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Banquo's Ghost
07-25-2006, 15:51
Another thorny problem for the European Onion - does the trade in Bulgarian babies (http://www.rte.ie/news/features/bulgaria/essay.html) attract a rural subsidy?

A less cynical question is: why are these countries even on the list for joining the EU? And what kind of human being is so consumer-driven that they would facilitate this trafficking?


Bulgarian Baby Trafficking

The town of Peshtera lies nestled in heavily wooded hills some 80 kilometres from the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Mid-morning there is little sign of the nearly 30,000 people who live here. On the outskirts of the town is a separate area where the Roma or gypsy community lives. Recently constructed bare concrete brick houses are juxtaposed with wood and stone shacks. Relative wealth sits uneasily with dire poverty.

We have come to Peshtera to investigate a new economic activity. Some years ago it emerged that babies born to women from this village were being sold to couples in France. This new form of trafficking came to light when one woman, apparently regretting her decision to sell her baby, went to the authorities and told them what was going on. Further investigation revealed an intricate trail of deception, greed and desperation.


In the Roma community it is common for women to have children at an early age. Large families are common and single mothers can find it hard to cope. Some members of the community have managed to find work within the wider Bulgarian job market, but lack of education and discrimination means many survive on social welfare. Total income for single mothers is €50 a month for their children.

Some local people have learned to take advantage of desperation. They approach the woman under the guise of wanting to help out, offering her a few euro to pay for food or clothes for her children. This might continue for some time until she has accumulated a debt. She will then be asked to repay this and it will be suggested that a way of paying what she owes and make some more money is to sell one of her babies.

In many cases the woman is still pregnant when this offer is made. If she agrees arrangements are made to transport her to the buyer's country. Markets for Bulgarian babies have been located in France, Greece, Italy and England. The pregnant woman travels abroad and waits until her baby is born. During this time she stays in a safe house - often in a Roma camp. But food and lodgings cost money and in Greece there have been cases where women were induced early by a doctor in order cut costs.

The babies are sold on the black market but they still need documentation. Various strategies and ruses are employed in order to ensure the adoptive couple have the 'right' to adopt the child. The mother claims the adoptive father is the biological father and 'agrees' to allow him to adopt the child. In order to support this fiction the man, in the months leading up to the birth, will travel to Bulgaria and have his passport stamped. This way he creates the impression that he has been having a relationship with the mother for some time.

Ludmila's daughter Slavca was already five months old when she was sold to a French family. She was offered €3,000 but the 23-year-old held out for €4,000. That's an above average price on account of Ludmila's good looks and pale skin, which would help her daughter blend into a Western European family. Ludmila is a single mother with three other children, from eight months to seven years.

"You see your babies crying every day because of hunger and you cannot afford to buy a bottle of milk for them," says Ludmila. "I get €50 a month for my children. It's just not enough. The children are sick sometimes and there is no help at all. If my mother and father were still alive I would have some help but I am alone - I have no choice."

The going rate on the market is anywhere from €5,000 for a girl up to €20,000 for a boy. The mother is usually promised a third of that price, with the rest divided between the traffickers, doctors, lawyers, border officials and all the other parts of this elaborate chain. Women are nearly always cheated of what they were promised - their reduced payment blamed on the cost of travel or false documents. They might receive as little as a few hundred euro for their baby.

Police find it very difficult to break up the criminal gangs involved in this baby trade. Women are complicit in the sale of their children even if they are acting out of economic hardship. They also have a legal right to travel. The 33 people charged by Bulgaria for baby trafficking in the last three years can only hint at the extent of this secret trade.

Most of the prosecutions have originated in the country of destination. Police there contact the Bulgarian authorities and between them they start to recreate the chain. "These cases are transnational so you have to work in co-operation with other services," says Joro Stoitsev, Chief of Police for the Peshtera district. "There are no secrets between us and foreign police forces. We learn from each other. Foreign authorities learn a lot about the problems we face here in Bulgaria and we are learning about European legislation."

Stoitsev and his colleagues are being helped by new legislation similar to that employed by the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau. The proceeds of crime can now be confiscated. A central organised crime unit has been set up and is having success.

Many of the trafficking gangs have been broken up but as long as poverty remains within the Roma community, selling one child to make life better for the others will remain a desperate option.

Anne-Marie Green, July 2006

GoreBag
07-25-2006, 18:25
I will never become bored with the antics of our species.

Duke Malcolm
07-25-2006, 18:56
A less cynical question is: why are these countries even on the list for joining the EU?

The European Onion is determined to increase its own international clout. This is primarily through annexing European (and soon Asian) countries so it can have behind it more money, and can say it represents X amount of countries and X people.

Csargo
07-25-2006, 19:07
Did I read that right? There trading babies man that makes me sick.

L'Impresario
07-25-2006, 19:42
A less cynical question is: why are these countries even on the list for joining the EU? And what kind of human being is so consumer-driven that they would facilitate this trafficking?

Might it be that the questions of some substance are of a different nature? Like how the Roma minority can be offered basic services each citizen deserves without irreversible negative effects on their semi-nomadic culture? All Balkan states have more or less such a minority and its economical position is hard to ameliorate, mainly due to a seemingly incompatible way of life. Illiteracy is also an issue and hostility from local communities contributes to the problem. As they 're vulnerable to deliquency from their early years, they 're oftenly tagged as criminals etc.

On the other side, one is confronted with the (perceived?) complexity of adoption procedures. If a few thousand euros can get a desperate couple a healthy child, then I can understand why these people are willing to use illegal means to achieve parenthood. Ofcourse the situation is tragic and by all means it mustn't be endorsed. Underground organizations that take advantage of both sides' unfortutate state (and especially the mother's, who is forced to do so) endulge in abominable acts.

And I also have to say that the Bulgarian and Romanian people have made enormous sacrifices to be in a position to ask for EU admission, suffering in the 90s from leaderships without any knowledge of how market economies work (and also not wanting to abandon their former positions of power), from western financial institutions with their conditionalities and their life-saving loans (whose talk of radical reforms helped the neocommunists cling to their chairs) and the unstable region which produced enough wars and conflicts to keep foreign investors out.

