KOSOVO: Western troops, policemen, and civilians are largely to blame for the rapid growth of the sex slavery industry in Kosovo over the past five years, a mushrooming trade in which hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls, are tortured, raped, abused and then criminalised, Amnesty International said yesterday.
In a report on the rapid growth of sex-trafficking and forced prostitution rackets since Nato troops and UN administrators took over the Balkan province in 1999, Amnesty said Nato soldiers, UN police, and western aid workers operated with near impunity in exploiting the victims of the sex traffickers.
As a result of the influx of thousands of Nato-led peacekeepers, "Kosovo soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution. A small-scale local market for prostitution was transformed into a large-scale industry based on trafficking, predominantly run by criminal networks."
The international presence in Kosovo continues to generate 80 per cent of the income for pimps, brothel-owners, and mafiosi who abduct local girls or traffic women mainly from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia to Kosovo via Serbia, the report said, although the international "client base" for the sex trade has fallen to 20per cent last year from 80per cent four years ago.
Up to 2,000 women are estimated to have been coerced into sex slavery in Kosovo, which had seen "an unprecedented escalation in trafficking" in recent years.
The number of premises in Kosovo listed by a special UN police unit as being involved in the rackets has swollen from 18 in 1999 to 200 this year.
A few weeks ago the UN's department of peacekeeping in New York acknowledged that "peacekeepers have come to be seen as part of the problem in trafficking rather than the solution".
The sex slavery in Kosovo parallels similar phenomena next door in Bosnia, where the arrival of thousands of Nato peacekeepers in 1995 fuelled a thriving forced prostitution industry.
International personnel in Kosovo enjoy immunity from prosecution unless this is waived by the UN in New York for UN employees or by national military chiefs for Nato-led troops.
Amnesty International spokeswoman Ms Annika Flensburg said no cases of Irish troops involved in prostitution had come to light.