Human Slavery

When Tatiana, 23, a nurse from the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, began planning her vacation in Greece last year, she knew she had to be careful. Her country has plenty of scam artists, and she had heard worrying stories of counterfeit tickets being issued and passports stolen. So she took a recommendation from a childhood friend, who put her in touch with a travel agency that offered her seven days all inclusive in sunny Athens for $800. A few days later she was in the back of a hired car, bound she hoped for the Mediterranean and an early glimpse of summer. Instead she woke up in Hungary. After taking a sip from a spiked orange drink she had passed out, waking to the words: "You are no longer in Moldova. You have been sold."

Over the next four days Tatiana (her name and all those of women victims in this story have been changed) was smuggled in the backs of cars across successive borders through Serbia and eventually to a dusty little town in the war-torn province of Kosovo, where she was sold for a second time to two burly Albanian bar owners named Nazif and Luli. They forced her to have sex with as many as four clients a night. "One of them would hit me, then give me something to wipe my tears with and lead me across the floor to a client, smiling," Tatiana recalls. "It was impossible to disobey." Under constant supervision, even in the bathroom, she once asked a foreign client, a Swiss consultant, for help. The man offered the bar owner $5,000 for Tatiana's freedom but was rebuffed. For that effort she was severely beaten.

Tatiana was comparatively lucky. One night two minders were driving her to a neighboring town when they passed through a checkpoint manned by Russian peacekeepers, who spotted her in the back seat and handed her over to an international aid agency. Most women like her never get that chance. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 are shipped out of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union into Western Europe and North America each year, most of them to work in brothels and nightclubs against their will, according to the International Organization for Migration (iom). The region is the fastest-growing point of origin for the trafficking in women for sexual purposes, a modern form of slavery dubbed "one of the most disgraceful faces" of contemporary society by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, an organization that has seen its share of disgraceful practices.

Once limited to a few countries in southeast Asia, the trade is going global, a byproduct of falling borders, the ease of international travel and, in Europe, the growing gap between rich and poor. Its impact is hard to overestimate, destroying families, fueling corruption and providing a fat new source of revenue for organized crime groups. But it is the degradation of human victims that has drawn the most attention. "This is more than a women issue," said a veteran U.S. investigator. "It's a political problem, an economic problem, a migration problem and most of all a question of human rights." One investigator familiar with the trade called it "modern day slavery with deception and coercion and violence at its core."

Details of women trafficking are hard to come by. Like the drug trade, it takes place in a shadowy world where victims and witnesses are intimidated into silence. But dozens of interviews by Time with investigators, traffickers and women freed from bondage paint a harsh picture of medieval abuse and cruelty: during off hours women are kept in cellars, sleeping on the floor or on tables, surviving on fast food. Those who balk are raped, beaten or burned with cigarettes. A 19-year-old Moldovan woman rescued recently from Kosovo reported not seeing daylight for a month. "I never thought this was possible. These people are animals," she said. One Albanian gang branded its women with tattoos to prevent them from being stolen.Lately, the practice has surfaced in the Balkans in a particularly brutal form. Bosnia, Macedonia and Yugoslavia, once mainly source countries for women lured into the trade (during the Kosovo refugee crisis, traffickers combed the camps for "recruits"), have now become transit and destination countries as well. The influx of international peacekeepers, U.N. administrators and development officials in Bosnia and Kosovo has created a burgeoning market for sex workers, while an infrastructure battered by war has allowed traffickers to flourish. Investigators say the Balkans have become a kind of training ground for women and girls brought in against their will from Eastern Europe and bound for Albania, southern Italy and points west.

While some Western officials have begun to recognize the more shocking aspects of the trade—and last week's initiative by Britain's Tony Blair and Italy's Premier Giuliano Amato to reinforce border checks in the Balkans is one of the more promising examples—the elusiveness of traffickers and the unwillingness of victims to testify have rendered most law enforcement efforts ineffective. Moreover, victims are still being blamed for allowing themselves to be seduced into the trade. Throughout Europe, police and prosecutors continue to view the trafficking of women as a permutation of unpleasant but ultimately intractable social ills. "Too often," notes Helga Konrad, coordinator of a task force on trafficking in human beings recently set up in Vienna, "victims are jailed as prostitutes and traffickers allowed to go free." Economic conditions in Eastern and Central Europe are chiefly to blame. In Moldova, for example, the economy has shrunk by almost 50% over the past decade; average monthly salary is around $30. Four households out of five are living below subsistence levels, and more than 90% of people are materially worse off than they were under communism. Unemployment is so bad, according to one diplomat, that "all these girls have to do all day is walk the streets." Says Ala Mandacanu, one of the few Moldovan politicians not afraid to speak out on the issue: "People here are willing to do anything for money."

In luring targets with the promise of escape, the traffickers can capitalize on more lenient visa requirements and lax law enforcement. Profits are considerable. The initial investment may be small—a few hundred dollars for dental work, new clothes and a plane ticket—but the payoff is upwards of $1,000 in Bucharest and $5,000 in Rome, plus prostitution profits generated along the way. The beauty of the trade, as one investigator puts it, lies in the fact that the victims can be sold and resold, producing income almost indefinitely. "It's better than mutual funds," quips the official. The iom figures the worldwide annual turnover from sex industry trafficking ranges from $6 billion to $12 billion.