And now the EU must slam the door in their face.

Blodrast
07-26-2006, 00:39
Have any of you read that carefully enough ? L'Impresario made some excellent points, one of which being that this is not Bulgarians, or Romanians, it's gypsies. There's a huge difference - ask any Bulgarian, Romanian, or gypsy, they'll confirm.
Neither of them identifies with the other.

The guilty party for this, at least insofar as the article points out (and we are now referring to the article, I'm presuming) are the gypsies. Blaming the entire country for what a crappy lousy minority does would be equivalent to someone blaming all Americans for what some uneducated, unwashed, uncivilized, jobless illegal Mexican immigrants.
All countries have minorities that do shameful stuff. That does not mean you should judge the entire country by that minority. Would it be fair to judge the UK by its Pakistani/Bangladeshi people ? Would it be fair to judge the US by its mexicans, or some other minority with a bad track record ? Would it be fair to judge Canada by its native indians, who are at best working low-level jobs, if any at all ?

As for the trading babies, it's been going on for a loooooooooong time. Nothing special about this, or even new. There's been some huge scandals (on some very illegal adoptions, and trafficking of kids for organs), on and off - just like with everything else. This is just run-of-the-mill article material.
Guess who's _buying_ them kids: rich folks from the Western world... so I'm not sure any of us are holy enough to point fingers, when our/your own compatriots are just as guilty of the trafficking - it takes two to make a deal.
So questions like "Why would these countries even be considered for EU ?" don't make much sense, ya know. Should France be part of the EU ? I mean, look at what all the Maghrebians did a few months ago !! Surely the French don't deserve to live in Europe, after such huge violent riots and all that destruction !! Surely they are not civilized, and they should be excluded from the EU !

Double standards ? Naaaaah.

Papewaio
07-26-2006, 01:05
Nor should a minority be blamed for the actions of a few in it. But a state that decides to ignore slavery should be castigated.

Selling children = slavery.

Turning a blind eye to human trafficking is about as low as you can go. It is a form of human slavery. To suggest a VAT on it would mean that the EU approves of child slavery. The response from the world should be the same as to South Africas apartheid government, any state or group that actively engages in helping such a situation should have all trade ties cut off.

As for the current situation the ones doing the buying should be treated with extreme prejudice and have far worse treatment then an ivory buyer or endangered animal buyer. The demand needs to be cut off.

As for the supply, womens education has the strongest link with lowering the amount of children a woman has. So yes to join the EU a country should show that it has the education infrastructure to keep up in the modern world. Otherwise you are just shackling the growth of the economic sector.

The gang members should be treated on par with terrorists and executed as such. The buyers should be treated on par with finaciers of terrorism as such it should be a hefty long sentence. The parents should be imprisoned until their child reaches 18, parity for giving them a childhood as a slave/white good.

As for the children they should be looked after by the state as the state failed them in the first instance by not protecting them. A state is a recipricol arrangement, as a child you do not get alot of the rights of an adult nor the responsibilites. These are held in trust by your parents and if the parents fail the state needs to take action.

Blodrast
07-26-2006, 01:30
Riight, let's see...

http://new.helpsavekids.org/press2.html
In the course of the last few months, three large networks were uncovered:
1. 20 CD-Roms were exposed by the Association, Morkhoven; these images were traced to a network called Zandvoort. 8.700 photos of rape babies, children and adolescents, scenes of adults taking off the diapers of babies to sodomise them, children bound, some drunk or drugged, others gagged so their cries are not heard. Seventeen adults are identifiable, an enquiry apparently is ongoing, dozens of parents in France have recognised their children on the CD-Rom-all of this information has been in the courts of justice in several European countries for two years, but no one speaks of this dossier !

2. The Wonderland Network: 13 countries were represented in this network, 200 members identified. In order to become members of this network, each of the 200 had to furnish 10,000 child pornography photos. 1,263 victims were identified on these CD-Roms. The persons arrested and who all admitted their acts were given punishments from 80 hours of labour to 18 months of prison -- they have made a rendezvous to meet at the prison gate this summer.

3. A third one, a Russian-Italian network was uncovered by Don Fortunato di Noto, President of the Association, Telefono Arcobaleno. On CD-Roms one can distinguish children from 2 to 12 years of age. Some cassettes also show children of a few months in he state of dying. The traffic between Russia and Italy passes via Internet. Several thousands of cassettes have been seized. Some are sold for up Frs. 150,000 if it contains a child in a death scene. Two judges assigned to this case worked on it, but in total disgust.

So we have Russia, Italy, France, and "several European countries", also "13 countries were represented in this network". Not too bad.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4397497.stm

Countries in South-East Europe are failing to take effective measures against people trafficking, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) says.

A Unicef report says that while countries in the region have strict anti-trafficking laws they do not tackle the root causes of the problem.

Unicef found that young people at risk often did not know how to protect themselves from traffickers.

Few knew that traffickers were often friends or even family members.

The report looked at trafficking in Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Serbia-Montenegro.

No one knows exactly how many people fall victim to traffickers - it is a secretive and complex business.

But Unicef does know what kind of people are trafficked: young women between the ages of 15 and 17 are sold for sexual exploitation; children under 13 are trafficked for forced labour and begging.

Children ill-informed

Many countries in South-East Europe have harsh laws against trafficking, but they focus on preventing illegal migration or cracking down on prostitution and organised crime.


The problem of trafficking in South-East Europe has gone underground
Deborah McWhinney
Unicef

What is missing, Unicef says, are child-focused strategies to prevent trafficking in the long term.

Children surveyed in Montenegro, for example, suggested that not walking alone at night might protect them.

In Romania, trafficked children returning from European Union countries are simply sent back to their families by the police, without involving the child protection agency and without investigating the situation of the family concerned.

But there are some success stories. Moldova, Europe's poorest country, has set up community services for abused children and introduced family and life-skill classes for those most at risk.

Education and awareness-raising are, Unicef says, the strategies most likely to prevent trafficking in the long-term. Repressive laws alone will not work.

