the victims in the beginning, they came here because they were trafficked, but once they came here and saw that they can earn some money, they just refuse to leave now.

LINK: Pimps and brothel owners are imaginative and resilient, to say the least. A bar that’s closed down in one place opens up somewhere else - it’s very easy, says Irinel, to set up shop in a different place, only with a new name and an old/new owner. A new technique to order sexual favours as well, she adds – order a drink if you want a girl.

CUT 6 (TPIU) A Champagne or maybe a coffee. And you will pay for that maybe fifty or 100 euros and you can a get a phone number or a location and you are supposed to go there to meet with the girl. It’s not anymore in the bars or in one location and you can imagine how difficult it is for us. We are trying to work in a different way.

LINK: But catching the perpetrators is only one aspect – bringing them to trial and keeping them behind bars is another ballgame altogether. According to official data, from 1999 till the end of 2002, the total number of trafficking cases filed is 85. 44 cases have been completed and 29 cases are still ongoing. The highest range of prison terms is five years.

Such statistics leave people like Sevtija Ahmeti fuming. Yes, UNMIK’s regulation on trafficking is good, she says, but the quality of its implementation leaves much to be desired.

CUT 7 (Sevdija) We have our complaints about the justice system. First of all, the punishments are not that high. We had a case of a trafficked young woman. I’ll only say that she is from former Yugoslavia. She had no place to return to. She was trafficked here.( She was under full control), she was in a very bad state, KFOR clients from the Russian sector used her and she was also used by other clients, both nationals and internationals. The pimps, the macros were from national communities so they joined together. We legally represented the case and we offered legal protection but what surprised us was the punishment. It’s such a small punishment for such a big crime and the pimps did not really get jail time.

Atmosphere (to find some strikes when judge is knocks)

LINK: Verdicts handed down in such trials depend of course on evidence submitted, on the testimony of victims and witnesses. But victims will only testify if they are guaranteed security, argues Sevtia. What has been offered to them, she asks – will they be able to lead a decent life, will they be under a witness protection program, and the key question, will the perpetrator be charged?

Witness protection programs do exist, but only for very high profile cases. Moreover, being rescued only solves one set of problems. A whole range of other problems begins once they are out of the clutches of traffickers, especially for foreign girls. Where to go for example? Irinel Cocos of the TPIU.

CUT 8 (TPIU) We cannot deport anyone from Kosovo. Usually they are asking us why don’t you send us home, why you don’t deport us. But we cannot deport anyone from Kosovo because Kosovo is not a country and to deport someone there is supposed to have an agreement between two states.

LINK: But local victims are equally at risk, even after their rescue, says Sevtika Ahmeti.

CUT 9 (Sevdija) The victim is from the country, the family is in the country, social centers are in the country, police is inside, pimps are inside, criminals are inside, clients are inside, bordellos are inside, motels and all facilities where the sexual exploitation happens is inside, jails are inside, school is inside and she has to live inside. So what kind of protection are we speaking about?

LINK: Shelters for victims of sexual slavery are few and far between. The recent opening of an UNMIK shelter is a welcome first step in dealing with this problem, though clearly, much more needs to be done. According to Mumbi Njau from UNMIK’s Justice Department, the most important thing about this UNMIK shelter is that it will provide help to both internal and external victims of trafficking.

CUT 10 (Mumbi) It has a range of services that are able to provide to the victims including accommodation, because it’s a shelter, counseling, legal information, advice to victim, medical care including gynecological and reproductive health care.

LINK: There is another rather disputable aspect to the whole sex trafficking issue in Kosovo - the question of who supports the industry and who are its main patrons. The TPIU claims that internationals have been caught in brothels only in a couple of cases, and that those people had been dismissed immediately. On the other hand, local NGOs allege that brothels and other facilities have approximately 40 % of local clients and 60% of internationals. Fatmire Terdevci shares this opinion.

CUT 11 My idea is that there might be double standards or prices…Lower prices for the locals. There is a very high scale of unemployment here so maybe there are double prices…

LINK: Balkan countries are becoming a haven for sex tourism warns Sevtia Ahmeti. She doesn’t see any real political will to tackle this problem – the ramifications and link-ups are so deep and complex that it’s difficult to break them all. But a useful first step would be for destination countries to clean up their own backyard – that’s where the big bucks are, that’s where the money laundering is happening.

CUT 12 (Sevdija) It’s there where the clients are being sent, that’s where the circulation of money is, and that’s where the customers are? How do the customers find the place? Let me put the question. For example, how do they know of a certain victim that has come from this beautiful nation if they don’t have the links, the chain? So, there is no punishment for both the clients and the organizers. How do the traffickers organize this, how do they cross borders? How do they know the exact time when to bring the victims inside? Do they have links with the police, do they have links with the ministers or prime ministers or army or not? So what are we talking about?

Back announcement: So many unanswered questions. The case currently shaking Monte Negro is indicative of the involvement of senior government officials in the murky business of trafficking. A Moldovan trafficking victim who managed to escape accused senior Montenegran officials of involvement in her incarceration. The state prosecutor decided there was no case to answer, a position that outraged human rights groups and the international community. An OSCE commission now has the final word on the case – on its decision hangs the reputation of Montenegro’s judiciary.

And this brings us to the end of this special UNMIK on AIR program. The programme was written and compiled by Andrea Saula.