The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

2 THE BREAKING GROUNDS

OLEKSANDER MAZUR KNOWS all about the breaking grounds. A Ukrainian police officer, he was assigned to the United Nations international police force—CIVPOL—in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. His job was to kick down the doors of brothels and rescue trafficked women in this renegade Serbian province. For a little more than a year he did just that, and in that time he rescued more than a hundred women—most of them mere teenagers.

“I would like to clean up this mess for good,” Mazur said. “I would like not to have this job. It has cost me my dreams.”

From numerous investigations, Mazur has compiled an impressive dossier on the traffickers and their operations. He knows the enemy well—what it looks like, how it thinks, how it moves. He knows the names of several key players; their descriptions are etched in his mind. More important, he’s figured out the locations of secret training centers in Serbia where these thugs snap the spirit and will of their terrified hostages. These centers lie within his grasp, but he is absolutely powerless. His mandate is limited to Kosovo. The breaking grounds, just a few kilometers across the border in Serbia, are in neither his job description nor his jurisdiction.

Anna Eva Radicetti has also heard about the Serbian breaking grounds through her interviews with scores of rescued women. As manager of the Counter-Trafficking Return and Reintegration project of the International Organization for

Migration in Kosovo, she too has gathered reams of information about what happens to trafficked women on the other side of the border. “There are big apartments or houses in Belgrade where most girls are brought. Sometimes there are fifty girls in each place,” she explained. Radicetti has learned that potential buyers “test-drive” the women, much like the way we test-drive new cars. “They are sex-tested by each buyer. They want to see for themselves what the girls can do in terms of sex performance.”

When they’re not being used, she said, the young hostages are poked and prodded like cattle.

What happens to most trafficked women, whether they were tricked, abducted or willing, is criminal. They are forced into situations of profound terror, comparable to being held hostage. They are immediately deprived of their travel documents and their every movement is tightly controlled and restricted. Usually they live on the premises, where they work, locked in rooms, under constant guard and in fear of extreme violence and threats. They are warned that if they try to escape, they will be found and severely punished. They are also told that their families will be targeted. Often they’re videotaped or photographed in embarrassing sexual encounters, and warned that if they escape, the pictures will be sent to their families and distributed around their hometowns.

SOPHIA RECOILED WITH SHEER PANIC when asked about her abduction at knifepoint while walking home one evening on a rural road about a kilometer from her home.

“I could hear the car approaching and suddenly I froze. I could not move,” the eighteen-year-old Romanian said, nervously spinning her shoulder-length black hair in her fingers as she recounted the nightmare that became her life for the next four months.

Sophia was horrified by what she witnessed during her brief imprisonment in the building. Her experiences continue to haunt her in her sleep, and are typical of what women encounter in the breaking grounds.

The next day, the girl tried to hang herself.

“Many girls attempted suicide,” Sophia said. “I was told a few were successful and their bodies were buried in the woods.”

Sophia’s biggest fear was being broken in herself.

She just lay there, and they still attacked her anally. When they finished, she didn’t move. She wasn’t breathing. There was no worry on the faces of the owners. They simply carried her out.

A couple of days after the Ukrainian girl had been taken away, one of her compatriots dug deep for the courage to ask about her. The owner’s reaction was sharp, swift and brutal.

After an hour, the man snatched the shovel from the girl’s hands and ordered her out of the shallow pit. His message was clear: “Ask any more questions and you will end up in the grave.”

On her third day of captivity, Sophia was “trained.” She submitted without resistance. She moved as she was told. She feigned excitement at every thrust.

A week later, Sophia was sold to a pimp along with two other women. She was now his. She knew him only as Saba, a twenty-something Albanian. The three were taken by truck into Albania and then smuggled into Italy in the dead of night on a speedboat across the Adriatic. Saba was a particularly nasty sort, with a penchant for threatening his “property” with burning cigarettes. He put the women to work on Via Salaria, a busy roadway leading into the Eternal City. They were housed in a damp basement apartment where they slept on foam mattresses. The pimp kept all the earnings, except for a small stipend for basic necessities and food. “For certain, he made a thousand dollars a night from us,” Sophia said. “We were not permitted to return to the apartment until he had that much money.”

Three months later, with the help of a sympathetic regular, Sophia ran away and was taken to a Catholic rescue mission in southern Italy.

FOR HUNDREDS OF “BROKEN IN” WOMEN trafficked from Eastern Europe, the next stop on the road is the infamous Arizona Market. Between Sarajevo and Zagreb, in northwest Bosnia near the frontier with Serbia and Croatia, there lies a stretch of road called Arizona Highway. Beside it is Arizona Market. With its narrow alleyways and hundreds of pine-fronted stalls, it resembles an American gold-rush town from the 1800s. During the day it bustles with throngs of eager shoppers navigating a labyrinth of dirt roads in search of a bargain. Here you can find not only T-shirts, shoes, makeup, mattresses, ghetto blasters and pirated CDs, but also knock-off brand names like Rolex, Levi’s and Ralph Lauren, dried fruit, gleaming porcelain toilet bowls and freshly killed chickens.