Deborah McWhinney of Unicef told the BBC that the repressive measures taken were "not empowering - they don't focus necessarily in their response on the human rights of victims, but on preventing the movement of people".

She said NGOs were reporting that the problem of trafficking in South-East Europe had "gone underground, so that we are no longer finding tens or hundreds of women in bars that are being noticed and picked up during raids, but there's just as much trafficking going on in private homes".

Nevertheless, she added that "south-east European countries have shown that they are much more willing to address the issue than many countries in western Europe".

The above is from the BBC, 31 March 2005:


A Unicef report says that while countries in the region have strict anti-trafficking laws they do not tackle the root causes of the problem.
...
Nevertheless, she added that "south-east European countries have shown that they are much more willing to address the issue than many countries in western Europe".

Now isn't that surprising ? (emphasis mine)

Let's look at another one:

http://www.globe-intel.net/?p=22

(warning, _very_ long article; I'll provide some excerpts)
It was dusk when the BMWs and Mercedes once more began to enter Cheb on Christmas Eve, 2004. By midnight, the expensive cars cruised its streets. The town is on the Czech-German border, a crossing point on the highway that leads to Prague from Bavaria and Saxony.
Cheb is a mecca for German paedophiles who come to this drab town, with its ugly Stalinist-era apartment blocks and poorly-lit back streets for one purpose.
Every night, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cheb has maintained its reputation as the child sex capital of Europe. These include what are known as “the specials”: children so small, so vulnerable, so fragile, that they cannot solicit for themselves. They are offered to the drivers of those cars by their “keepers”. This is the shame of Czechoslovakia, a country that now prides itself on having a future in the European Community.
For the equivalent of US $50 a paedophile can take his pick of children often barely out of their diapers.
They are the ultimate degradation for a town of 38,000 people. With over 100 brothels, no one knows exactly how many young prostitutes work in them or on the streets of Cheb.
On New Year’s Day, 2004, Europe’s newspapers reported the latest child-sex scandal. A former Portuguese cabinet minister tipped to lead his socialist party, Paulo Pedroso, and a former ambassador to South Africa, Jorge Ritto, along with eight others, including a doctor and two television presenters, were all charged with sexually abusing minors.
Outside Portugal most newspapers gave little space to the revelations. They have become all too commonplace.
The allegedly abused children of Portugal represent a fraction of a global industry. Its annual revenues were estimated in 2003 to exceed half a trillion dollars globally. This is twice the value of all United States currency currently in circulation at any given time, more than the annual gross national products of many countries.
To understand the sheer size of profits accruing from such terrible misery, consider this: a million dollars in gold would weigh as much as a Japanese Sumo wrestler. A half trillion dollars would come close to exceeding the entire population weight of a medium sized Australian city.
The profits come from child sexual trafficking in all its forms: white slavery, sex rings, pornography, the sex tourism industry, lap dancing, bogus adoption schemes and procuring the victims – the untold millions of children globally entrapped in the sex trade industry who are forced to allow their bodies to be used in exchange for food, money, shelter, alcohol and drugs.
Children are bought, sold, traded and misused in underground child sex markets daily. Every state in the United States, and every other nation, contributes in some fashion to the steady flow of children, the customers and exploiters.
It is estimated that the profits from this vast evil empire, when properly invested, would draw an interest exceeding US $2 million an hour. The sexual trafficking in children is not so much an industry but a global empire.
Sovereign and expansionist, it is frequently torn by internal struggle – fights to the death between the Chinese Triads and the Russian Mafia, between the multi-gangs of the Balkans, are commonplace. But the empire presents a secret front to the world. It is from there it plunders our children, snatches them, never to be seen again.
The predators who control the sexual trafficking in children are well organized. They have thugs who snatch and break the resistance of children; banks who account the empire’s profits without asking questions; ships that convey the hapless children from one continent to another and private planes that transport them to clients around the world.
Yet there is little or no cohesive and sustained war against this terrible evil. The United States and Britain try to stamp on the trafficking within its own borders. But as yet there is no universal challenge to the ever-growing sexual trafficking in children.
The shabby streets of Cheb are but one staging post in a necklace of shame that encircles the globe.

To the east of Cheb, a battered Volvo crossed into northern Bosnia. Hidden under filthy blankets were four teenage girls. One, a blonde called Maria, had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
To prepare for the long and uncomfortable journey, the girls had each been given an injection by a doctor. They were told it was to alleviate travel sickness. In reality it was a cocktail of drugs to keep them drowsy and unable to try and escape. This is standard procedure for the men operating this segment of the network in sexual trafficking that criss-crosses the Balkans.
The doctor is a man known by his first name only, Goran, in the girl’s hometown of Chisinau, the capital of Europe’s poorest country, Moldova. It has some of the prettiest children in central Europe. This has made it a magnet for the traffickers.
They moved in soon after the collapse of the Communist system in the country. Since then there is a widely accepted estimate that some 6,000 girls have been trafficked out of Moldova. No one knows how many of them received their drug injections from Dr Goran.
The girls in the Volvo had answered advertisements in a Chisinau newspaper. The ads promised them work in Paris, London and Dublin – and even in the United States. The posts on offer included maids, nannies, house-keeping and bar work. The ads stressed no previous experience was required. The salaries were far beyond those available in Moldova.
A Moldavian recruiter told the girls their journey would involve them first being secretly driven over the border into Bosnia. There, they would receive passports, for which they had already paid him US $100 – money borrowed from their families and friends. Then they would go West to earn undreamed of money. So they had been promised.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia, followed by a vicious war in the region and the establishment of new states under the 1995 Deyton peace accord, had left many Balkan countries with virtually no legislation or border controls to deal with the sexual traffic in young women and children.
By the time Maria and her three young friends had been tricked into making the journey in the Volvo, the profits from sexual trafficking in the Balkans were matching those of the drug trade – and the penalties for smuggling humans were minimal.
The border guards into Bosnia waved the Volvo through. The car was a familiar sight to them. Each time it crossed, the guards received US $200 for allowing its unhampered passage.
Five hours later the Volvo reached its final destination. “Arizona Market” is on the outskirts of Kosovo. The town resembles the old Wild West rather than Central Europe in the Third Millennium. It is also the UN headquarters in Bosnia.
An area interlaced with muddy tracks lead to establishments with names like Café Marlboro, Café Don, and The Golden Heart. Fronted by heaps of refuse, used condoms and empty liquor bottles, they are brothels. Between them stand wooden huts selling cheap denim clothes, alcohol, perfume, and guns.
Inside the sleazy bars, the scene seldom changes: dimmed red lights, loud music, cheap drinks – and semi-naked girls. Usually they are draped over the men known as “the internationalists”. These are the soldiers of the United Nations multi-national peace keeping force. In 2003, it consisted of 45,000 soldiers drawn from 39 countries. In addition, there were some 7,000 UN staff as well as members of over 200 Western aid agencies.
Many of the girls appear to be drugged – and not only from the ready supply of cocaine and heroin on open sale.
An American aid agency worker said: “Lookit, the bar owners who bought these girls like to keep them nice and quiet. So they buy drugs from some of the UN medics to do so. When a girl has finished her shift, she is taken to her room by a bar man and given a shot. When she wakes up she is ready for her next shift”.
This is Arizona Market. Officially established by the peacekeeping forces to foster trade between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, today its five square miles is the epicenter of Bosnia’s booming sex-slaves trade.
This was the destination of the four young girls. They would work here as prostitutes – and maybe die – in this forsaken place.

