by Otto Penzler
“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.
Natalia could not track down her sister, but at the Alo Bar she started talking to a beautiful and morose Moldovan woman named Niki. Niki was the girlfriend of the owner, an Albanian named Tus, and she said that she had been trafficked to Bosnia and then to the Apaci bar in Ferizaj, where she wound up in some kind of trouble.
“She told me that someone tried to help her and she thought that the owner noticed and so he sold her,” Natalia says.
We are squeezed into the backseat of a Rus
sian Lada on the way to Kagul. It has been raining hard all morning, and the creeks are up over the roads; the locals are using horses to drag cars through the washouts. “She told me there was something special on their faces,” Natalia goes on. “She was afraid they were journalists and she didn’t want to screw up her reputation back home. One of them questioned her, but he wasn’t in love with her—she said he was either a journalist … or maybe the police.”
Natalia spent hours talking to Niki, almost certainly the same woman we had tried to help. Either Natalia somehow heard about our experience and just repeated it to us, or the Kosovo underworld is so small and sordid—and the girls get shuffled around so much—that they just wind up meeting one another. Niki kept a diary, and during the time they were together she had let Natalia read it. I had told Niki my name when she came to our table, and in her journal she had referred to me as Sebastian Bach. She wrote that she must somehow have deserved the terrible things that happened to her, and so it didn’t make sense that we were trying to help her. The owner had been tipped off that there was going to be a raid, and she had actually hidden herself when the police came looking for her after we left. She was scared of them because she knew that most of them were also customers at the bar. She knew that only the OSCE could help her, but she didn’t want to escape before she had a little money to return home with. Also, she feared going to jail if she turned herself in to the police. In the meantime, she had taken some photos at the Alo Bar that she would try to send home to her mother. That way—however unrealistic the hope—her mother might be able to help her.
We arrive in Kagul in early afternoon, and Natalia takes us to the Flamingo Bar, which is near the bus station. It’s a cheap-looking place with Formica tabletops and louver blinds on the windows. This is where the traffickers try to pick up girls who are waiting for buses to Chişinâu or Bucharest. Well-dressed men come and go from tables, and Natalia hides her face from them because she’s afraid of being recognized. She got a crew cut a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to disguise herself, but she still lives in fear that they’ll somehow find out she escaped. I ask her if she would testify against her traffickers if she had the chance.
“What would I do about my family?” she asks. “The police would lock up one guy, and there are ten more … We’d have to leave the country. It’s better that I forget. I just pretend I don’t see anything, and I go on with my life.”
It was not until July 2001 that Moldova passed an anti-trafficking law. Recruiting for and organizing the trafficking of a human being abroad for the purpose of sexual exploitation, slavery, criminal or military activity, pornography, or “other loathsome purposes” is now punishable by up to fifteen years in jail. Traffickers can get up to twenty-five years if their crimes involve minors, groups of people, the use of violence, or the taking of internal organs.
The Moldovan law is modeled after U.N. regulations, but enforcing it is even more daunting here than in Kosovo. In a country where doctors make around $30 a month, buying off the entire justice system—from the police right on up to the judges on the bench—presents no particular difficulty for the Moldovan Mafia. There are honest cops and judges, but they face a trafficking system that is so fluid and hard to pin down that it is almost impossible to crack. The process often starts with a completely legal classified ad in the newspaper: “Hiring girls without complexes for the work abroad” is a common one. The ad includes a phone number, and the initial contact is usually a woman, often one who was trafficked and has been blackmailed or otherwise coerced into doing the job. From there, the recruits are handed over to the traffickers themselves, whose job it is to get them across the border into Romania. In many ways that is the smallest obstacle in the entire process. Passports can be bought or forged for just a few hundred dollars, border guards can be bribed for even less, and the border itself is so porous that until recently the authorities didn’t even bother to keep records of who went back and forth. (The Moldovan government is still hoping for an international loan that will allow it to buy a computer system to handle that task.) Once the girls are in Romania, they’re almost always beyond help.
Vastly adding to the problem is the psychology of both the new recruits and the ones who have made it back. Not only are they poor, uneducated, and desperate, but they have grown up in a society that tolerates such astronomical levels of domestic violence that almost any kind of abuse could be considered normal, even deserved. “During the Soviet times there weren’t as many social problems,” says Lilia Gorceag, an American-trained psychologist who treats women at the IOM safe house in Chişinâu. “There was some kind of stability. Now that everything is gone, all our frustrations and fears have been converted to a fear about tomorrow, and it really increased the levels of violence.”
