BELGRADE: Every week now, dozens of people are caught trying to cross illegally into Western Europe through the Balkans. They mask the many more who get through.

Some are males from the Middle East led to believe a better life waits the other side. But thousands of young women and girls have been travelling this route. It is the route to prostitution, police and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) agree.

A large number remain in the Balkans, but scores are taken further West.

“Hideous crimes are committed against thousands of women (in the Balkans),” Madeleine Rees from the United Nation High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCHR) office in Sarajevo told IPS.

“Western governments treat this problem as illegal immigration that should be solved with law enforcement,” she said. “But it is the human rights perspective we want to introduce to explain human trafficking, as the women who end up being forced into sexual slavery can only be treated as victims.”

NGOs are stepping in to help these women in eight countries in the region — Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Moldova, Kosovo, Serbia & Montenegro and Romania. With the help of UNHCR and other international organizations they are working first to educate the public, police and media about the problem.

“These countries are both transit countries and source countries for trafficked women,” Jelena Djordjevic from the Belgrade-based NGO Astra told IPS. “We have received some 900 phone calls from women who became victims of human trafficking in the January 2002-June 2003 period. We provided shelter for dozens of them.”

A study on human trafficking released earlier this month by the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe (SPSEE), an organization funded by the European Union, says 5,000 female victims of human trafficking have been identified and assisted in the January 2000-June 2003 period.

Astra is the first NGO that began to deal with victims of human trafficking in Serbia. “It is our aim not only to provide help, but also to clarify the reasons why women become victims of trafficking,” Djordjevic says. “In all these years, we have come to a single conclusion: devastating poverty is the main reason to fall prey to false promises.”

According to information presented at a conference called last year by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), some 200,000 women have been smuggled through the Balkans in recent years.

Most of them came from the Soviet successor states or former communist countries. Lawlessness during the wars in former Yugoslavia (1991-95) and the social collapse in former Eastern bloc countries created the ground for exploitation.

“This was the business of organized crime rings working internationally,” Rees says. “These people were always a step ahead of the authorities.”

The largest numbers of trafficked women arrived in the Balkans after the thousands of peacekeepers entered the area, first in Bosnia in 1995 and later in Kosovo in 1999. Hundreds of bars with prostitutes came up in the surroundings almost immediately.

“But the organized crime has changed its methods of work,” Rees says. “They are going underground now, renting houses and apartments, as hundreds of bars are being closed after years of police raids. The police cannot enter homes without permission, and that is where things end.”

The shifting methods lead to another gruesome pattern — prostitutes are forced to bear children if they get pregnant. The children become new victims of human trafficking, Rees says.

“It’s the new, horrifying source of income, as child trafficking is on rise,” she says. The UNHCR office in Bosnia says about 5,000 children born in that country since 1998 were never registered, and their fate is unknown.

The few victims who escaped will bear the scars of their ordeals the rest of their lives, Djordjevic says. “It is hard to escape, it is harder to re-integrate and it is almost impossible to go back to one’s place of origin.”

The eight countries of the region have only 26 shelters for women, with 300 spaces. Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania have shelters where women can stay up to two years, with hopes of settling later in a different surrounding where people do not know their past. But there are no statistics to suggest how many women managed to do so. Law enforcement efforts in the region have led to some success as police cooperation across the region has become more efficient.

Two months ago the Montenegrin police arrested Dilaver Bojku ‘Leka’, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia. The notorious trafficker of women will stand trial next month in his home country.

Serbian police, who have a 200-member task force to deal with human trafficking, arrested a key suspect Dusan Zarubica last April, together with some 30 others involved in the business. They will stand trial in November. They are charged with trafficking women from Romania, Moldova and Serbia into Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.

Croatian expert on trafficking Sasa Lekovic said police officials and representatives of NGOs agree that human trafficking is the second most profitable organized crime after drugs smuggling.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.