Almost 2,000 miles to the south of Bosnia, in the tropical heat of West Africa, a group of girls, each no more than thirteen years old, made their way to a small square in the suburbs of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. They were escorted by hard-faced young men, the gold in their teeth glinting in the searing sunlight.
Dressed in their Sunday best – colourful print cotton dresses – with hair washed and combed, the girls were directed to sit on wooden benches in the centre of the square.
Each girl was for sale as a slave. Their prices ranged from US $5 – the cost of a coffee in what passes for the city’s finest hotel – to the most expensive child, an eleven year old, costing US $15.
The place is known, locally, as Le Marche de Jeunes Filles – the Market of Young Girls.
Buyers, men carrying fly-whisks, and sharp-eyed women, strolled up and down along the benches, feeling one girl’s arm, looking at another’s teeth. One was asked to stand and twirl. Another to bend.
Around the edges of the square stood the traders. The moment a prospective buyer stopped, a trader was there to emphasise a girl’s good points.
“She is young and disease free. She is strong and will obey your every command. She will do whatever you want…” he would intone.

No one knows today how many sexual slaves there are in the world. The International Organisation for Migration estimated in December, 2003, that from Eastern Europe alone there could be half a million.
Anti-Slavery International believes the global figure may run to “tens of millions”. The one certainty, adds the world’s oldest human rights organisation, is that there are more sexual slaves than ever before.
The United States State Department announced in June, 2003, that fifteen countries were now deeply involved in trafficking humans. They included Greece and Italy, both members of the European Community. The State Department estimated that through the fifteen countries almost one million adults and children brought and sold annually into the sex slave market. Secretary of State Colin Powell rightly called it a blight on humanity.
There is growing evidence that many of those slaves are traded over the internet; pimps, often catering for extreme sexual demands ranging from unprotected sex to torture, can log on to women and children best suited to their “markets”.
In Britain, Scotland Yard believes that over 5,000 girls from former-Communist countries were smuggled into the country in 2003. Each earned their pimps an estimated over US $2,000 a day.
Bill Hughes, Director General of Britain’s National Crime Squad, said: “A growing number of girls are barely into their teens. Although the number is small compared to such countries as Greece and Italy, it has had a startling impact on London’s indigenous vice trade.
“British teenagers have been moved out by their pimps into the city suburbs as their rates are undercut by sex slaves imported from the Balkans into London’s traditional Soho red light district.
“They have come from Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova. The great majority have escaped from dirt-poor villages, with no modern form of communications – some villages do not even have a single telephone let alone a policeman.
“That makes it easier for a young girl to be lured away or kidnapped from their homes – and never to be traced again”, added Hughes.

The former Soviet Republics are the nexus of the traffic. Serbia and Yugoslavia are key staging posts along this road of unspeakable misery. It is in those countries that the majority of girls are housed, waiting for pimps to conduct an initial inspection. The girls – and some boys – are then taken by road to one of the regular “flesh markets”.
In 2003, those sales took place in the many apartment block complexes on the outskirts of Belgrade. The girls are handled like livestock and, once one has been bought by a pimp – prices can be up to US $1,500 for a teenager, double that for a pre-teen – the victim will usually be beaten, drugged and forced to have sex with scores of men a week. If she tries to escape, she can be subjected to further horrendous sexual abuse – and warned that if she tries again to escape, her family back home will be killed.
The Belgrade apartments are owned by Semion Yokovich Mogilevich. He is a specialist in every type of major crime. A document by MI5, Britain’s internal security service, describes this Ukranian as “one of the most dangerous criminals on earth”.
Mogilevich is wanted in the United States for a multitude of crimes including bank frauds, money laundering and other currency offences. He is protected by his own private army – and, according to CIA sources, he has a liking for young girls. Documents in the agency possession show he is a regular visitor to the apartments to pick out a girl.
One CIA document identifies Mogilevich as the head of the Rising Sun, one of Moscow’s major criminal families.
“His business is global prostitution, drug running and traffic in humans. He runs a dark and evil empire. A number of people who have crossed his path have been disposed of. He has his own team of killers never further away than a phone call”, said former British intelligence officer Colin Wallace.
Unable to travel to the West for fear of immediate arrest, Mogilevich moves between Moscow and Belgrade with his bodyguards and his latest choice of girl.
The office for the UN High Commission for Human Rights has identified other criminal gangs from Macedonia and Serbia as being involved in sex trafficking. But along with Mogilevich, it is the criminal warlords of Albania who now dominate it.
A report prepared by the Commission states:
“Girls who’ve shown signs of disobedience have had their feet cemented into washbasins before being dumped in the Aegean Sea. Others have been horrifically tortured. The Albanian gangs have a seemingly endless supply of women, and their power extends way beyond their homeland to the underworlds of Italy and parts of New York. The victims do not officially exist and are powerless to resist.”
Most Albanian gangsters are men in their twenties from the backward north of the country. Rather than being based around individual gangland bosses, they are organized in clans bound by an ancient code of honour called kanun. Some of the profits are returned to their homelands.
In 2002, UN administration in Kosovo and Bosnia enacted new laws to prohibit the traffic. But there have been few prosecutions, and such as have occurred have been tainted by charges of corruption. UN teams set up to rescue the girls have often found that when they organise a raid, the brothel-keepers have been tipped off.
A UN report into trafficking claims that some Western officials are undermining attempts to clean up the trade by becoming cronies of Balkan pimps. The same is true of some of the international and local police. In one case, cited by the report, Bulgarian border police took money from girls to secure their safe passage back to Bulgaria, only to hand them back to the traffickers in exchange for yet more money.