According to Gorceag, one of the more common reactions to a violent childhood or marriage—not to mention a violent trafficking experience—is massive feelings of guilt. Niki’s conviction that she somehow deserved her fate is a classic example of this sort of psychological defense. “Most trafficked women have very negative sexual experiences during childhood,” says Gorceag. “Many were raped when they were young—I have many patients who had been raped by the age of twelve, sometimes by their own father. They adopt a perspective that they have been created to satisfy someone else’s sexual needs. They consider themselves depraved, unacceptable to family and friends. And very few men here would tolerate it if they found out a woman had been trafficked. I know one nineteen-year-old woman who says her brother would kill her if he found out.”
Such a woman is perfect prey for a trafficker, and a good candidate for relapsing into prostitution even if she makes it back to Moldova. Gorceag says that women who are trafficked to Turkey, Greece, and Italy generally survive their experiences psychologically intact, but the ones who wind up in the Balkans are utterly destroyed as people. They exhibit classic symptoms of severe posttraumatic stress disorder: They can’t focus; they can’t follow schedules; they’re apathetic to the point of appearing somnambulistic; they fly into violent rages or plunge into hopeless depression; some even live in terror that someone will come and take them away. Their condition keeps them from functioning normally in a family or a job, and that puts them at even greater risk of being trafficked again.
“One of my patients ate napkins,” says Gorceag. “When I took away the napkins, she started eating newspaper. She wasn’t even aware of what she was doing. There is another patient who counts. She counts everything. When she can’t find anything to count, she turns her sleeve and counts the stitching. These are people with completely destroyed psyches. It’s a form of genocide. I know that’s a very strong word, but I live with twenty-two of these women, and I see their suffering every day.”
On our last day in Moldova, Teun and I meet Natalia to look at some photos she wants to show us. I have just received word from members of the U.N. anti-trafficking unit in Kosovo that they think they have found the bar where Niki is working, and they want me to fly back there to participate in a police raid. That way I can identify her so she can be sent home to Moldova, whether she wants to be or not. It’s a beautiful fall day, and Natalia and Teun and I sit down at an outdoor cafe next to two puff-pastry blonds who are wearing maybe an ounce of fabric between them. Natalia—tough, smart, and battered by her experience in Kosovo—tosses them a dismissive look.
“What do those women want?” I ask her. “What are they looking for?”
“Men with money,” Natalia says. “Moldovan women have become very cold, very callous. They don’t want to fall in love. They just want to meet a rich guy, and most of the guys with money are thugs. It’s their mothers who push them into this—that’s the worst part.”
The photos Natalia shows us were taken at a bar when she was working as a prostitute. One was taken a few days after she arrived; she’s very drunk and her eyes are red from crying. She has long, glamorous hair and very red lipstick and a forced smile that says more about her situation th
an any expression of hate or fear. There is none of the wry sarcasm in her eyes that I have become so fond of. I tell her that Niki has been located, and that if I go back to identify her she in all likelihood will be repatriated to Moldova.
“What should we do?” I ask. “Would we just be making things worse for her?”
“Yes, I think so,” Natalia says without hesitation.
“So we shouldn’t go to the police?”
Natalia takes a drag on the cigarette we gave her and crushes it in the ashtray. For her this is clearly not a question of principle; it’s a question of guessing what Niki herself would want. If Niki were tied up in a basement getting raped, the answer would be easy: Break down the door and save her. But she’s not. She’s imprisoned by a web of manipulation and poverty and threat and, much as I hate to admit it, personal choice. The answers aren’t so obvious.
“She would just deny that she’s a prostitute,” says Natalia. “Look, there’s nothing here for her. If you brought her home you’d have some sort of …” She casts around for the right words.
“Moral responsibility?”
“Yes,” Natalia says, never taking her eyes off me. “Exactly.”
THE KEYSTONE KOMMANDOS
GARY COHEN
The four men arrived by U-boat and landed on a deserted beach near Amagansett, Long Island, in the midnight darkness on Saturday, June 13, 1942, a mere six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. They had close to $80,000 (equivalent to nearly a million dollars today) in cash, four boxes of explosives, and a mission that had been planned at the highest levels of the Third Reich—namely, to halt production at key American manufacturing plants, create railroad bottlenecks, disrupt communication lines, and cripple New York City’s water supply system. The mission, audacious in means and scope, had the potential to seriously impede America’s military buildup, and perhaps even to affect the outcome of the war.