at the beginning of March an elderly man shuffled into my office at Save the Children in Tirana, Albania. He was tall, gaunt, shabbily dressed, and smelled of goat. He pressed his calloused hands around mine, then laid his palm flat on his chest-a warm gesture accompanied by a litany of humble Albanian greetings. I helped him into a chair. He was frail and plainly exhausted, having travelled for most of the day to tell me how he lost his daughters.
I had heard about Eduardo Leka from a teacher in Fushe Arrez, a pitiful huddle of communist tower blocks built on the side of a muddy hill in the mountains of northern Albania. Haystacks, goats, chickens and pigs crowd the once proud entrance halls-evidence that the population barely scratches together a living. When the local copper mine closed five years ago, unemployment rose to 90 per cent. I had wanted to meet the old man in his apartment, but the teacher said my presence in the remote town would attract too much attention and that could be dangerous for Eduardo. Instead he had taken a battered bus down the pot-holed mountain roads to visit me in Tirana.
Eduardo, who's in his late 60s, started the interview in tears. I had never seen an Albanian man cry. It was short, dignified and punctuated by profuse apologies. Dabbing his hollow cheeks he began by telling me how it used to be, about the tiny family apartment where they had all lived; his wife, three daughters and a disabled son. They were poor, but made do. Eduardo used to work in the copper mine, but since the closure he eked out a living selling cigarettes and sunflower seeds on the street corner. He refused to let his children do the same. He had hopes they would go to university. Then, three years ago, some local men started paying his daughters a lot of attention. Eduardo sensed danger. But the men were clever and his daughters were easy targets.
His youngest daughter, 14-year-old Anduena, fell in love with one of them, and although Eduardo tried to reason with her, the two ran off to the nearby town of Shkodra. Her boyfriend then announced that he wanted her to travel to Italy with some friends and he would join her later and they'd get married. They met the friends for coffee and Anduena said she didn't want to go. But the friends-who turned out to be traffickers-weren't listening. She was sold for $700. It wasn't a top price for an Albanian girl, but then, like a lot of undernourished mountain children, she was thin and her skin sallow. Anduena didn't discover the truth until her boyfriend left. Then the traffickers raped her. It was the simplest way of breaking her spirit and preparing her for what lay ahead.
From Shkodra, Anduena followed a path trodden by thousands of other Albanian women. We don't know all the details-Eduardo has only received one brief and unhappy letter from his daughter-but the story is so common it is easy to fill in the blanks.
A few days later she was taken in a car along with a clutch of other girls to the Vlora coastline of southern Albania. She was now so traumatised that escape was not something the traffickers needed to worry about. Late at night, huddled in flimsy clothing, the women waited in the pine forests that border the deserted Albanian beaches for the sound of a twin-engined speedboat. There would have been around 15 operating that night, as is usual when the sky is clear and the Adriatic sea is calm. There were no signs of any police on the beaches or the roads; someone would have paid them to be elsewhere.
Soon Eduardo's daughter, along with around 40 other trafficked women and illegal immigrants, was clinging to guard ropes. It was the first time Anduena had ever seen the sea and this was a terrifying introduction, the unlit speedboat racing almost blind for two hours across the 70-mile Otranto channel to the Puglia coast in Italy. On arrival, they waded through the surf to get to the shore.
After a blur of grotty hotel rooms and inspection visits from buyers, punctuated by further rape, Anduena arrived in Milan. There she was sold again, her price now doubled, to another Albanian who owned several other girls. He was keen to put her to work immediately. In a matter of days after leaving her boyfriend in Albania, Anduena found herself at midnight on the freeway clutching a fistful of condoms, with an instruction to make $500 by dawn. Her pimp warned her that if she tried to escape, she and her family back home would be killed. This was no empty threat: last year, 168 foreign prostitutes were murdered in Italy, most of them Albanians.
