KOSOVO SEX INDUSTRY
By Jeta Xharra in Pristina

There was hardly any prostitution in Kosovo before the war - now it's booming.

August 5, 2002 - (IWPR) Red neon over the Nairobi bar and an arc of light slicing through a chink in its heavily-draped window are all that illuminate the entrance to the striptease club, where Naim, a thin Albanian man in his twenties, stands looking bored. When he sees me he springs into action, spreading his scrawny chest across the door. "Sorry, women are not allowed here," he said.

The doorman, Naim, was soon joined by a colleague who said he had visited similar nightclubs in Sweden, and considers the provision of such "entertainment" a measure of Kosovo's recent progress. "The real excitement here is that guys whose first journey beyond their village was to Stankovac (a refugee camp in Macedonia) can now see women strip here," he said.

I ask to be let in, saying that I only want to order a drink at the bar. When that fails, I threaten to complain to the UN police about the discriminatory entrance policy at the club. Naim will not budge. "All the girls inside the club are on contract, if the police raid the place and find uncontracted local girls we'll be in trouble," he said. "Anyway, this is no place for you 'sister', do you have any idea of why people come here?" He probably didn't expect an answer, but I whisper back, "Per kurv'ni?" - a piece of local slang best translated as "for whoring". Naim does not respond, but his face reddens.

Such prudishness might seem absurd from a man working at a club where punters can buy sex with the dancers. But this is a traditional tightly-knit society. Discussing his job with an Albanian woman was probably as awkward for him as talking about it to his mother, or his own sister. Naim probably justified his work on the basis that the club - which has since closed - is staffed entirely by foreign women. By "importing" Romanian, Moldovan or Ukrainian women, club owners and their staff can argue that they are shielding "our women" from this unpleasant, but lucrative business.

Unheard of three years ago, the sex industry is now the fastest growing "business" in post-war Kosovo, which has undergone unprecedented social and political upheaval since the1999 conflict. Mobilised for over a decade against the Milosevic regime, the population now plays host to the KFOR peacekeeping force, which provides a steady stream of clients for the protectorate's 120 or so strip clubs.

Around 60 per cent of women working in the sex trade come from Moldova, the others from Romania and Ukraine. However, figures from the International Organisation of Migration, IOM, counter-trafficking unit suggest that 70 per cent of the overseas women were lured from their home countries with promises of jobs as cleaners, waitresses, baby-sitters or care workers.

While the arrival of 45,000 international peacekeepers has certainly been a key factor in the sudden growth of the industry, in research conducted by the IOM Kosovo team last year, victims of trafficking reported that the bulk of the clientele are local residents.

Sevdije Ahmeti, a human rights activist and director of the Centre for the Protection of Women and Children, CPWC, also questions the image of Kosovo as an untainted, traditional society where an imported sex trade serves the needs of promiscuous foreigners. Traditional Albanian family structures, in which a male breadwinner provided for women and children, had started eroding even before the war, she says.

Many Kosovar men emigrated to western Europe during the 1990s, either to escape the military draft or to earn the hard currency which funded Kosovo's "parallel economy" in a period when Albanians either boycotted or were sacked from state jobs. Their absence altered the traditional balance of roles between the sexes.

Kosovar society was then traumatised by the events of spring 1999, as the majority of men were left powerless to defend their families in the face of Serbian army tactics, which included rape and gang rape. This "weapon" was not only used against women, but also to humiliate and emasculate the men who were supposed to be their protectors.

Claims by local men that no Kosovar women work in the sex industry are open to dispute. A local safe house set up by CPWC in 1996, to offer refuge to Bosnian women who had been raped during the 1991-5 war, has helped hundreds of women from across the former Yugoslavia, including a significant number from Kosovo.

Tina, a Kosovar girl who sought sanctuary at the refuge, was kept as a virtual slave in a Mitrovica nightclub for two years. Her clientele was divided between locals who visited the club and military personnel to whom she was "delivered" at checkpoints and barracks across northern Kosovo. In practice, the traditional attitudes that are believed to "protect" Kosovar women from the sex trade leave victims of trafficking and sexual crimes largely unprotected by the law.