Traffickers are loosely organized, investigators say, sometimes operating under the aegis of larger criminal organizations and sometimes working alone. At the point of contact—where women are first approached with an offer to travel or work abroad—recruiters are often former trafficking victims or others adept at gaining girls' trust. In Moldova, known recruiters include the daughter of a village priest and the wife of a policeman. They also routinely use classified ads in newspapers or on the Internet. "Jobs for girls without complexes, $800 a week," read one published not long ago in Makler, the Chisinau newspaper. When a Moldovan reporter disguising her identity called one of these numbers, a woman who identified herself as "Angela" offered work "without intimate relationships" for up to $500 a week, and work "involving intimate relationships," for an undisclosed amount more. Asked about the rumors of forced prostitution or slavery, "Angela" replied: "Don't worry. You will be under the protection of Ôimmigration.'" She used the English word as if it were some kind of guarantee. A trafficking victim later identified "Angela" to local police, but they have yet to make an arrest.

Once the victims are lured from home, their travel papers are usually taken away. The girls are then threatened with being turned over to local authorities as illegal aliens if they step out of line. Later, handlers tell them that they have been sold and that the only way to obtain their "freedom" is to work off their "debt," a threat that is repeated as many times as the woman changes hands.

It can get nastier. When Marina, a 25-year-old from Chisinau was met in Budapest by a stocky Bosnian calling himself Ivo, he told her she was too ugly for prostitution and might have to be sold by the kilogram for her organs. Ivo then took her and a friend to a hideaway in northeastern Bosnia and raped them repeatedly over the next two days, introducing them to prospective buyers in the intervals. In Montenegro and Serbia, several women describe being lined up naked in the hotel room where they were held, in a kind of inspection line for slave shoppers. In Kosovo, women have been warned that if they try to flee they will be identified as Serbs because of their Slavic features and murdered as members of the hated minority.

For victims who do manage to escape, such memories take a heavy toll. "My soul is stained," said 19-year-old Olga recently, picking at her food back home in Moldova. "I can't forgive myself for trusting people." Across town, Marina says she wakes up most nights in a cold sweat, pale and shaking. She gobbles tranquilizers and smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. "People look at me and think I am either a junkie or an alcoholic," she told a reporter, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder. "This is no life."

Law enforcement authorities in Eastern and Central Europe have in some cases actively abetted the trade. In 14 of 40 trafficking cases uncovered in Bosnia in a 12-month period ending last March, local and international police as well as foreign peacekeepers were implicated both as clients and, in several cases, as traffickers. "The majority of [local police]," a subsequent U.N. report asserted, "are guilty of awareness of the brothels and failure to act." Elsewhere, arrests have been rare. But the absence of resources is also partly to blame. "We have a national plan," says Larisa Miculet, a senior official in Chisinau's chief prosecutor's office. "But we have no money." In Chisinau the vice squad doesn't even have its own car.

Poverty combined with a lack of interest in a crime that ultimately victimizes foreigners has led to some surprisingly callous responses. Authorities in the Czech Republic, for example, have stamped foreign victims' passports with an "undesirable" mark and dumped the women at the border, according to a recent report from the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. In Moldova, even a doctor in the venereal disease clinic treating women who have returned to the country believes their troubles are in most cases self-inflicted. "A woman's sexual behavior is entirely her responsibility," declared Viorel Kalistru.

Prosecution is almost always problematic. Traffickers know that cases depend on victims testifying, so in places like Kosovo they are sure to give their women "contracts," written in English for the benefit of English-speaking U.N. police. Traumatized and deeply humiliated by their ordeal, most women fail to testify even when given the chance. One-third of the women "rescued" in Kosovo in a six-month period last year refused to incriminate their captors. Twice peacekeepers have raided a railside nightclub in the south central town of Ferizai, and twice they came up empty-handed after the girls failed to incriminate the owner, even though purplish cigarette burns were plainly visible along their upper arms.

Nor is much done for victims who do want to tell their story. In Moldova, women are being returned by U.S.- and European-funded agencies almost weekly. But they receive little protection or support. Marina flew back to Chisinau to give testimony against the recruiter "Angela," as well as the man who raped her in Bosnia. But no sooner had she read her statement at police headquarters than she began receiving threatening phone calls. "If you testify," she said later, "you have to live in fear."

Nevertheless, efforts to slow the trade are gathering momentum. A year ago the commerce in women was low on the list of international organizations' priorities. Today, thanks in part to growing concern about trafficking in asylum seekers—a different category of chattel—new attempts have been proposed to prosecute the guilty. Not long ago the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O.S.C.E.) set up a task force to coordinate initiatives throughout the Balkans. Witness protection programs are on the books in a few countries. And Kosovo, under U.N. administration, last year drafted a comprehensive antitrafficking law, though the province remains chronically short of police to enforce it.

On the ground, Western governments have focused mainly on warning victims or trying to shame potential clients. In Moldova, the U.S. embassy funded two half-hour programs about the trade to be broadcast on state television and in schools. In Kosovo, the iom printed 20,000 pamphlets—in English—to target the international community there. The pamphlets recount the true story of a young woman, Maria, who lived eight to a room and was forced to have sex with up to five men a night. "You pay for a night," it admonishes readers. "She pays with her life."

Meanwhile, back in Chisinau, Tatiana is struggling to piece that life back together. She testified against her captors, including her childhood friend Oxana, but police have yet to make an arrest.

She has been threatened over the phone for speaking out. "I try to look ahead to the future, but I can't forget what has happened to me," she said last week. "There is no justice here." Women like Tatiana still provide the best hope for fighting the trade. They should not be left to tell their stories alone.