At the entrance a large sign pays homage to the Americans: “Our thanks to the U.S. Army for supporting the development of this market.” Constructed in 1996 after the Balkan civil war, the market—often jokingly referred to as the Wal-Mart of Bosnia—was the brainchild of an American general. It was envisioned as a place where all factions—Croats, Serbs and Bosnians—could set aside their ethnic and religious rivalries and come together in the spirit of free trade. In the daytime, with its hordes of shoppers, the market looks like an experiment that has somehow gone right. But when the sun goes down a more pernicious trade kicks into gear.

In the shadows of night, the T-shirts and shoes are replaced by luxury cars and SUVs stolen off the streets of the European Union, not to mention weapons, illegal drugs and black-market cigarettes by the truckload. But the most valuable goods are the ones with a pulse—young women and girls trafficked from Eastern Europe.

Mara Radovanovic, vice-president of Lara, a local women’s group in nearby Bijeljina, shakes her head in disgust at the Arizona Market. “That is when the traders come to buy girls. They order the girls to take off all their clothes and they are standing in the road naked. They are exposed to be purchased like cattle.” Radovanovic said trafficked women are also sold at “sex slave auctions” in nightclubs with names like Acapulco and Las Vegas that have sprung up inside the market. “The girls appear naked on stage with numbers in their hands. Men walk up, touch their flesh, inspect their skin and even look into their mouths before they make a bid.” Once purchased, the women are held in slavery-like conditions and forced to work in bars and brothels throughout the region. “Their personal documents are taken away and they are not permitted to go out without a guard. They are paid no money at all, and often nightclub owners force them to have sex with clients without protection. As a consequence, every week there is at least one of those women undergoing an abortion in the Bijeljina hospital.”

In the surrounding hamlets, “collection centers” have emerged where hundreds of women are held captive in the basements, cellars and attics, awaiting their turn on the auction block. “Most of them are young, naive girls from rural areas who believe that they will find a job across the border,” Radovanovic said. “They realize what kind of job they have to do only when they end up in the Arizona Market or in Serbia. By then it is too late and they have little chance to escape.”

The women are sold to the hundreds of brothels and bars that pepper the countryside throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina. There they service the locals and, more significantly, the huge numbers of foreigners who make up the international peacekeeping and reconstruction forces. Those women who aren’t purchased on the auction block end up staying in Arizona, catering to shoppers and local policemen at a dozen clubs in the market.

At an urgent one-day meeting in late fall 2001 sponsored by Radovanovic’s group, the local police were invited to speak about law enforcement efforts to end the trade. Within minutes, the two male officers were put on the hot seat. Surrounded on all sides by determined women—all volunteers with local and regional NGOs—they were asked, point-blank, why the police simply sit back when it’s obvious what’s occurring in virtually every town in the area. Looking uncomfortable, the officers summoned one pathetic excuse after another, citing conflicting laws and regulations covering the various jurisdictions. But Radovanovic grilled the men relentlessly. She accused the police, straight out, of complicity and corruption, pointing out that a strip bar reputed to harbor trafficked girls operated with impunity directly across from the Bijeljina police station. The officers squirmed but stuck to their script.

Later that evening, a law student took me to that very bar. It was dimly lit, smoke filled and reeked of body odor and cheap beer. Disco music crackled from two speakers perched on an elevated stage where a naked teenage girl moved awkwardly to the thumping beat. As she danced, she stared at herself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the edge of the stage. She looked morose and self-conscious. It was as though she was in a trance, and that the young woman she saw in the reflection was a stranger who had stolen her body.

A meaty bouncer escorted us to a booth at one end of the bar. From the corner of my eye I noticed the owner—a slug with a buzz cut in a black leather jacket—wave his hand at two girls sitting at a table near the front. They jumped up and rushed over to our table. “What is it you want?” a pale-looking girl with short brown hair asked in Ukrainian.

“Two beers,” I replied, realizing a second after responding in Ukrainian that it was clearly the wrong thing to say. The girl stared at me, wide-eyed, and retreated to the bar, exchanging furtive words with the owner. He picked up his cell phone and punched in a number. “I think we should drink our beers quickly and get out of here,” I told my companion. He nodded anxiously.