One teenage victim of abduction and gang rape received scant support from the legal system.

Violeta, 16, was kidnapped by two young Albanian men on her way to school in Pristina three years ago. She was taken to a bar, which promptly closed for the day. After drawing the curtains, the men and their friends raped her repeatedly. She was allowed to return home in the evenings, but the kidnappers threatened to ruin her reputation if she said a word to anyone.

Terrified, Violeta, did not dare tell her parents what had happened and her ordeal was repeated several times. She became pregnant and had an abortion before her abductors were eventually caught. She testified against them, but they were released for "lack of evidence".

Three years on, her life is still severely restricted. "My kidnappers can go wherever they want, I only dare to go out in the company of my mother or father," she said. "I had to drop out of school, because they would follow me and ask my teachers where I was."

The first judge Violeta encountered told her to be less emotional and stop crying about her ordeal, which, he said, was clearly her own fault. With the support of her parents and the CPWC, she is now pushing for a new hearing of her case at the Pristina district court, but her experience shows the attitude rife among local men and even judges that women willingly engage in sexual activities in the various strip joints and bars. It is a view that conveniently overlooks the fact that girls may have been trafficked or abducted.

Urosevac (Ferizaj in Albanian) is a grim little town with a population of 130,000 in the south-east of Kosovo, bordering Macedonia. Even before the war the town had a bad reputation, with the level of drug dealing and underworld activity earning it the title of Kosovo's gangster capital. The nightclubs here are more relaxed than in Pristina.

Anyone - including a woman - can walk into the clubs and the owners seem unconcerned about regulations or the police. Their confidence is well-placed. "You don't just go and raid off-limits clubs in Ferizaj," exclaimed Jamie Higgins, head of the UNMIK Trafficking and Prostitution Unit, TPIU, when I asked if I could join a police swoop in the town. As a centre of organised crime, a crackdown on the town would require detailed planning and extensive numbers of police on the ground - more than the TPIU has at its disposal, he said.

On the outskirts of the Freizaj is the Madonna nightclub, a former family house turned striptease joint. In the corner, girls were putting on bikinis, ready to perform. Following a signal from an Albanian pimp, a blonde girl dancing on the podium made way for a dark girl, who began an elaborate gyration to Michael Jackson's ballad "Liberian Girl". A clientele of Albanian men, old and young, relaxed, surrounded by groups of foreign women.

This is where Gezim, a local resident and acquaintance from high school, brought me when I asked him to show me the place where he had tried to "order" a girl for a friend who he thought had "a problem" in that department.

"We stood outside the club almost all night after the dancing finished, but we couldn't get anything," he told me. "Other people were bidding and by the end there were no women left. The demand was high so I don't think we could have afforded them anyway."

We also visited the Apachi Club, named after the famous US Apache helicopters and one of the first clubs to open after the NATO action. Armed with Hellfire amour-piercing missiles, the aircraft were much vaunted during the war as the only military hardware capable of stopping the Yugoslav tanks and troops ethnically cleansing the province. The Americans' reluctance to deploy the helicopters, and their frequent crashes during training exercises in northern Albania, did not deter the owners. They probably hoped to attract a clientele from the US military base Camp Bondsteel, 14 km away.

It seems to have worked. "I drive both civilians and uniformed men to these clubs," said a taxi driver waiting outside the Apachi club, sometimes also - confusingly - known as the Arizona club. "Some have even changed into civilian clothing in my car. Of course, the locals think this is bad for the area. It's a bad example for the young if they see these things, but soldiers will be soldiers and they won't stay on base if there is a night-club outside."

Outside the Apachi, a string of red Christmas lights hang neatly around the entrance. Inside, the corridor leading to the striptease room was festooned with pictures of helicopters.

By 2 am, the dancing was over. Semi-naked, heavily made-up girls accompanied men to different tables, to negotiate "business" for the night. With heavy local patronage and little international appetite to take punitive action, scenes like this one look set to continue in Kosovo for many nights to come.

Jeta Xharra is a freelance researcher/journalist & recent MA graduate from the War Studies department, at King's College London