Posted on 09/27/2003 6:52:14 AM PDT by Loyalist
This week George W. Bush declared another war -- on the global sex trade, a problem in need of 'urgent attention and moral clarity.' Is the U.S. President being too dramatic? No, the Globe's MARK MACKINNON reports from tiny Moldova. So many of its girls have been shanghaied to the fleshpots of the world that the impoverished former Soviet republic is starting to run out.
Sofia, Moldova -- She says her name is Valentina and she's six years old. But that's all she'll say before bolting to take refuge behind a nearby cow.
Valentina has good reason to be wary of strangers. Girls have been vanishing from her village, and some of them are not much older than she is.
It's afternoon in Sofia, and elderly people are chatting in front of the mayor's office, kids are playing in the schoolyard and young men are working the fields. But there are no young women walking the muddy, potholed streets of this tiny farming community in southern Moldova. Few remain among Sofia's 1,600 residents, and there are almost none whatsoever between the ages of 15 and 25.
No one really wants to talk about the situation -- it's almost taboo -- and Vasile Schiopu has heard only whisperings of what has been going on. Yet the 20-year-old farmer can't help but wonder where so many of the girls he went to high school with have gone. His graduating class's five-year reunion is supposed to be next summer. He doesn't expect many of the girls to show up.
Local residents profess ignorance, but Mr. Schiopu's older sister has given him a sense of what has happened to her friends. They not only left their village but their country as well, and "a lot of the girls are prostitutes now."
Most, he believes, were tricked into it. "They don't know where they are going. They just think that, outside Moldova, they'll make more money and get big houses. They go to get good jobs and a career."
Few find it. They think they're going to Western countries, such as Canada and the United States, and they leave excited by the promise of a better life. Many tell their families they're heading for Italy, but wind up instead in the brothels of Kosovo, Macedonia and Dubai. Few ever come back and some are never even heard from again. It's a problem not just for Sofia.
This week U.S. President George W. Bush used a large chunk of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly to challenge the UN to tackle human trafficking and the sex trade, issues he said require "urgent attention and moral clarity."
It's unlikely that he had faraway Moldova in mind, but experts here say that empty villages like Sofia are the equivalent of the smouldering Twin Towers. In any war on human trafficking and the global sex trade, Moldova is Ground Zero.
"Nobody can say how many Moldovans have been trafficked abroad," explains Ana Revenco, head of La Strada, an organization that helps to repatriate Moldovan girls found in brothels around the world. "But there are thousands working in slavery-like conditions, being sexually exploited. Tens of thousands. Of that I'm really sure."
Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but trafficking women from Eastern Europe across international borders to supply the sex trade in the West is a relatively new phenomenon, sparked largely by the economic chaos created by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.
The number of women brought into Western Europe -- some of them, no doubt, en route to North America --- exploded from next to none in 1989 to an estimated 80,000 annually six years later. Today the International Organization for Migration estimates the annual figure to be near 120,000.
Human trafficking, now called "the fastest-growing type of crime" by Interpol, is a $7-billion-a-year (U.S.) business. As the young women are being transported to market, a thick network of players takes a cut: passport "doctors," false employment and visa agencies, taxi drivers, pimps, brothel owners and border guards. Interpol suspects that large trafficking gangs may employ as many as 40 people to take care of logistics alone, from transportation to border crossings to housing.
The farther a girl is transported from home, the higher the price she fetches. Recruiters in Moldova are believed to receive $500 for each girl they introduce to a trafficker. In Western Europe, pimps are known to pay as much as $10,000 for an attractive Moldovan. The younger, the better, with a premium paid for virgins.
In Soviet times, Moldova was the smallest but among the more affluent of the USSR's 15 constituent republics. Hilly, with a countryside dominated by rolling vineyards, it was famous for its wines, some of the finest exports the Soviet Union ever produced. Now, this independent state wedged between Ukraine and Romania is impoverished, and the only thing it sends abroad is its people.
