[ALBSA-Info] Times 2

[Agron Alibali]

                The Times (London)

 February 24, 2000, Thursday


Nightclub shame

James Pringle

 Troops of the Nato-led Kosovo Force (Kfor) guard 12
women in a safe house in
Pristina who are victims of the growing sex-slave
trade. It is not quite the
role originally envisaged for Kfor, which intervened
in the province last June
after hundreds of thousands of  Albanians  had been
forcibly expelled by Serb
authorities.

    Case-workers describe a 22-year-old Moldovan girl
housed there as
"adorable". "She is keeping up the morale of the other
girls in the safe house
with her good spirits, appetite for life and sense of
humour." The Moldovan girl
was kidnapped and later sold several times. Her dream
before being kidnapped had
been "to work as a nanny or look after babies", an IOM
official says. "She saw
no future in her home country which has a
deteriorating economy." The girl was
one of 12 rescued in January by Italian UN
peacekeepers from a nightclub just
outside Pristina, near the HQ of Russian forces. Her
"duties" at the club
involved dispensing sexual favours - about $ 50 for
half an hour - to Russian
and American Kfor troops, and  Albanian  clients.

    Evidence of the sex-slave trade is increasingly
common in the Balkans.
Recently, while waiting for a plane at Bucharest
airport, Romania, where flights
also depart for Kishinau, the Moldovan capital, I saw
several Balkan men waiting
with attractive young women to leave for Moldova. The
girls appeared to be
prostitutes. At one stage money was exchanged. One
attractive Moldovan girl was 
crying. In Greece, two girls from Romania and Ukraine
were found dead recently
in the snow on the border with Bulgaria. Police found
another 22 women who had
been wandering in the snow for three days after their
contact on the Greek side 
of the border failed to turn up.

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