As international peacekeepers and officials wrestle with how to settle the unruly province of Kosovo, a new and elusive crime scourge is seeping its way into the war-ravaged borders. As international peacekeepers and officials wrestle with how to settle the unruly province of Kosovo, a new and elusive crime scourge is seeping its way into the war-ravaged borders.
It's sex slavery. Ironically, the same peacekeepers and international officers sent to administer and police the province are trade's best clients. It's a market that degrades and brutalizes women, and not enough is being done to stop it.
A former war zone, Kosovo is a prime location for the burgeoning sex-traffick. Porous borders, a large clientele in the form of international troops and aid workers, and the lack of a working criminal justice system are excellent conditions.
Eastern European women make up much of the workforce in Kosovo's underground brothels. Not only are Slavic women in high demand for their good looks, but also their native countries are close by, making the women easily transportable along well-established organized-crime networks.
In the last six months, United Nations peacekeepers and police have rescued women from Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Albania. Police say that most of these women and girls - some as young as 15 - were brought from their home countries to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south. There they are sold at auction to ethnic Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500.
The women are stripped of their passports and held in unsanitary conditions in bars or motels. Seen as chattel with no rights, they often are traded from owner to owner, brothel to brothel. They are forced to engage in unprotected sex with local police and international peacekeepers for no payment. They are told that before they can keep any of their earnings, they first must pay the pimps for their purchase price and the cost of their travel. Of course, those so-called expenses have no end. If the women resist, they are beaten.
Many of these women know the men who trafficked them. Often boyfriends, husbands, family members, or friends act as the home-country suppliers. In many cases, the women go knowingly, hoping to make some money, a distant possibility in their home countries.
The sex-slave trade of Eastern European women is one of the busiest in the world. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people throughout the world are trafficked each year. According to the International Organization for Migration, about half a million women from Central and Eastern Europe are trafficked annually into the nations of the European Union and the United States.
The problem is not new, and international measures have recently been enacted to deal with it. In the United States, the House of Representatives recently passed a series of laws to tighten immigration controls and improve victim support. What congressmen don't realize is that their own government-funded employees, deployed in these troubled lands, are often the trade's biggest clients.
Rolf Welberts, human-rights director in Kosovo for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), says his organization has assisted about 50 women. He believes the number still held in bondage is much higher. Welberts says that "internationals" - foreign soldiers and aid workers - are very often brothel patrons. The same phenomenon exists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the presence of peacekeepers and aid workers initiated a major trade in women from Eastern Europe.
The problem of what do to with the women once they have been rescued plagues all international attempts to curb the sex-slave trade. The problem lies in the international attitudes toward prostitution. Around the world, trafficked women are too often seen as criminals and not victims. They are frequently incarcerated while their handlers go free. Worse, they are often sent home. Out of sight, out of mind. But the woman's troubles don't end with deportation. When the woman returns home, she returns alone to deal with threats and violence from the original traffickers far from the sanctity of international law.
As history has proven repeatedly - once again in Kosovo - war and sex slavery go hand in hand, leaving behind a whole class of living victims.
Alexandra Poolos (poolosa@rferl.org) is a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague. © 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.