"Once, this village had 400 young people in it, now there's less than half that," says Maria Rotaru, director of Sofia's only school. Most students leave as soon as they graduate. "The village is starting to become empty."
Ms. Rotaru believes that most of her former students are working at odd jobs but says that stories are creeping back about young women being tricked into the sex trade. She's uncomfortable with the subject, but says the school recently began to talk to students about traps they may encounter in life.
Still, it's difficult to persuade a young woman who has grown up in poverty that she has anything to lose by taking a chance. "A lot of the girls who leave come from bad families," says Ilya Cizmizi, 23, who says he, like Mr. Schiopu, has had many of his female classmates depart for places unknown. "They were single mothers, very poor. They were forced to leave."
Poverty may inspire a young woman to leave, but many of her countrymen are eager to help pave the way. Like dozens of other villages that dot the landscape, Sofia is preyed upon by a well-organized network that profits handsomely from poor women with dreams of a better life.
"The traffickers go straight into the villages and identify people who might want to go abroad, then they disappear with them," says Veronica Lupu, general secretary of the Centre for the Prevention of Trafficking of Women, based in Chisinau, the Moldovan capital.
"The people in the villages are very poor. They don't even have money for bread. They only know that they need to leave to make money. These girls are not worldly, some of them have not even seen the next village. It's very easy for the traffickers to lie to them."
Ms. Lupu calls the result a social catastrophe for Moldova, something the outside world is only now starting to realize. "Every year, thousands more women are taken. In every Western country now, there are prostitutes from Moldova."
Judging by what her friend was saying, life in Israel sounded almost too good to be true. As she listened jealously, "Nina" (she'd agreed to tell her story only if she weren't identified) knew that she too wanted a nice job in a restaurant and a place of her own. Her friend was only too happy to give her the phone number of the person who'd arranged her passport and passage out of Moldova.
At 18, Nina considered the decision to leave Tiraspol, a city less than 100 kilometres east of Sofia, a no-brainer. Her father had died the year before and she hated living at home with her alcoholic, abusive, mother. She had finished high school, but her job at the local linen factory paid just $10 a month -- not nearly enough to live on, even on the rare occasion her paycheque arrived in time.
Before long, the diminutive strawberry-blonde teen had met with a woman who said she could get a passport and a train ticket to Moscow where her transportation to Israel would be arranged.
"She told me I'd work in a restaurant as a waitress or washing dishes, or maybe taking care of children," Nina says in her native Russian, fiddling with a lock of her shoulder-length hair.
Upon reaching Moscow, she was given a bed in an apartment with six other girls, all of them Moldovan. They didn't talk much, but Nina says all of them believed they were on their way to good jobs and a better life.
After a week in Moscow, she was put on a plane to Egypt. It was there that she finally realized she'd been deceived. She can't remember the exact time frame from what happened next, but she does recall landing in Cairo, being driven out of the city and then being forced at gunpoint to walk through the desert.
"We began to realize then what the situation was, but we couldn't run away because a lot of Arab men with guns were watching over us," she says. "All I remember is that it was hot and there were a lot of snakes around."
When they reached what she thinks was the Israeli border, the men cut a hole in the fence, then told the girls to get into a truck waiting on the other side. They were made to lie flat in the back under carpets as the vehicle drove on to Tel Aviv.
The destination at the end of the two-day overland journey was an apartment near what Nina thinks was the centre of the city. There, she and the other girls were made to stand in a row before a group of men.
"They told us to take off our clothes, and if they liked us, they bought us," she says with a mild quiver in her voice, as she sits with knees together and arms crossed defensively. Her faded blue jean jacket is buttoned to the neck.
"I knew at that point what we would be doing, but I couldn't get away."
The following day she was taken out for a haircut and then driven to another apartment that was to be, in effect, her prison for the next nine months. She lived what she describes as a hellish existence as a sex slave always on call. There was one room for sleeping and another for receiving the men who came in droves shopping for sex.