At this point in the story, Eduardo reached into his pocket for a purple handkerchief to wipe his eyes again. Then he told me about his second daughter, 18-year-old Suela. The traffickers had come back for her after they took Anduena. Eduardo was too distressed to go into the details. He said that he'd heard the traffickers had taken her to work in a Kosovo nightclub, although there was another rumour that she was a prostitute in Belgium.
So by 1999, Eduardo and his wife only had two children left, 35-year-old Marta and his disabled son. The family clung to a hope that Anduena and Suela were happily married abroad. Then a letter came from Anduena. She'd been rescued by an Italian religious order who had noticed the distressed child punting for clients. In the letter, she described what had happened to her.
Marta, the eldest daughter, was a brave woman who must have known the dangers. She went to the local police with the names of her sister's abductors. The police promised to protect the family while they made enquiries, but all they did was tell the criminals that Marta was causing trouble.
Not long after, the local men paid a visit to Eduardo's apartment. Only his son was there to receive them, but they left a chilling message: if Marta persisted in her quest for justice, she too would disappear. In fact, her card had already been marked. A few days later Eduardo came home to find the the walls splattered with blood. Marta had gone. On 31st May some floating bin bags in the local river caught the attention of a small child. Inside were the dismembered remains of Marta.
For a day or so the story received attention in the national Albanian press, then it fizzled out. Eduardo told me that the police took no forensic evidence and while two men have been arrested for trafficking offences, there have been no murder charges.
"It's a cover up," he said. "These traffickers are very powerful, dangerous and rich men. I fear they'll get away with it." To make his point, he emptied an envelope onto the table. It was stuffed with letters bearing the official stamps of senior government officials. Each of them told him to take his grievance to another department. With a defeated shrug of the shoulders Eduardo uttered Albania's most common refrain: "What can you expect? It's Albania."
His story is just one of many that I have heard over the last few months. Albanians, according to recent research, are by far the most numerous of all eastern Europeans exported to the west for sexual exploitation. Yet the disappearance of thousands (some say tens of thousands) of Albanian females remains the least understood of Balkan atrocities. Among western governments there persists an image of the tough, professional eastern European prostitute: a victim of, at worst, economic pressures. No doubt such women do exist. But there has been a failure to grasp the root nature of prostitution trafficking, the ruthless methods used by traffickers to keep their women quiet, or the fact that most of their Albanian cargo are children.
in january of this year, I was asked by Save the Children to conduct the first comprehensive research into the trafficking of Albanians. Throughout the 1990s it has been known that Albanians were selling their fellow citizens-in some cases their wives-for sexual exploitation in the west. In 1997, NGOs in the country were reporting that as many as 30,000 Albanians were working as prostitutes abroad, 10,000-15,000 in Italy. The NGOs maintained that most of the girls weren't economic migrants. They had been conned by offers of marriage, abducted or simply sold into sex slavery. They were unpaid, routinely beaten and prevented from escaping by threats to themselves and their families.
The evidence has long been visible in Italy. Take a car at midnight along the freeways of Milan, Bologna, Rome and Lecce and you can see the timid Albanian village girls, (along with a host of other east Europeans and Nigerians) punting for trade. They're monitored night and day either visually or by mobile phone. Some are plainly very young.
But in Albania successive governments have maintained an impressive silence. Those individuals that spoke out in the past were either ignored or run out of town. In the mid-1990s, an Italian priest, Father Antonio Sciarra, erected ten white crosses to 30 girls trafficked from his Albanian parish. The inscription reads "to the lost girls of Zadrima." He even paid for a government minister to travel to Italy to see the girls on the streets. It made no difference. In 1997, Vera Lesko, a crusader for women's rights, presented a dossier of evidence about trafficking to the local authorities in Vlora. Within days she received death threats and had to leave her home.
The Albanian government admits it is a source country but still can't come clean about the scale of the problem. In January the ministry of public order wrote to me to say that it knew of 348 cases of trafficking. There was no further explanation.