The fate of those four young girls who were smuggled over the border into Bosnia to work in Arizona Market was to be hustled from the Volvo into a large wooden building. Standing around its walls were the brothel keepers of Arizona Market. Maria and her companions were ordered to undress. When Maria refused, her dress was ripped from her. Naked, she and the other girls were forced to stand on wooden crates. The brothel keepers physically inspected the women.
Then the bidding began. In minutes Maria had been sold to a brothel keeper for US $1,500. The other girls fetched prices ranging from US $350 to US $1,200.
For US $20 a client could spend thirty minutes with Maria. For US $2.50 he could buy a bottle of beer while he satisfied himself.
Maria would soon discover that there was no escape from a life where she is expected to have unprotected sex. She is owned body and soul by the man who bought her. All she receives are three meals a day, a bed to sleep on and the skimpy clothes her owner insists she must wear to attract clients.
A UN peacekeeper in Kosovo, who asked not to be named, told me: “Often the girls are sold on by other brothel keepers. They are traded like cattle and are routinely beaten and drugged. If a girl tries to escape, she is raped or tortured – or told that her mother back home will be killed.”
Milan Sitilovic, the Bosnian police chief with responsibility for Arizona Market says: “How can we stop it? Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world”.
Frederick Larson who headed the office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo identified the problem, “the girls are terrified of testifying against their owners. Those who dare to do so are simply murdered”.
In 2001, the naked bodies of several girls were found in a river near Arizona Market. They bore the hallmarks of Russian mafia-style killings; hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet set in concrete. Their breasts had been slashed off.
Arizona Market is situated close to the Bosnian headquarters of the US peacekeeping force. During 2002, six Russian soldiers, members of K-For, gang-raped two girls in the Arizona Market. As they were “owned” by the club owner, the soldiers paid him a small sum in compensation. No other charges were brought against the rapists.
Those who survive such inhumane treatment are often sold on to the international slave market.
Paul Holmes, of London’s Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, has estimated that 80% of all women working in the brothels of Britain’s capital are from the Balkans. His own investigations concluded that the traffic in women had made their owners at least US $75 million since the start of the Third Millennium.
His facts and figures can be repeated through the Western world. In Paris, Dublin, Rome, New York, Montreal and Los Angeles, police report the same story: when rescued from sexual bondage, the women are too terrified to testify against those who traffic in them.
As of now the penalties against trading in preteen sex slaves is small compared to those handed out against drug runners or arms dealers. Indeed, in Bosnia, the offence is not even on the statute book.
Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention said: “the trafficking in people is now the fastest growing transnational criminal activity”.
Frederick Larson explained that, apart from his organisation, there is almost nothing to protect sex slaves in Bosnia.
The girls are regarded as illegal immigrants, and are treated as such, rather than the victims of gross human rights violations. All NATO and UN officials who frequent Arizona Market are entitled to immunity from Bosnian prosecution – although not from legal consequences when they return home.
However, the possibility of any conviction in a US or UK court is non-existent, given that no abused girl is ever likely to be able to give evidence.
Recently an international police team carried out a raid on three bars in Arizona Market. They rescued thirty-four girls, three of whom were aged just fourteen. The raids were carried out without the assistance of the local police.
Afterwards, team members faced disciplinary charges for “exceeding their authority”. The charges were not pursued; the officers have quietly left Bosnia.
The IOM has set up safe houses in Sarajevo to protect girls, some as young as eleven, who have escaped from brothels.
“The best we can do is to offer them support and repatriation”, said Larson.
But the reality again is that a girl who does go home to a country like Moldova is often cast-out by her family who suspect what happened to her in Bosnia. All too often, she ends up prostituting herself on the streets of the country’s capital, Chisnau.
In Bosnia, the international peace-keeping force has failed to control, let alone eradicate, the transport of sexual slaves.
Jaque Grinberg, the UN missions head of civil affairs – a caring and committed official – said there was “an urgent need for an effective border force”. The office of the High Representative in Bosnia ordered its creation. But there was no money to bring it to reality.
The trafficking business started with the arrival of UN peacekeepers in 1993. Until then Bosnia had no “sex industry”. The mission of the peacekeepers was to bring democracy. But too many of their members saw an easy way to make money as well as satisfy their own sexual desires.
“After the peacekeepers arrived, criminal gangs who had smuggled guns during the war began to traffic in women and girls. There was more profit and less risk. And so it goes on”, said a member of the international police force, Don Thomas.
“The evils of what is going on are obvious. But the problem is that the victims are horribly exploited, many of them also claim they are not in Bosnia involuntarily. That is the rub. How can you convince some kid who is so terrified that she will not talk? If she opens her mouth she is dead meat”, added Thomas.
The worst offenders are the 3,000 Russian peace-keepers. Some girls have described how friends were taken into the Russian camps and never seen again.

