Project: Prevention, Protection and Integration of the Human Trafficking Victims in Serbia24Oct2014
Human Trafficking: By Kosovars, of Kosovars, for Kosovars
By Jack Davies
Gone are the days of slick, transnational criminal networks hauling lorryloads of women from Eastern Europe to work as prostitutes in Kosovo for a predominantly international clientele. Today, the majority of human trafficking victims in Kosovo were born there; so, too, were the men that exploit them. And whilst the perpetrators may still be legally classified as ‘organized’ criminals, in reality they are a shambolic constellation of insidious, low-level entrepreneurs.
The laws of supply and demand govern every market, including paid-for sex. In the years immediately following the end of the 1997-1999 Kosovo War, the country was flooded with thousands of international police, peacekeepers, administrators and aid workers. Many of them a long way from their wives and girlfriends and with fat paychecks in their pockets.
It was around this time that reports of the international community’s complicity in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-conflict sex trade began to surface. Not only were UN peacekeepers and international police officers alleged to be frequent consumers of the trade in human flesh (including those specifically tasked with ending it), some were even accused of playing an active role in the trafficking process. Demand for sex was high among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s then thronging international presence, and their international salaries meant they weren’t too fussy about the price. The market responded accordingly. Vulnerable women from countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Romania were lured to Bosnia and Herzegovina with the promise of waitressing jobs, only to find themselves additional stock in the sexual supply chain.
It should have come as no surprise then, when the pattern repeated itself in Kosovo. In 2004, Amnesty International issued a grim report on Kosovo’s then-booming sex industry. It detailed how in 1999 a “small-scale local market for prostitution” was transformed overnight by the arrival of 40,000 KFOR personnel into “a large-scale industry based on trafficking predominantly run by organized criminal networks.” Brothels sprang up outside bases almost immediately. It went on to claim that internationals accounted for 20 percent of the industry’s client base in Kosovo. The report also stated that, just as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN police involvement in trafficking was taking place, with the first instance being reported in 2000 and senior officials being implicated.
UNMIK acknowledged it was on the verge of facing a serious scandal and drew up a list of “off-limits” sites its personnel were forbidden to frequent. The majority of these were bars and nightclubs. As was the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina, many human trafficking victims in Kosovo were promised waitressing jobs. In a loose sense, that was what they got. The bars and nightclubs they ‘waitressed’ in served unchecked as the sex trade’s spice markets, where its victims could (and were often forced to) hawk their intimate wares.
Kosovo has changed dramatically since then. As the situation has stabilized the international presence has wound down. Stabilization has also meant increased rule of law. Kosovo is no longer the ‘gangster’s paradise’ it was once fabled to be. As a result, transnational criminals have abandoned it for more lucrative, less well-policed markets.
But the demand for sex at the drop of a banknote has not disappeared from Kosovo, there are still plenty of men willing to pay, the majority of them Kosovar. Until recently, the majority of the sex trade continued to operate out of bars and clubs.
Speaking in his office, director of Kosovo Police’s 55-officer anti-human trafficking directorate, Major Arben Pacarizi, spoke of how those bars would collaborate, rotating their victims between each others’ premises every six months in order to stunt the directorate’s investigations.
The situation changed when the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare was brought on board. Now when the ministry’s labour inspectors audit bars and clubs, they are on the look out not just for labour law violations, but also potential human trafficking victims.
Whilst this initiative has, to a large extent, driven prostitution and trafficking out of Kosovo’s watering holes, it has had the adverse effect of pushing it further underground—making it even harder to police.
Today, the majority of Kosovo’s trafficking victims are held and exploited in private homes. Unlike their counterparts 12-15 years ago, these victims are predominantly Kosovar. They are also considerably younger than their predecessors.
Deputy Interior Minister Sasha Rasic, the man charged with overseeing national anti-human trafficking strategy, told me that 50 percent of trafficking victims in Kosovo today are believed to be aged between 14 and 18. The same age group accounted for just 13 percent of victims between 2001 and 2013. This shift in demographics is just the tip of a worrying trend.
Major Pacarizi described how traffickers operate today. They are often one-man operations, though sometimes a handful of criminals will cooperate, driving them over the three-person threshold for their crimes to be legally classified as ‘organized.’ However many they may be, their operations are a far cry from those of the 37 people indicted for the exploitation of 21 Moldovan trafficking victims in a network that spanned five Gjakova bars in 2012.
In the past, recruiters (the individuals sourcing trafficking victims), traffickers (the ones bringing victims by deception or force to a new location to be exploited) and pimps (the people facilitating the exploitation of victims) were usually separate individuals. Today, diminished profit margins for traffickers, alongside improved policing benefiting from greatly increased intelligence facilities, have made it impractical both financially and logistically for traffickers to work across such wide networks. Now, more often than not, all three roles are performed by the same individual.
Recruitment today usually takes place on the internet. A trafficker will contact a vulnerable girl offering her either a job, cohabitation, or both in a major city — the most common being Ferizaj, Peja, Prishtina and Prizren. Oftentimes, for the first month following the girl’s arrival the situation will be domestic and pleasant.
After that initial month, everything changes. The trafficker will start to coerce his victim into prostitution. This coercion often takes the form of blackmail, said Pacarizi: either emotional, asking the victim to help pay their way as a ‘couple’; or physical, threatening to publish a compromising video of the victim. Some traffickers will use the threat of physical violence.
With the trade driven out of bars and clubs and into private homes, traffickers must now rely on trusted networks of clients. These clients, who according to Pacaziri’s intelligence pay on average between €30-50 per visit for a victim’s services, are given a mobile phone number and instructed to share it with no one. The victim will be given the phone and then expected to act as their own booking agent, taking calls from clients and setting appointments with them.
In an effort to dodge Major Pacaziri’s intelligence gathering efforts, the traffickers will usually change these numbers every few months. However, not all traffickers are quite so savvy. Some even advertise their victims’ services on social media. One trafficker has already been prosecuted off the back of evidence gleaned from Facebook.
But the intelligence gathering process is not an easy one for the officers investigating trafficking in Kosovo. The social stigma associated with prostitution means that few victims ever come forward without encouragement. Ordinary citizens, too, are often reluctant to report suspicious activity.
Major Pacarizi could not give too many details of his directorate’s intelligence gathering methods for fear of rendering them redundant. He did say that missing persons reports usually lead to the discovery of seven to nine victims a year: “When I see young girls are missing, I investigate.”
The directorate's work often involves following up on false leads. “I want to investigate every piece of intelligence, regardless of the cost,” said Pacarizi. The cost of not doing so would be more than his conscience could bear.
Even when a lead does generate strong intelligence, it does not necessarily mean it will garner a conviction. Of the 52 cases the directorate is currently investigating, Pacarizi estimates as few as ten will result in prosecutions.
In spite of adversity, arrests have gone up in recent years. The 91 arrests made in 2013 for human trafficking offenses far eclipse the 11 made in 2003. That is not to say the problem has grown eight-fold in the last decade. Rather, Deputy Minister Rasic assured me, legislation and proper infrastructure have been put in place to enable the investigation and prosecution of this still relatively new phenomenon in Kosovo.
Still, Major Pacarizi, whose officers are on the frontline of the fight against trafficking, refuses to be complacent: “The criminals will always be one step ahead of us,” he acknowledged.