Email this article
------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 25, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------In occupied Kosovo
NATO, UN admit women are enslaved
By Leslie Feinberg
An imperialist occupation army brings with it rape, prostitution, and extreme and brutal forms of oppression of women. This has been true throughout history.
The strength of a liberation army can be directly measured by its role in freeing women from oppression.
When the U.S. ordered the bombing war on Yugoslavia, U.S. and NATO leaders posed as liberators. The people of the Balkans knew this was a lie.
Now, with the Pentagon and other NATO "peacekeepers" hunkered down in Kosovo, what has emerged are conditions that are no different from other imperialist occupations. Most particularly revealing of the near-colonial state that has been imposed on Kosovo by the United States and NATO are the conditions for women in the occupied territory.
Rape, prostitution, brutality and murder--and the literal enslavement of thousands of women--are the documented reality in just over one year of imperialist occupation.
"The sex-slave traffic in East European women, one of the major criminal scourges of post-communist Europe, is becoming a major problem in Kosovo, where porous borders, the presence of international troops and aid workers, and the lack of a working criminal-justice system have created almost perfect conditions for the trade," reported the April 24 Washington Post.
This report of the nightmare condition for these women was admitted by the very imperialist forces that ushered in this lucrative profit industry: NATO occupiers, United Nations police officials and capitalist "aid" agency personnel.
"The first case of sex-slave trafficking came to light in October--four months after NATO-led peacekeepers entered the province," admitted an April 24 Washington Post report.
"In the last 10 years, according to women's advocacy groups," the article continued, "hundreds of thousands of women from the former Soviet republics and satellites have been trafficked to Western Europe, Asia and the United States."
Recall the media hoopla, the Pepsi Cola commercials, all hailing the "liberation" of Eastern Europe from socialism? Yet last Oct. 22, UNICEF released a report on the plummeting standard of living for the 150 million women and 50 million girls of Central and Eastern Europe.
Imperialist military occupation
What has the reintroduction of the capitalist profit-driven economy meant for women and girls in these former workers' states? Widespread unemployment, loss of free health care and education, the rise of drug and alcohol abuse, and anti-woman violence. This has helped created fertile ground for the emergence of a large-scale prostitution industry.
What created the conditions for Kosovo to be the hub of a sex-slave industry?
"Kosovo, which had some local prostitution but no trafficking problem before the peacekeepers arrived after the Kosovo war ended last June, is just another new market," officials said.
According to a few women lucky enough to escape their confinement, the Post noted, "Peacekeeping troops--including Americans--also were customers."
The women and girls--some in their early teens--are lured with lies or outright kidnapped from Moldavia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania. They are reportedly robbed of their passports.
The Post referred to a report, recently released in France, that the women are frequently taken to slave-breaking stations in Albania where they are repeatedly raped and beaten in an attempt to crush their spirit.
Although many people forced into prostitution are paid very little, these women are literally held as chattel.
"These women have been reduced to slavery," conceded Col. Vincenzo Coppola, commander of the national police in Kosovo.
Who is profiting? According to the Washington Post report, the women and girls "were transported along a well-established organized-crime network from their East European homelands to Macedonia, which borders Kosovo to the south. There, they were held in motels and sold at auction to ethnic Albanian pimps for $1,000 to $2,500.
"The pimps work under the protection of major crime figures in Kosovo, officials said, including some with links to the former anti-Serbian rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation Army."
Liberation army? The KLA began as a mercenary force covertly armed and uniformed by Germany and the United States. Even the New York Times--an avowed enemy of the Yugoslav government--reported March 28 that many of the leaders of the KLA trace their roots to a fascist unit set up by the Italian occupiers during World War II.
The KLA's stated aim is an "ethnically pure," Albanian-only Kosovo. KLA leaders insisted on the U.S.-NATO occupation of the multi-ethnic province of Yugoslavia.
That's under whose protection these crime bosses work. No industry can function in Kosovo today without U.S.-NATO approval and collusion.
What has the Pentagon-NATO war of bloodshed brought to the Balkans? Ethnic peace? The post-war military occupation has provided the cover for murderous pogroms against Serbs, Rom and other peoples in Kosovo.
Freedom and democracy? Ask the women and girls being sold on the auction block for NATO armies and KLA crime bosses.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)HOME :: U.S. NEWS :: WORLD NEWS :: EDITORIALS :: SUBSCRIBE :: DONATE