Where to start our research? There was virtually no data, other than a few ad hoc surveys by local NGOs. I considered going to Italy to interview hundreds of prostitutes. But that was dangerous. In March Regina Pacis, the boss of an Italian Catholic organisation which rescues women from the streets of Italy, was held at gunpoint by Albanian pimps, who warned him to stop meddling.
Instead I chose to focus on Albania itself and study the trends at village level. I chose sample areas across the country. By holding discussion groups with villagers and interviewing locals with knowledge of their community (priests, doctors, teachers) I hoped to extrapolate a national picture of trafficking.
One cold wet January day I went to Lezha, another tower-block town of pot-holed roads full of donkey carts and top of the range Mercedes (stolen from the west). Here I explained to 14 women from the outlying villages why we had come together. They nervously kneaded their cold, brawny hands and darted furtive looks from downcast eyes. I had no idea if this was going to work. What if some of the women knew the traffickers or had lost daughters themselves? Shame, and rural fear of authority and traffickers, can make people unwilling to talk.
I needn't have worried. Within minutes the interpreter threw away the delicately phrased questions because it was clear that the women needed no gentle cajoling. Years of forced silence, watching traffickers remove girls from the villages, had built up a store of rage. In a rush of voices, they told their stories. A frustrating amount of information was anecdotal, the hard facts often elusive. Meeting victims' humiliated families was almost impossible. This is, after all, a battered people who have rarely known a stranger to bring them anything but trouble. Nevertheless the evidence, as it built up, was overwhelming.
Over the next ten weeks this scenario-me in a room with a translator surrounded by angry villagers-was repeated many times. We heard stories of girls who'd been abducted by strangers on their way to school, of runaway marriages turning into sexual exploitation abroad, of relatives who'd sold their own cousins to pimps. We were told about centres where women were gang raped to prepare them for work abroad, and of wealthy traffickers nonchalantly cruising through villages in soft top Mercedes sizing up candidates for export.
Sometimes, we came across heroic Albanians. An ex-policemen from Berat is paid just $70 a month by an Italian charity to track down the families of trafficked girls who had come to the attention of the authorities in Italy. He told me he knew many of the traffickers personally and how he feared discovery. "They are absolutely ruthless," he said. "They kill anyone who gets in their way."
"Why do you it?" I asked. He emptied his wallet on to the table. A clutch of yellowing passport photos of blank-eyed girls spilled out. "Look at them," he said. "They should be in school."
In each sample area, the basic picture became apparent. Trafficking had been widespread since 1992 and it was hard to find a village that had not been affected. In the early days, victims had come from all ages and backgrounds. Latterly the victims were predominantly children. For example, in Berat and Kucova districts in south Albania, we estimated 2,000 females had been trafficked since 1992, 75 per cent of them children under 18. In Puka district in the north, local teachers identified 87 victims trafficked in the last three years, 80 per cent of them children; in the small town of Lac, also in the north, pupils and teachers identified another 57 victims, half of them children. And so it went on.
How was it that a country barely larger than Wales and with a population of mere 3.5m, could have allowed this to happen with so little outcry? The reasons lie in the political, social and moral wasteland that followed the collapse of communism. It was always going to be hard for Europe's poorest country to adapt after centuries of medieval living followed by 50 years of Stalinist (and briefly Maoist) dictatorship. Hopes of economic revival died with the collapse of the pyramid loan schemes in 1997. After Albania's most talented and educated had quit for happier pastures, what remained was a lawless zone of Europe where young women are the main victims.
Trafficking first emerged in the early 1990s in the southern town of Berat. Thanks to government connections which made it easy to smuggle arms, drugs and women, Berati gangs emerged as the most influential in Albania. Vlora, the Adriatic port, became the centre of the speedboat operation taking girls to Italy.
To begin with, there were fewer recruits in the mountainous north. This is because of the influence of the Kanun, a medieval law which communism had tried to suppress, but which had re-emerged in the vacuum of the early 1990s. The Kanun lays strong emphasis on close family ties, honour and revenge, and in these areas it was harder and more dangerous for traffickers to infiltrate communities.