She and the other girls were never allowed outside; their food was brought to them. "I would stay in the apartment all day. Because I was a new girl, I would get 18 to 20 clients a day."
At first, she was paid nothing because her pimp said she "owed" him thousands of dollars for her passport and journey from Moldova. In nine months of prostitution, she received only $800.
Her ordeal ended sooner than it does for many girls. This spring, Israeli police acted on a tip and raided the apartment, then deported Nina and the other girls for having false passports.
Back in Moldova now, Nina finds herself at the centre of an international police investigation. She lives under constant guard for fear the traffickers will try to keep her from testifying against them. She still doesn't know why her friend tricked her, or what has happened to the girl since.
Nina now has a boyfriend and is pregnant, but can't stop wondering whether life wouldn't be better if she could just leave Moldova again.
The rot in Moldova seems to go a long way up. Doru Ciocanu, a researcher with the IOM's office in Chisinau, says that, for the traffickers to be as successful as they are in this tiny country, "you can only suppose that there are very high-level persons protecting the trafficking and the traffickers. Otherwise, how would it be possible for them to get passports so easily.
"I mean very high-level people. You can only imagine how much money is involved here."
Mr. Bush surprised many UN observers when he lumped human trafficking in with combating terrorism and helping to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq as the main challenges facing the world body. He called the sex trade a modern form of slavery and said the recruiting of girls --- some "as young as five" -- affects hundreds of thousands of people every year.
It's the kind of issue the U.S. President craves, one with moral high ground that is easy to find. "There's a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life -- an underground of brutality and lonely fear," he told the assembly.
"Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery."
By Mr. Bush's standards, there are many guilty parties. According to data collected by the IOM, the women who disappear from Moldova reappear in the brothels of nearly every country in the Balkans, the Middle East and Western Europe. In the process, they often cross half a dozen borders, seemingly without major hindrance.
The U.S. government has taken the lead in fighting this. Pushed by women's-rights groups, Congress three years ago passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which calls for the annual appraisal of foreign governments' efforts to combat human trafficking and the imposition of sanctions on those who don't do enough.
The bill sparked similar anti-trafficking legislation across Eastern Europe, including Moldova and other "source" countries such as Russia and Ukraine, but observers say that so far the impact on the volume of traffic has been negligible. The measures taken by Moldova -- introducing a new law and arresting a few small-fish recruiters -- have only highlighted just how little the country can do to help itself.
Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union 12 years ago, the nation has watched its economy shrink by almost 40 per cent, as out-dated industries have failed to compete with the best of the West after the collapse of communism. Matters were made worse when the Russian-speaking enclave of Transdniester, a region that holds much of the country's economic potential, declared itself separate from the rest of the country, where most people speak a dialect of Romanian. This move sparked a brief war and an uneasy truce that leaves the country split in two more than a decade later.
The IOM estimates that, of the 4.5 million people who once made Moldova one of the more densely populated Soviet regions, somewhere from 600,000 to a million have left, most of them illegally. The average annual income has fallen from $2,000 (U.S.) in 1992 to just $220 today, marking the country with a level of poverty that has driven many Moldovans to desperation. Interpol also believes the country is a prime source for the trade in human organs, and two years ago, the regime in Chisinau briefly banned foreign adoptions for fear that babies were being sold abroad for their body parts.
When it comes to the sex trade, some aid-agency workers here believe that even family members have collected commissions for introducing girls to traffickers. La Strada estimates that, in 15 per cent of its cases, a "very close relative" took part.
The aid workers also agree with Mr. Bush that the girls are suddenly getting younger and younger. "When I started here three years ago, none of the girls was under 15," Ms. Revenco says. "Now we're seeing girls who are 11 and 12."
And that applies just to the few girls the agency manages to recover -- about 100 last year. Ms. Revenco is sure the real story is even worse. "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's been a destruction of the system of values here. All anyone thinks about now is money, money, money."