Unlike Bosnia, where the UN peacekeepers arrived in a blaze of publicity, no one knows exactly when “the Germans” started to arrive in their big cars for sex with the children of Cheb.
The men who drive into the cheerless town know they no longer have to fly to Thailand to have sex with a child.
Many of the child prostitutes come from Cheb’s large Roman refugee population. Their knowledge of German is confined to the sexual words of their trade.
By night, they haunt the park adjoining the town’s Evropska Street or stand in darkened doorways in the alleys.
New byelaws have forbidden street prostitution in the centre of Cheb; video cameras have been installed to monitor the area.
Catherin Schauer, a nurse who works for Karo, a child-rescue project supported by the German Red Cross and the European Commission, said the police are largely indifferent to what goes on.
“Those who work as prostitutes are usually homeless and turned on to drugs. They start by sniffing glue and then move on to a substance known as ‘piko”, a cheap amphetamine which suppresses feelings of cold and hunger”, said Schauer.
Some of the children have been born in Cheb after their families fled from eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At an age when their childhood is beginning to expand, they are forced into prostitution.
One girl, her face smeared with make-up who admitted she was thirteen, said “the Germans like us to wear as little as possible. I only wear a short skirt and a t-shirt and my sandals”.
She added that in “a good night” she had four or five clients. “They pay me anything from US $20 to US $30 dollars. It’s good money for a few hours of work. I always make them use a condom. But some of the younger girls allow unprotected sex. Because they are not menstruating, they believe they won’t become pregnant”.
Catherine Schauer said that a growing number of these under-age girls had developed HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
She and her colleagues distribute condoms to the children. The rescue centre has a drop-in facility where the children can go for treatment.
“We are a little sensitive about all this. There would not be a problem but for the Germans. We know that the sex tourists are 99 percent from Bavaria and Saxony”, said Petr Jaks, Cheb’s deputy mayor.
He did admit there had been “a problem to get our police motivated, but we hope this will change soon”.
A senior police officer reluctantly agreed to talk on the basis of having his identity concealed.
“My colleagues and I have better things to do than check on every kid who hangs around the streets. As far as we are concerned, they are just out for a night of fun. Look at the way they dress: good quality jeans, Adidas shoes. Sure, they may take a little dope. But so do the kids in Munich.”
What about all the Germans who drive into the town every night? The officer shrugged. “They spend good money in our bars. If they pick up a girl, so what. It happens everywhere.”
Even small children? He smiled indifferently. “How can you tell if a girl is ten, thirteen or fifteen? These Romanian kids grow up quickly. Anyway, why pick on Cheb? Prostitution is all along the border.”
That is true. At every crossing, the child whores are there, alongside the traders selling cheap cigarettes and Becherovka, the Czech national drink.
Catherin Schauer and her small team of dedicated social workers note down the license plate numbers of the German cars entering the town, then send them to the nearest German city of Regensburg.
There is a German law, passed in 1993, under which the Federal Republic can prosecute men who have sex with minors abroad. If found guilty, a culprit can be sentenced up to ten years in jail.
But, as in Bosnia, the reality is very different. Josef Heisl, a police officer with the Regensburg force said “when we get the license plates from Cheb, we do question the car drivers. The men just say they were looking for directions. To make a successful prosecution, we have to catch a man in the act of having sex with a minor – or get a child to file a complaint. That is purely wishful thinking”.

Just as in Cheb, the turnover of girls is high at Le Marche de Jeunes Filles – the baked earth market place in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.
The girls come from the country’s remote rural areas, lured away from their villages by promise of a better life in the city. Family and friends sew their new clothes and arrange their hair before they leave home. But once they arrive in Abidjan, they find there is no work; instead they are sold-off like cattle in that market place.
Some, the lucky ones, are sent to toil in up-country cocoa plantations. Others are shipped off to Sudan, where slave traders shackle them for the long journey to the Middle East to restock the region’s brothels.
Still others end up in a truck stop called Salgaa on the main Kenya-Uganda highway. It is the biggest whorehouse in central Africa. In 2003, it had 24 bars and 500 prostitutes – an estimated half of them under age.
In a regional economy that is close to collapse elsewhere, Salgaa is booming. It is a cut-price version of Arizona Market. In Salgaa a child can be procured for one US dollar. In Salgaa the life expectancy of a prostitute is put in months rather than years. Their clients are the thousands of truck drivers who travel every week up and down the highway.
The girls work out of seedy bars with names like the Good Times Hotel and New Paradise.
AIDS is a killer by many names here: “mikingo” meaning “slow puncture”; and “kauzi” meaning “slim as a thread”, an apt description to describe the body wasting process of the disease.
Sharin Cmemtai, who admitted to being “only fifteen”, said that her “worst clients are the Arabs. They can be very violent. I try to charge them more. But it is impossible for me to keep the extra money. He always takes it straight away after sex”.
“He” was her pimp, a burly Kenyan who is reputed to have a stable of fifty young girls, a number of them in their pre-teens, working in Salgaa.
His girls live in a small compound. It has one water tap, two showers and three stinking pit latrines. Most weeks a girl is diagnosed as in the final stages of AIDS. Overnight she will be taken from the compound by the pimp. There is a widespread fear she is dumped in the bush to be devoured by the jackals or other wild animals.
Within hours a new girl will arrive as a replacement.
She, too, can expect to be dead within a year. To survive longer in Salgaa is a miracle.
Only none of the girls who work there believe in such divine intervention.
The global traffic in children for commercial sexual exploitation involves torture and their premeditated rape and mutilation. If and when the authorities decide to take action against the child sex trade, it achieves very little.
This terrible human abuse, the prerogative of no one race or colour, continues to occur under all religions, and where there is no religion. The sexual traffic in children is the product of greed and lust which feeds off abject poverty.
There is no solution in sight until that poverty is addressed – and the traffickers sentenced to long terms. By a collective indifference and silence, the betrayal of children will persist.


