Some Serbs are beasts, and some Albanians are no better :
Prostitution gangs stalk camp women.
The Times (UK)
4 may 1999 Janine Giovanni
Refugees face a new terror, writes Janine Di Giovanni in Fier, Albania
Prostitution gangs stalk camp women
THEY have survived "ethnic cleansing", the razing of their villages, the killing of their husbands and brothers.
They walked over the mountains and were separated from their families. They arrived at this squalid abandoned chicken farm in Fier - a lawless town in central Albania renowned for its export of prostitutes to Italy and Greece, as well as for its guns and kidnapping - to find an equally horrific scenario. They are being preyed upon by local men who enter their camps at night and abduct them into prostitution.
"We are frightened, really frightened," says Suzanna, 22, a student of German from Pristina, who is now living in the Grize refugee camp. "We have been told we can't leave the camp, even to go for a walk. I survived Pristina being cleansed and walking four days on foot over mountains, but this is worse."
Suzanna is not a simple village girl. She is beautiful, as are many of the tall, blonde,blue-eyed young women in this camp. With her tight jeans, platform boots and polo neck jumper, she could pass as any Western college student.
The realisation now that she is not only a refugee, but also vulnerable to Albanian thugs who can kidnap her into a world of forced prositution fills her with unspeakable terror. Suddenly, without warning, she begins to weep.
"They come every night, these men in Mercedes, and say that they want to take the youngest girls away to train us to be teachers in Italy," she says. "Why are they doing this? Haven't we gone through enough?"
Maxe Goxha, a policeman posted inside the camp by local authorities - the camp is being run by Albanians with intermittent aid deliveries from Jewish and Norwegian agencies - confirms the story. He says: "Local men arrived with fake documents and said they had come to take young girls away to a teacher training course in Italy." Some of them, he says, spoke good Italian. Another night, they posed as aid workers. "This week they had three girls in their early twenties and a boy, aged 28, in their possession, before we stopped them."
Since the first unconfirmed stories emerged last week that the refugee women were being forced out of their camps at night and brought back the next morning, the local authorities have posted security police inside the camp. Officials of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe are investigating the situation.
According to the OSCE, at least three women have disappeared from this area. But even the organisations sent to protect these refugees admit that dealing with a country with little infrastructure largely run by local gangs and clans is a daunting one.
Fier and Berat, a neighbouring city, are famous for prostitute-trafficking: it is estimated that since the 1992 creation of Albanian democracy, 10,000 local women have been taken to Italy and 20,000 to Greece.
In the chicken farm known as Grize camp, a squalid place inhabited by 600 people, other refugees timidly speak of a pretty young woman who was last seen doing her washing. "A local Albanian man approached her and she left with him," says one woman. "We have not seen her since."
The other women of the camp are in a state of panic. "This is no kind of life," says Suzanna, in tears. "Can you imagine this happening to you?" Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd. |