The ad in the paper is easy to overlook. It's tiny and uses no boldface type to help it stand out on the classified page of Moldova's popular Makler newspaper. "Information and consultations for those who would like to study in Canada," it reads. There's a phone number at the bottom.
"This could be about trafficking," says the IOM's Doru Ciocanu. "Who knows?"
Surrounding the ad are more than a hundred others like it, some in Romanian, Moldova's official first language, some in Russian, the lingua franca from Soviet times. Some promise jobs, others just visa consultations. But the lure is always the same: the chance to go to the West, whether it be Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Germany or Great Britain, and make a better life.
Convicting a trafficker on the basis of a newspaper ad is next to impossible, Mr. Ciocanu says. To make even one arrest, the police would have to find a woman willing to go undercover, to take the fake passport and to allow herself to be transported out of the country. To link the traffickers with the sex rings, she'd have to go even further -- likely right to the point where a pimp exchanges money with a trafficker. The Moldovan police simply don't have the resources or the will to conduct such investigations.
Yet ads like this are known to be a starting point in the trafficking chain as those who respond wind up on the traffickers' radar as people eager to leave, for whatever reason . As well as poverty and a lack of sophistication, Moldovan women may have an especially sinister reason for being easy prey. According to some sources, as many as 80 per cent of those who wind up abroad were the victims of abuse, often sexual, at home.
"The only thing they're thinking of," says Mr. Ciocanu, "is to run away from this hell."
The IOM also believes that, even though some women such as Nina are shipped to the Middle East and North America, most who are sucked into the sex trade end up in brothels across the Balkans. The agency's unit in Kosovo, for example, says that two out of every three trafficking victims are Moldovan.
"They might think they're going to a place like Canada," says Ms. Revenco of La Strada, and realize what's really going on "only when they get to some other place and see their passport being handed over to the bartender in exchange for money."
Moldovans need no visa to travel legally to Romania or Ukraine, where their passports are often taken away and they're brought to such major trafficking centres as Timisoara in western Romania and Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odessa. From there, now powerless, they are shipped out -- often to Balkan destinations because the thousands of relatively well-paid NATO peacekeepers in the region provide a ready market.
War is almost always good for business, says Ms. Lupu of the Centre for the Prevention of Trafficking of Women, which now expects to see a surge in Moldovan women turning up in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It's a growing industry," she says sadly. "To sell a person into slavery is a very good business."
Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's Moscow correspondent.
Bush: 'The trade in human beings . . . must not be allowed'
In his address Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly, U.S. President George W. Bush outlines an issue in need of "urgent attention and moral clarity:"
There's another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year --much of which is used to finance organized crime.
There's a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life -- an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.
This problem has appeared in my own country, and we are working to stop it. The Protect Act, which I signed into law this year, makes it a crime for any person to enter the United States, or for any citizen to travel abroad, for the purpose of sex tourism involving children.
The Department of Justice is actively investigating sex tour operators and patrons, who can face up to 30 years in prison. Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the United States is using sanctions against governments to discourage human trafficking.
The victims of this industry also need help from members of the United Nations. And this begins with clear standards and the certainty of punishment under laws of every country. Today, some nations make it a crime to sexually abuse children abroad. Such conduct should be a crime in all nations. Governments should inform travellers of the harm this industry does, and the severe punishments that will fall on its patrons.
The American government is committing $50-million to support the good work of organizations that are rescuing women and children from exploitation, and giving them shelter and medical treatment and the hope of a new life. I urge other governments to do their part.
We must show new energy in fighting back an old evil. Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended in its last strongholds, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time.
I emailed FOX about that...rec'd no reply.
My heart breaks for the women, and especially the little girls forced into this truly horrid form of slavery. Dear God...
President Bush, how about putting y(our) money where your heart is, and bumping that up to $15 billion. Which is more important: fighting AIDS, or sex slavery?
I cast my vote on taking the African AIDS money and using it to stop the slave trade.
Good point.
Hey President Bush, why don't you enforce U.S. laws on illegal immigration?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.