Excerpts from the above:


By midnight, the expensive cars cruised its streets. The town is on the Czech-German border, a crossing point on the highway that leads to Prague from Bavaria and Saxony.
Cheb is a mecca for German paedophiles who come to this drab town, with its ugly Stalinist-era apartment blocks and poorly-lit back streets for one purpose.
Every night, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cheb has maintained its reputation as the child sex capital of Europe. These include what are known as “the specials”: children so small, so vulnerable, so fragile, that they cannot solicit for themselves. They are offered to the drivers of those cars by their “keepers”. This is the shame of Czechoslovakia, a country that now prides itself on having a future in the European Community.
For the equivalent of US $50 a paedophile can take his pick of children often barely out of their diapers.
They are the ultimate degradation for a town of 38,000 people. With over 100 brothels, no one knows exactly how many young prostitutes work in them or on the streets of Cheb.
On New Year’s Day, 2004, Europe’s newspapers reported the latest child-sex scandal. A former Portuguese cabinet minister tipped to lead his socialist party, Paulo Pedroso, and a former ambassador to South Africa, Jorge Ritto, along with eight others, including a doctor and two television presenters, were all charged with sexually abusing minors.


The United States State Department announced in June, 2003, that fifteen countries were now deeply involved in trafficking humans. They included Greece and Italy, both members of the European Community. The State Department estimated that through the fifteen countries almost one million adults and children brought and sold annually into the sex slave market. Secretary of State Colin Powell rightly called it a blight on humanity.

Whaddya know, not just Romania and Bulgaria ! Ooops, and they're members of the EU already...damn, I guess it's too late for them, isn't it ?

Anyway. I (or anybody else) can come up with lots of similar articles, proving whatever we'd like to prove. Bottom line is, it's a reality, and it's happening _everywhere_.
Sure, victims are more often from poor families, so it's more likely to be preponderent in countries with a higher concentration of poor families (Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe).
But it happens everywhere, and finger-pointing at whoever happens to have covered the latest news is not really fair, or logical.
As you can see, though, there _are_ efforts to remedy this. Nobody has got it under control, yet, and nobody probably will - because it's underground, it's mafia, and this will likely always exist. Just like the wars on drugs - those have been lost a long time ago. This will never be won 100% either, sadly, but not for lack of trying.

Blodrast
07-26-2006, 01:38
And, just to see, good old Wikipedia (rather old data on some parts, but still):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafficking_in_human_beings

excerpt:
Due to the illegal nature of trafficking, the exact extent is unknown. A U.S. Government report published in 2003 estimates that between 800,000 and 900,000 people worldwide are trafficked across borders each year, the majority in South East Asia, Japan, Russia and Europe. This figure does not include those who are trafficked internally. [3]

Between 20,000 and 40,000 people are trafficked into the United States each year.[4] According to the Massachusetts based Trafficking Victims Outreach and Services Networkin Massachusetts alone, there were 55 documented cases of human trafficking in 2005 and the first half of 2006. [5] In the United Kingdom, the Home Office estimated that there were up to 1,420 women trafficked into the UK in a 1998 study. [6] Trafficking in people is increasing in Africa, South Asia and into North America. Between 80% and 90% of victims trafficked across international borders are female and the majority of those women and girls are trafficked for sexual exploitation through forced prostitution or sexual slavery.

According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 800 persons are trafficked into Canada annually and that an additional 1,500-2,200 persons are trafficked through Canada into the United States (2004), and these figures could be higher. [7]

In Russia, Africa and South and East Asia, many countries are faced with a rising child prostitution problem and the linkage with tourism is evident. Child prostitution and the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation is also increasing in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.

So the UK, US and Canada have decent numbers there, as well, and it's increasing in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia.
My point is this: like Papewaio is saying, the surest way to stop this is by cutting off the demand. There would be no traffic if there were no demand.
I don't think that the laws are lax (how does one explain that it's a problem in all countries ?) - it's more that the corruption and poverty push people to do crazy, crazy things. The way to fix that is to try to improve their living standards.
And that is happening, slowly...

Sadly, there will always be problems like this, and drugs, and crime, as long as there is poverty. Heck, they may still exist even after that (although I'd like to be optimistic and give humanity a bit more credit). But having a very one-sided look at things isn't helping anybody...

L'Impresario
07-26-2006, 01:40
Well, the article is neither about a theoretical situation, nor about how willing the police should be nor how educated Bulgarian women are.

There are some facts here.

First of all the children are usually sold already before birth.
It involves a minority with very special needs and problems.
Said minority can't be automatically transformed into your obedient, educated western consumer type without severing all ties with its traditions, something that even if desired it'd require some intricate social engineering and lots of time.

Here's also what the article mentions regarding the actions of the state in question:


Police find it very difficult to break up the criminal gangs involved in this baby trade. Women are complicit in the sale of their children even if they are acting out of economic hardship. They also have a legal right to travel. The 33 people charged by Bulgaria for baby trafficking in the last three years can only hint at the extent of this secret trade.

Most of the prosecutions have originated in the country of destination. Police there contact the Bulgarian authorities and between them they start to recreate the chain. "These cases are transnational so you have to work in co-operation with other services," says Joro Stoitsev, Chief of Police for the Peshtera district. "There are no secrets between us and foreign police forces. We learn from each other. Foreign authorities learn a lot about the problems we face here in Bulgaria and we are learning about European legislation."

Stoitsev and his colleagues are being helped by new legislation similar to that employed by the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau. The proceeds of crime can now be confiscated. A central organised crime unit has been set up and is having success.

Many of the trafficking gangs have been broken up but as long as poverty remains within the Roma community, selling one child to make life better for the others will remain a desperate option.

Human trafficking is a reality for many european countries, and it isn't limited to them. To extrapolate on mafia tactics and the post-1991 effects in the relevant countries, that is a somehow different issue. If states that are not capable to effectively combat this phenomenon are to be castigated, then the world police will have a pretty long list of countries to punish. Especially the poorer ones with increased corruption.

The EU has its third pillar (Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters) directed towards these kind of activities and is in touch with the eastern European authorities which not part of it, but corruption is a major obstacle in such . And corruption is more of a socio-economic occurence than one that can be easily outlined and combatted using suppressive means.
And as a self-respecting left leanign person could say, it seems the authorities have also their hands full with passing around personal data and designing concetration camps for immigrants.

EDIT: Hmm, I shouldn't take breaks while writing a reply, Blodrast quotes similar passages heh

Blodrast
07-26-2006, 01:43
Pape, as you can see by some some of the stuff I've posted, it's not that the laws are too lax, or the govenrments turn a blind eye... or else, we could blame _all_ governments of that. I definitely agree with you that the punishment should be harder on the "buyers", such that they can't afford to have a second offence.

