The Best American Crime Writing (44 page)

“One more question,” I said. “Have you ever seen me before in your life?”

We’d spent an hour about three feet from her—at one point she’d even given us a smile. Now, she looked straight at me, touched one hand to her hair, and laughed.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

Some do escape. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is charged with sheltering migrants and sending them back to their home countries, rescued more than 700 women from the Balkans and Italy during the year 2000. Elena, who was “owned” by Leku, escaped into police custody in a Macedonian town named Kumanovo, only to be sold by the police back to another bar owner. Through the help of a sympathetic client, she finally managed to make it to an IOM office in Macedonia, where she was taken care of and eventually put on a plane for home. There she was installed in an IOM safe house in Chişinâu, the capital of Moldova, and given psychiatric counseling and job training.

Another Moldovan woman, whom I’ll call Nina, left her husband to work in Italy as a waitress or cleaning lady because her son had a degenerative disease and she needed money to pay for his
treatment. She wound up getting trafficked to Romania, where she was drugged and put on a train to Belgrade. Unable to buy her freedom, she wound up being sold again, this time to a brothel owner in the Bosnian town of Doboj, where she discovered that her husband had gotten her pregnant before she left. Her owner—unable to persuade her to have an abortion—took her to a corrupt doctor, who she suspects gave her an injection that induced miscarriage. A customer at the bar who found out what had happened slipped her the equivalent of $200 and offered his help. She eventually escaped to a local IOM office and made it back to Chişinâu, though she never told her husband the details of what had happened to her.

Inevitably, the women who are driven to escape are the ones who have suffered the most trauma and are most urgently in need of care. But they are also the ones who have the most damning evidence against the traffickers and, theoretically, the most reason to want to put them in jail. This is where the agendas of the IOM and U.N. prosecutors diverge slightly. With no witness protection program yet in place to shelter the women, the IOM argues that their safety will be compromised if they are detained in Kosovo. Furthermore, there is insufficient funding to lodge them in safe houses for the duration of a criminal trial. For their part, U.N. prosecutors argue that in the long run the problem cannot be solved—in other words, the traffickers will never end up behind bars—if these women don’t provide testimony.

The problem is made more complicated by the thicket of legal issues surrounding trafficking and prostitution. In the United States, gathering evidence of prostitution is fairly straightforward. Since it is nearly impossible to prove that a customer is not the prostitute’s boyfriend, undercover cops pose as customers in order to prove prostitution charges. In Kosovo, however, the U.N. police force was until very recently prohibited from surreptitious intelligence gathering, and the Kosovo Police Service—the local police corps—has not yet been sufficiently trained in undercover work.
(KPS officers, who are paid only $230 a month, are also highly vulnerable to corruption, making security breaches almost unavoidable.) In addition, most of Europe has extremely rigorous standards for admitting into a trial evidence gained by an agent provocateur. A police action that in this country would be considered a standard “buy and bust” operation is more likely in Europe to be considered entrapment and therefore excluded as evidence.

As a result, the prostitutes themselves are needed to provide testimony against the pimps. Witness protection concerns aside, this raises legal issues. A woman who accuses someone of being her pimp is implicitly admitting to prostitution, which is in itself punishable by jail. To get around this, Section 8 of United Nations Regulation 2001/4—which supersedes preexisting local laws—declares that providing evidence of trafficking protects the woman against charges of prostitution. “Section 8 understands that in many cases, but not all, a foreign woman in Kosovo finds herself a stranger in a strange land,” says Michael Hartmann, an international prosecutor for the U.N. in Kosovo, “and that she was basically not given a choice. Even though she became a prostitute voluntarily, one could assume that she is someone who would not ordinarily do that.”

