Global Policy Forum

By James Pringle

Pristina - The presence of Nato-led troops in Kosovo is supporting a new and sinister white slave trade trade, in which women from impoverished parts of Eastern Europe are being bought and sold into prostitution. The women, some as young as 16, are held captive by gangsters, often Albanian, and sell sexual favours to troops and businessmen in the seedy nightclubs springing up around Kosovo.

Others smuggled into the region from Moldova, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and beyond are moved further on, into Albania, across the Adriatic into Italy and from there to brothels in Western Europe, all the time under the "ownership" of organised crime. Even children are following similar routes, sold for adoption or, some say, for body parts.

International agencies trying to combat the trade say that it is expanding rapidly, despite efforts to rescue women from the clutches of the loosely organised, mafia-style gangs. They say the numbers are becoming too great for agencies to manage.

Kosovo was not, in the past, a destination for the East European sex trade, which began with the collapse of communism in 1991, but the lure of a 45,000-strong army and a large international component has proved an irresistible draw and bars and nightclubs are springing up across the province in places such as Gnjilane and Urosevac.

One at Slatina, just outside Pristina and near the HQ of Russian forces, is the Nightclub International, from which Italian Carabinieri rescued 12 young women last week. Their duties involved dispensing sexual favours, at about £30 for half an hour, to Russian and American Kfor troops and other foreign clients. "These girls who were rescued are terrified and don't understand what has happened to them," Pasquale Lupoli, chief of mission of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) in Pristina, said. "But they are now in a protected area where security is guaranteed."

The IOM, a little-known Geneva-based governmental agency, was originally set up to provide travel documents and an assistant network to migrants; instead, it is engaged increasingly in trying to help the thousands of girls who are now prisoners in the European sex trade. Signor Lupoli said that the number of such girls was rising so quickly that the agency was finding it very difficult to cope. The IOM had also had difficulties locating a non-government organisation (NGO) to agree to take care of them. One problem is that the girls are not refugees so do not come under, say, the UNHCR.

There was, Signor Lupoli said, also some danger. Albanian gangsters are searching for their "property" and IOM staff have received threats. In Kosovo, British troops are subject to a strict "no walking out" policy, but other nationalities' forces, such as the Russians, Americans and Italians, are less closely monitored. "None of our soldiers goes into these bars unless on an official mission," one British officer said. "If they did, they would find themselves on a military charge."

Of the dozen women rescued by the Carabinieri in Slatina, one had been raped at 14 and all had been maltreated. Like hundreds of similar victims, they had been sold several times as they were spirited across Balkan borders from owner to owner.

Greece, too, is a destination for the sex traders. Mirela Stan, 24, of Romania, and Hitara Antilsova, 29, from Ukraine, were found dead from the cold on a mountainside near the Greek-Bulgarian border in January. They perished in an effort to reach their "promised land", a Greek nightclub.

In Kosovo, the streets were empty recently after dark after a panic that teenage girls were being kidnapped by the Albanian mafia to be sold into prostitution. Indeed, some have disappeared.

These days, a young East European woman costs from £1,000 to £1,400 to buy. She first has to pay back her cost, then ostensibly she gets half of what she makes from prostitution, while the boss retains 50 per cent. Additionally, the girl has then to pay 10 per cent of her earnings for board. "Often she ends up with very little or nothing," an IOM official said. If she is lucky.