Blaming the governments for not being able to take care of this, though, is like blaming, say, the US government, for failing to win the war on drugs (and they surely have more resources than the govenrments of Eastern Europe put together). It's just not that simple.
There are, and always will be, heartless cold people who will do this, regardless of the local law and what not. Just as there will always be mafia, and organized crime - which this is just a part of. Eradicate that, and this will go away, too - except nobody's succeeded in doing that yet...

Blodrast
07-26-2006, 01:47
L'Impresario::bow:
Also, one has to keep in mind that, sad and unlikely as it may seem, just like L'Impresario pointed out, there are (many) cases where all parties (except the children, of course) are _willingly_ and _knowingly_ doing the trade. When all of it is set up as a perfectly legal adoption, there is little that the law can do.
The law can only reach so far - they hardened the adoption laws - that only slowed them down, and I don't know if significantly enough, because there is only so much you can do about making adoptions more difficult, without hurting the genuine ones...

Papewaio
07-26-2006, 02:13
A law that is not actively enforced is not a law, it is a piece of ink on paper.

A government that cannot enforce its own laws within its own territory or look after its own children would not be my first candidate as a member of a progressive group of states.

Nor do I accept 'others are failing therefore so can we'. Two wrongs do not make a right. The buyers need to be hounded down and publically named. DNA tests need to be used to get rid of scams that claim false parenthood.

Governments whose nations are consistently used as depots for selling children do have a responsibility and they need to show that they are doing something. Yes there will always be crime, that doesn't mean it should not be policed. If there is more crime in a town, region, state or country then that needs to be more heavily policed not less.

If the government is not capable of doing such then by all means it should lose privledges such as being suspended from the EU (this should apply to both sides of the equation buyers and sellers).

Any government and society that actively supports child slavery ie the hypothetical VAT tax should be wiped off the face of the earth. We are overpopulated as it is so why keep the worst?

Alexander the Pretty Good
07-26-2006, 04:05
As Blodrast has been saying, Pape, should we terminate all of Europe?

Obviously this is sick; I think Banquo's Ghost needs to apologize to Romania and Bulgaria for denying that they are fit to join the EU. The buyers already live inside the EU.

Papewaio
07-26-2006, 04:44
IFF any state actively encouraged and taxed slavery as per the hypotherical then I don't see why they shouldn't be removed.

That is not the situation as delivered in the article, the actual scenario is one where wealthy people are preying on poorer ones. It is a worse version then the sex tourists going to poor countries to get cheaper sex (at least there the people involved are more likely to be adults).

The people are buying other humans as a commodity. They are creating a demand that in turn creates organisations that sidestep the law. Remove the demand and you remove part of the problem. The other part is making sure that humans in a country can live without having to turn to crime... that is reason enough for a country to be denied entry into the EU because it is not capable of looking after its own citizens, on the other hand it might be said that entering the EU will boost the economy and help the country to look after the people.

So I would start with conditions of entry that included that the citizens would have a minimum standard of living (including education) and as long as the country works on those issues trade would be strengthened. Once high enough standards were met I would give them conditional EU membership until they finally achieve parity with other long term members.

Mooks
07-26-2006, 06:21
This stuff is absolutely disqusting. People that do this are on par with Hitler.

America likes to get in other peoples affairs, why not stuff like this? Its not like they would get bad PR for trying to stop underage prostitution.

Banquo's Ghost
07-26-2006, 08:48
Obviously this is sick; I think Banquo's Ghost needs to apologize to Romania and Bulgaria for denying that they are fit to join the EU. The buyers already live inside the EU.

:laugh4: I somehow doubt that those two countries are losing much sleep over my censure or otherwise.

One of the functions of the Backroom for me is to gain a wider perspective on my own thoughts and opinions. The majority of the posters here are well-informed and passionate in their areas of knowledge - or good at squirrelling out information.

It is often effective to engage such debate by provocative phrasing. From my first question, Blodrast not only made an excellent series of arguments but provided some good material for me to mull over. Papewaio articulated some of my own emotional responses - but I should apologise to him, because clearly my over-provocative title confused the issue - there is no implication that the EU will actually tax this trade, merely my ham-fisted attempt to make a link between economic priorities and the convenient overlooking of human rights that sometimes goes on in the EU's drive for expansion. :oops:

The second question was obviously phrased badly as well - the intent was to try and find out why people would use their wealth to purchase children like a commodity. The problem is not limited to the EU - and Blodrast showed some of the causal links. But can we understand the mind-set of someone who buys children? Do they consider they are providing a better life for that child?

It happens to interest me, not merely from a humanitarian perspective, but because I know someone personally who has built a family this way. A very successful business person worth many millions, has chosen to use that wealth to buy/adopt several Romanian children. They are all blue eyed and blonde, the premium brand.

I find that spooky beyond belief, yet I seek to understand what is going on through other's views.

:bow:

Vladimir
07-26-2006, 17:20
One of the functions of the Backroom for me is to gain a wider perspective on my own thoughts and opinions. The majority of the posters here are well-informed and passionate in their areas of knowledge - or good at squirrelling out information.

It is often effective to engage such debate by provocative phrasing.

Great, it appears we have something in common.~;). This new form of slavery is everywhere; there were even some arrests here in Washington, D.C. Taxing such a thing would be...interesting :inquisitive: , but perhaps beneficial. There are a few laws here, like the cocaine stamp tax in Tennessee, which serve to not only increase the penalty for certain crimes but all law enforcement another way to catch the bad guys. Tax evasion on illegal revenue anyone? (Al Capone).

Alexander the Pretty Good
07-27-2006, 00:19
I was mostly kidding about the apology, Banquo. ~;)

From the perspective of the mother, it's probably a win-win scenario. One less mouth to feed, and some cash up front. The cash thing is what makes it icky; putting kids up for adoption is I think a fairly accepted option for mothers, especially young, poor ones.

If it wasn't for the purchasing aspect, this would be fairly normal. As it stands, it is morally reprehensible as well as highly illegal.