Because she is at risk, it is not in her best interest to remain in Kosovo long enough to provide testimony against her owner in a criminal trial. As a result, U.N. regulations allow for videotaped testimony to be admitted in court. This has its own shortcomings, however. A good defense attorney can argue that his inability to cross-examine his client’s accuser weakens the value of the evidence, and—more insidiously—video testimony can even be viewed skeptically by a biased judge. Major criminal trials in Kosovo have two international judges sit on a panel with three local, or “lay,” judges. This panel hears all evidence and then comes to a verdict. The lay judges, however, occasionally display the prejudices of the
highly patriarchal Kosovar culture. They tend to blame the woman for her troubles, in other words. “The majority of rape cases are fabricated by the alleged victims, seeking revenge, or trying to pressure the defendant to force a marriage proposal,” one judge, according to an OSCE report, declared before a rape trial.

Even a perfect system, however, would face daunting enforcement challenges. New U.N. regulations have made trafficking itself a crime, apart from the related issues of assault, rape, forced prostitution, etc. Trafficking is defined, in part, by the level of deception involved: If a trafficker tells a woman she is going to be a waitress and then transports her across a border to sell her into prostitution, he is guilty of trafficking whether she went voluntarily or not. As a result, traffickers have changed their strategy to get around this new, looser definition of the crime. Instead of slipping across borders at night, for example, they pay off border guards so that the women have legitimate visas in their passports. They coach the women in what to say if they are questioned by the police—some of whom are corrupt and have been bought off in the first place. They have placed informants throughout the local and U.N. administrations. And they have started offering the trafficked women just enough money to keep them in the game.

“Ultimately the problem is the economic conditions that make prostitution the only thing these women can do,” says Alison Jolly. “Even when jobs come onstream, it’s not going to be the women who get them. For some countries it will be decades before the economic situation is such that you don’t need to take the risks associated with trafficking. They think, Maybe, just maybe, I’ll find something better out there.”

In late March 2001, two women were arrested in Chişmâu for selling illegal meat in plastic bags. Suspicious, the authorities tested it and confirmed their worst fears: The meat was human. The women
said that they had gotten it at the state cancer clinic, and that they had been driven by poverty to sell it.

Only weeks earlier, the World Health Organization had warned that Moldova’s economic collapse had created a thriving transplant market in human kidneys and other body parts. Some people were voluntarily selling their organs for cash, and others were being tricked into it in a ruse similar to the one used to lure women into prostitution. Moldova—pummeled by droughts, cold spells, and the 1998 Russian financial crisis—has become by far the poorest country in Europe. The average salary is $30 a month, unemployment is reportedly at 25 percent (though much higher in rural areas), and up to one million Moldovans—nearly a quarter of the country—have gone abroad to work. Some villages have lost half of their population, and virtually all their young people. Every year these migrants wire home an average of $120 million, which is equivalent to half the national budget. Two-thirds of the budget, however, is sent right back overseas to service the nation’s foreign debt. With productivity only 40 percent of what it was under the Soviets, Moldova has voted back in a Communist government. It is the only former Soviet republic to have returned so unabashedly to its past.

Teun and I have left Kosovo. It is now several months later, and we’re driving through the emptied and sullen countryside of Moldova. We have come to see this place where, according to a significant proportion of the trafficked women, life is even worse than in the brothels of Kosovo. It’s a low, dark day that will soon deteriorate into a pounding rainstorm that will fill up the rivers and wash out the roads and force the villagers to take off their shoes and carry them under their jackets. That’s what you do when you own only one pair.

Village after village stands nearly empty, the brightly painted wooden gates of the houses hanging open and the weeds growing
up around the palings. Cornstalks are piled against the fences to dry, and an occasional horse cart rattles by with an old man at the reins. Sodden hills checkered with woods roll south toward the town of Kagul and the Romanian border. There are no workers in the fields, no cars on the roads, no children in the houses. It is as if a great plague had swept through, leaving behind a landscape out of medieval Europe, out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
. Kagul is the center of trafficking in southern Moldova, and we are with a woman I’ll call Natalia, who was trafficked through Kagul and just made it home a few weeks ago. Natalia’s story is so horrendous that I’m tempted to think she has embellished it, but at this point I’ve heard and read so many accounts of trafficked women, and the brutality is so consistent, that I’ve given up looking for some other explanation. These are troubled, traumatized women who may have distorted, misremembered, or even fabricated details of their experience, but their testimonies are unfortunately too similar to be doubted.