At that moment, another young woman took to the stage. She was obese and clearly on display for the sport and ridicule of the patrons. Holding on to a brass pole, she bounced to the music while a phalanx of men at the edge of the stage whistled and laughed. While she spun her way around the pole, the previous dancer reappeared from a back room in a beige negligee. The owner ordered her to a darkened corner where a greasy middle-aged man sat hunched over a bottle of cheap red wine. The moment she sat down he started groping her, forcing his hand up and down her top. As he pawed her she kept her eyes closed, as if in prayer. A moment later, the two retreated to a room behind the bar.

We were just finishing our drinks when five local goons sauntered over to our table. One of them said something to me. The tone was definitely threatening. I turned to my guide.

“He wants to know who you are and why we are here.” “Tell him we were thirsty and came in for a beer.”

A number of words were exchanged. “He said to finish the beer and get out of here. He doesn’t like your face.”

We got up and left.

THE LEVEL OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE and psychological intimidation used to control these women is deliberate and extreme. It’s meant to instill fear—to crush them, destroy their will, force them to comply. There are reports of women being mutilated and murdered as punishment for refusing to engage in the sex trade. Women have been killed as examples to other women for daring to resist. According to Italian police, a foreign prostitute is murdered each month in that country alone. In Istanbul, Turkey, two Ukrainian women were thrown off a high-rise balcony while six Russian captives watched in horror. In Serbia, a Ukrainian woman was purportedly beheaded in front of a group of trafficked girls. A Russian woman was strangled by her pimp in May 1996 when she refused to hand over a $20 tip she received from a client. Her Israeli pimp dumped her body near the West Bank town of Ramallah so that police would believe she had been murdered by Arabs. And in 2000, the bodies of two Moldovan women were found floating in a river near the Arizona Market. Their hands were tied behind their backs, their feet attached to concrete blocks and their mouths taped shut—all marks of execution-style killings. On the tape over their mouths, their killers had scrawled the words “Organization for Security and Co-operation in

Europe.” Under its mandate, the OSCE has been trying to bring civil order to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Then there are the countless cases of women like Irini Penkina, who simply give up and take their own lives. The appalling circumstances behind Irini’s suicide in Greece rocked the cradle of democracy, but the public outrage was short-lived. The twenty-year-old from Belarus was found dead in an apartment in the northern port city of Thessalonica in October 1998. A perfunctory police investigation concluded that she had killed herself in despair at being forced by her Greek pimp to service more than a dozen men a day. Irini knotted black pantyhose around her neck and strung the other end around a pipe above the toilet bowl in her closet-sized bathroom. Her twenty-three-year-old roommate found her body. There was no suicide note.

Investigators learned that she had left her homeland with the promise of a waitressing job in Greece. When she arrived, she was brutalized into submission and then imprisoned in a stifling bordello in a town notorious for prostitution. She and three other women—a Bulgarian, a Moldovan and a Ukrainian—were rarely allowed to leave the apartment, except under the watchful eye of a thuggish guard. Their pimp forced them to service a blur of sex tourists and locals scurrying into the dank apartment at all hours of the day and night. He was arrested and charged with luring the women into prostitution and procuring them, but was later acquitted for lack of evidence.

IN EVERY METROPOLIS around the globe, trafficked girls mingle freely with the women who choose to take money for sex. On the surface, it’s hard to tell them apart. They dress and look the same. They have the same inviting expression. They smile, they pose, they flaunt and they strut. That’s what prospective clients and the public see in the bars or streets.

But that’s also what the pimps make certain they see. What they miss entirely is the darker side of the trade. It’s an ugly side, hidden behind heavy padlocked doors in rooms with iron bars on the windows and armed thugs in the hall. There, the striking blonde smiling coyly on the street may have been beaten with electrical wires the evening before. Behind these walls, the sweet-looking brunette who stands shyly on a corner with the innocent gaze of seventeen-year-old schoolgirl may have just been indoctrinated into the trade by two guards and a pimp intent on “breaking her in.” This is the side that keeps them on the street and this is the side that keeps the smiles on their lips. They stay because they fear what will happen if they run… and they smile because they know what will happen if they don’t.

If their “clients” looked closely at the bodies they’re using, they just might see some of the telltale signs—bruises peeking through under cheap flesh-colored makeup, whip marks on the buttocks, cigarette burns on the arms. If they paused long enough, while reaching their climax, to actually look into these women’s eyes, they might see frustration, revulsion, fear, depression, resignation, anger, shame… And if they asked the woman they’re with why she does what she does and actually took the time to dig into her past, they might hear how she was kidnapped from an orphanage in Ukraine, smuggled out of the country, sold at an auction and forced onto the street by a money-grubbing pimp who forces her to bring in $500 a night.

In short, they’re forced to do whatever it takes with whoever asks, as long as he pays, and they’re forced to do it with a smile on their face, a sparkle in their eyes and a moan on their lips… exactly as trained in the breaking grounds.