PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - The trafficking of East European women into sexual slavery is becoming a serious problem in Kosovo, where porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid workers as customers and the lack of a working criminal-justice system have created almost perfect conditions for the trade. In the past six months, U. Hundreds more, lured from their impoverished homelands with the promise of riches, may be living in sexual servitude. Vincenzo Coppola, regiment commander of the Italian Carabinieri, a police force with military powers in Kosovo that has rescued 23 women on raids of brothels in Pristina and Prizren.
According to police sources and aid workers, the women - some as young as 15 - were transported along a well-established organized-crime network from Eastern Europe to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south.
The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with links to the former rebel fighting force, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The women were stripped of their passports as soon as they left their homelands, and many were held in unheated rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to have unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night, for no payment, according U. Police, peacekeepers and aid workers here have been slow to respond to the problem.
The undermanned U. Moreover, officials here said, the trade has flourished because of a lack of applicable law on trafficking or prostitution and because some countries with military forces here have tended to dismiss the activity as simple prostitution. German peacekeepers in southern Kosovo, for instance, have taken a benign view of the phenomenon in part because prostitution is tolerated in Germany; international aid workers are trying to convince them that these women are victims.
They are never paid. Of the 50 women we have seen, not one has received a single deutsche mark. And they are often held in horrendous conditions. According to authorities, the women were told that before they could keep any of their earnings, they had to pay off the pimps for their purchase price. Often, however, they found themselves fined for infractions such as not smiling at customers, so there was no way they would ever have enough money to complete the payoff.
