Smugglers' prey: poor women of E. Europe

Lyudmila, a divorced mother of three, had few prospects at home in Moldova. So when she saw a newspaper ad promising work in Italy, she did not hesitate.

Leaving her children with her parents, Lyudmila joined seven other women seeking a way out of the poverty of postcommunist Eastern Europe. The women were taken by car south, across the Balkans. Only at the border between Serbia and Macedonia did Lyudmila (who did not want her last name printed) realize where they were really headed.

"There was a guy who told us to take off our clothes to see how we looked," she recalls. "Then everything became clear to me. They were staring at us as if we were cows, to see how good we looked."

One of the few businesses that has flourished in the former Yugoslavia is human trafficking. Women from Eastern Europe's poorest countries, especially Moldova, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria, are lured into the sex trade with the promise of jobs as waitresses or hotel maids in Western Europe. They are smuggled across borders, bought and sold like cattle, and forced to work as prostitutes.

Lyudmila was sold for $400 and sent to work as a prostitute in a largely ethnic Albanian area in the western part of the country. Over the next two years, she says she was sold a dozen more times, sometimes netting traffickers as much as $750.

Estimates of the number of women and girls trafficked each year from Eastern Europe are as high as 120,000. Most end up in Western Europe, but many, like Lyudmila, remain in the former Yugoslavia, where corruption and weak law enforcement have made trafficking and prostitution a source of easy profits for organized crime. Foreigners who poured into the Balkans to help it recover from its wars also helped feed the market.

A report released in July by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) says that peacekeeping troops and civilian workers for international organizations make up a substantial number of the customers – and even more of the profits – in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia.

"It's a free-market thing," says Madeleine Rees, who works in Sarajevo for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. "The traffickers brought women to Bosnia because there were peacekeepers here – 50,000 men." Although today the majority of the customers are locals, Ms. Rees says that initially, "the majority of men using these women were internationals. They were really the only ones with money."

In some cases, UN police officers sent to Bosnia and Kosovo to improve policing have been caught buying sex from trafficked women. In Bosnia, where international personnel monitor the local police, 18 officers have been sent home for sexual misconduct, according to the UN. In Kosovo, where internationals do actual police work, 10 have been sent home, including an American who reportedly fell in love with a prostitute.

Critics have accused the UN and other international organizations of not taking the problem seriously and, in a few cases, of covering up for their employees. Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN investigator from Lincoln, Neb., won a lawsuit in August after being fired in 2001 while looking into reports of international involvement in trafficking in Bosnia.

In one case, she investigated an American police officer accused of buying a prostitute for $1,000. Another case involved a NATO soldier suspected of smuggling four Moldovans into Bosnia.

In the past two years, however, efforts have increased to stop the trafficking. In Bosnia, the UN set up an antitrafficking police unit in July 2001; in its first year it conducted more than 600 raids, closing down 124 nightclubs and rescuing 182 women. In Kosovo, a similar police unit closed 54 suspected brothels last year and rescued 131 women.

Page: 1 | 2