Natalia grew up in a desperately poor village named Haragij, where people survived on whatever they could grow, and children had to bring their own firewood to school in the winter. At age 16 she was married against her will to a violent alcoholic who wound up beating her so badly that he fractured her skull and almost killed her. She says the police in her town were so corrupt that they had to be bribed in order to even consider arresting him, so she decided to leave and look for work in Chişjnâu instead. She had two young children, and she was determined to support them.

She wound up being trafficked twice. The first time she fell for the standard scam: A trafficker offered her a good job in Italy, but she was sold to a brothel in Macedonia. With the help of the IOM, she eventually escaped, but when she made it back to Moldova, she found out that her young sister had been trafficked as well. Now knowing
that world inside out, she decided to go back to Chişinâu and get herself sold into prostitution one more time. It was the only way she could think of to get back to the Balkans and bring her sister home.

It didn’t take long. Within a few days she met a woman who passed her the phone number of a man who supposedly could get her work in Italy. She met with him—a well-dressed and impressive businessman of 35 or so—and he offered to put her up in his apartment. She soon found herself with about forty other women in an apartment somewhere in Chişinâu. From this point on, her life would no longer be her own.

The women who didn’t have passports were given fake ones and charged for them, which was the beginning of their debt. They were first taken by car to Constanta, Romania, and from there to the banks of the Danube, which they crossed at night by boat. Now they were in Serbia. There they were forced to walk across fields at night to a road, where they were picked up by a man named Milos, who she says took them to the White Star cafe-bar in the town of Kraljevo. There were dozens of women—Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians—being held in the basement of the bar, waiting to be bought by brokers for the Albanian Mafia.

Natalia spent several weeks there and was then moved across the lightly guarded internal border from Serbia into Kosovo. There she was sold to a place called #1, in the town of Mitrovica. The women at #1 were all on drugs—pot, morphine, pharmaceuticals, coke—and fell into two categories: slaves and girlfriends of the owner, a Serb Natalia referred to as Dajan. The girlfriends were the most beautiful ones and were given a certain degree of privilege in exchange for keeping order among the regular prostitutes, whom they held in contempt. One girlfriend tried to force a new Moldovan girl to have sex with her, and when Natalia stood up for the girl, she was beaten by the owner. In revenge, Natalia says, she found some rusty thumbtacks and put them on the woman’s office
chair, and when the woman sat on them she got an infection that sent her to the hospital. Natalia never saw her again.

The schedule was brutal. They had to strip-dance from 8:00
P.M.
until 6:00
A.M.
, taking time to go in back with clients if called upon, and they had to be up at 8:00
A.M.
in case there were clients during the day. She says the customers were a mix of local Serbs and United Nations personnel. The prostitutes made around $30 per client and $1 for each drink the client bought, which was all put toward their debt. Natalia owed $1,500, but the owner deducted for food, lodging, clothes, and, of course, drugs, particularly cocaine, which the girls freebased in back. The new girls lived at the bar, and the ones who had repaid more than half their debt lived in an apartment, because the owner didn’t want the experienced ones warning the new ones about what was going to happen to them. If a particular girl got close to repaying her debt, the owner sold her off to someone else, and she had to start all over again.

One day, according to Natalia, Dajan’s brother killed an Albanian man at the bar, and the police finally came and shut the place down. The girls were hidden from the police before the raid, and Natalia was sold off to another bar in Mitrovica, but there her luck changed. The toilet had a small window in it, and she managed to crawl out and escape. She walked all night and made it to Priština, but instead of turning herself in to the IOM, she hitched a ride to Ferizaj. She had heard a rumor that her sister was in one of the Ferizaj bars, and she wanted to try to find her.