But by the second half of the decade, there had been so much internal and external migration, particularly of the male population, that the traditional way of life was no longer a protection. Tens of thousands of men had left to seek work abroad and it became easier for traffickers to target girls in remote villages. Although it has always been more prevalent in the south and in the cities, trafficking gangs and their victims now come from all over Albania.
Women from the more sophisticated former Soviet countries are usually recruited through false job adverts. But most Albanians are snared by the wedding scam. The status of rural Albanian women is particularly low (the Kanun calls them "sacks made to endure") and few aspire to more than marriage. In addition, domestic violence is endemic and in some remote villages a bullet is a traditional item of the bride's trousseau, for the husband to use if she strays. Adulterous women are shot in the back of the head, as you might dispatch a dog.
The trafficking of girls probably peaked in 1997 and 1998. But the lawlessness of that period also worked against the traffickers. Albanians broke into the state armouries and stole half a million kalashnikovs. At the same time, the media was taking more interest in the activities of traffickers and Albanians became more aware and vigilant. Heavily armed, they were able for the first time to exact revenge.
Today trafficking continues on a daily basis, but the gangs have to be much more selective about their targets: vulnerable girls, normally children, from poor, ill-educated and dysfunctional families. While numbers have declined, trafficking still casts a long shadow in rural areas. We discovered that in many villages 90 per cent of schoolgirls over the age of 14 no longer go to high school. A generation of parents has learned to fear for its daughters.
With their stocks running low, the gangs are now heavily involved in the buying and selling of foreign women. Moldovans, Ukrainians and Romanians are brought into the country, chiefly from Montenegro. But Albanian traffickers still prefer Albanian girls. In March my student assistant was introduced by a friend to two traffickers, while drinking in a hotel bar in Shkodra. They told her that in a bedroom upstairs they were keeping a Moldovan and a Ukrainian. My assistant asked if they dealt in Albanians. "Oh, we prefer them," they said, "they're so much less worldly. It makes them a lot easier to control." The conversation finished abruptly when a buyer arrived.
Albania is the thin end of a funnel directing thousands of women and children onto the streets of western Europe. The Albanian government, showered with cash by the EU, does next to nothing about it. It is in serious violation of the many international conventions and treaties on human rights that it has signed and ratified. There is not a single official shelter or welfare programme for trafficked Albanians, no attempt to collect reliable data, and no anti-trafficking strategy. In December 2000, the Albanian and Italian governments teamed up to launch Operation Eagle, a bilateral effort to stop the speedboats. While it had some success in seizing vessels, only seven small-time operators were caught and none, as far as we know, has been punished.
This surprises few Albanians. Even if there was a real effort to take on the gangs, who would finance it? Albania can't. Albanian policemen earn $100 a month; hardly motivation for taking on the gangs. One in ten trafficked foreign women given shelter in Albania last year claimed the local police had colluded with her abductors. The Albanian chief prosecutor was recently asked how many policemen were involved. "I can name you a few who aren't," he joked.
My report for Save the Children was published in mid-April. It kicked up a stink in Albania, mainly because it was election time. But the country can't do much without the help of the west. It needs to train its police force, reform a corrupt judiciary, create services and shelters, develop and implement a meaningful anti-trafficking strategy. But even then, the root causes of trafficking remain as obvious as they are intractable: poverty and lack of opportunity.
A few days after the report was published I was invited to address the Balkan Stability Pact Task Force on Trafficking of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The stability pact is the weapon with which the west plans to fight the traffickers. It will need to show a bit more conviction if it is to beat the gangs. Over 100 delegates-ministers, ambassadors, experts-gathered in Vienna's Hofburg palace. I was told I could speak for five minutes. By lunch, with no offers of money and no new ideas, some of the delegates began to slip out. In the afternoon, a bottle-blond woman from Montenegro, who runs a shelter for victims of trafficking, took the floor and said, "I am very disappointed. Thank you for your invitation, but I shall not be coming again." Not everyone heard. It was a Friday, and quite a few delegates needed to get home early.
