Returnees: Lost in Legal Loopholes

Finally, Bruna is safe in a secret place.

She was still a child, 16, when she summoned the courage to go to the police with the name of her pimp a year ago. She was younger still, only 14, when she was abducted by the man who introduced her to the "happy days" in Italy. There she lived a life of terror and she still wears the tattoos of cigarette burns on her face and breasts to prove it.

Bruna's information led to the arrest of her alleged pimp and a network of 17 other traffickers of young girls, some of the most dangerous men in Tirana, according to the organizer of the private shelter that first housed Bruna. (The organizer lives in fear of the traffickers, like the girls she is trying to help, and asked not to be identified.)

The legal system answered Bruna's bravery by quickly releasing the 18 traffickers and dropping all charges against them. The pimp network most likely went right back to work in Italy, the organizer added.

The release immediately made Bruna's secret place at a college somewhere in Italy, not so safe anymore.

"Pimps never abandon their prey," the organizer said sadly.

Bruna is only one of thousands of children from Albania and other countries who are being abducted by traffickers, or entranced by the stories they spin of a fast life of clothes and money in Italy. Their only escape from a life of terror on Italian streets is when they are discovered by authorities in patrol boats off the coast or on the streets of Rome and Milan and are sent home.

But a returnee's hope of a new life when she is returned to Albania is quickly extinguished when she faces a legal system that does not seem to have the will to protect or rehabilitate her, according to an investigation by a team of eight journalists organized by the Media Diversity Institute in London, and the Albanian Media Institute in Tirana.

The two-week investigation found that terrorized children forced to leave Albania return as desperate women, who will more often be prosecuted as prostitutes, and sentenced to up to three years in prison, than treated as victims of pimps, who too often go free. The justice they are promised if they turn in their street masters favors those who have more to spend on lawyers and bribes.

Bruna will likely never recover from her brutalized teenage years.

"When she came to us she could hardly stand-up," the organizer said. "She was badly violated with permanent physical damage (to her genital area)."

Bruna wore a wig to hide scars on her head from cigarette burns, and her arms were permanently blue from continual beatings. Besides scarring on her breasts, the center's physicians said she had damaged hearing from the pimps constant pummeling.

Trafficking sex slaves like Bruna continues to be a thriving business, virtually unabated, in Albania, according to a recently released Human Rights Watch World Report for 2001. The report said that far more women victims were prosecuted for prostitution than pimps charged in trafficking cases. The Albanian government simply does nothing for victims or witnesses against the traffickers, the report said.

The first law against human trafficking for prostitution in Albania was passed in 1995. In February 2001 the trafficking law was strengthened with penalties of from seven to 15 years imprisonment. If trafficking results in the death of a victim, the trafficker may be sentenced to life imprisonment. The law also provides that all the boats and other means used in trafficking or profits will be confiscated from the perpetrator. The law also includes those who indirectly profit from trafficking including fines against bars and motels used for prostitution and imprisonment of the owner for up to 10 years.

The government feels the law is adequate, and compares favorably to any other country in the world, according to Ardian Dvorani, head of the Law Codification at the Justice Ministry.

"The new law better defines organized crime and closes the loopholes of abuse," Dvorani told the investigating team.

The problem is no one is using the law, Dvorani said.

The government surveyed use of the law last year in Berat, Korce, Fier and Shkoder.

In Shkoder, for example, the survey showed that five traffickers were sentenced in 2000, and yet by October 2001 there were only two of them in prison.

There are plans to create special courts for organized crime and serious crimes, which would include trafficking for prostitution exploitation. But the effort is stalled by the bureaucracy and a lack of commitment of funds, Dvorani said.

But courtrooms, special or otherwise, cannot do much without fearless judges, other observers told the investigative journalists team.

Luan Omari, a well-known penal specialist and vice-chairman of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Albania in Tirana, said the irony of the re-victimization of the young women is not an accident. It is just one more price being paid by the country as it waits for the judiciary to become truly independent of outside pressures in the wake of the Communist period.

"The judiciary's independence is not only a matter of getting free from politics," Omari said. "But also from the effect of organized crime and the trafficking networks they operate."

Before 1990, when forced trafficking of prostitutes to other countries became a major industry in Albania, local street prostitution brought severe criminal penalties. But though there is greater recognition now that trafficking is closer to slavery than voluntary prostitution, the legal system still treats trafficking victims like local street corner prostitutes.

Prostitution is big business now. What used to be a "primitive" collection of small operators, Omari said, is now a rich and well-organized industry with the capability to corrupt Albanian prosecutors and judges who have low salaries.

The Vlora boat owners, for example, that used to operate independently have now formed cartels similar to the Italian Mafia, one boat owner told a member of the investigative team working undercover in Vlora's port-side bars.

"If the police manages to seize one of our boats, (the cartel) can still continue by replacing the seized boat immediately," the boat owner told a journalist posing as an interested observer.

They don't even miss a night of business.

But according to professor Omari, the greater problem is the fact that well-organized traffickers no longer look like common criminals.

"Now, a trafficker might be anyone, a corrupted official, a good father, or a minister," Omari said. "And prosecutors, trained under the simplistic communist view of justice, don't think twice about calling a victim a 'prostitute' and throwing her in prison."

Corruption can be a serious temptation for judges and police alike considering the size of the trafficking business. There were some 30,000 trafficked Albanian women serving their masters in Italy in 2000, according to a recent report by Save The Children, an international NGO. Out of the total, 6,000 were in turn moved on to Greece in 2000 by the trafficking networks.

With this kind of volume, judges and police can avoid threats and earn considerable "bakshish" (bribes) by favoring pimps over returning young women even in the small percentage of cases where charges are brought, the report said.

Apparently, the law enforcement problem is not in trying to find the prostitute victims and their pimps.

Every year the Italian authorities hand over to their Albanian counterparts hundreds of women arrested on the streets of Italy. The Italians also send back some of the pimps to Albania for prosecution, although the Italians also prosecute some themselves. Traffickers operate openly in seaside towns such as Durres and Vlora and the cooperative effort of interdiction by Italian Guardia di Financa patrol boats and the Albanian Border Police is successful, according to government officials.

But a federal prosecutor involved in the government's anti-trafficking effort in Tirana said the law enforcement is rendered useless by jailing prostitutes and letting their pimps go free. Last year the anti-trafficking effort managed to jail six Moldavian prostitutes and sentence 313 Albanian women in Tirana for prostitution.

Meanwhile, only 10-20 traffickers have been sentenced in all of 2000 and 2001.

"The prostitutes were arrested in Albanian hotels from Shkodra to Tirana but none of their pimps has tasted any jail time, and neither have the hotel owners or anyone else who supports the trafficking industry," the prosecutor said with disgust.

Added to the indignity of the lack of justice for traffickers, the prosecutor said even he fears them enough that he asked his name not be revealed for this story.

Perhaps Xhavit Shala, the Fier Regional Police Chief, is an even lonelier figure in the trafficking battle.

Shala spoke passionately to the investigative journalist team about the need to aggressively pursue traffickers and stop treating their victims as criminals.

In his effort to break the traffickers advantage, Shala opened a shelter two months ago for victim women within the Fier police compound. Since then he has been begging the federal government for help with the project with virtually no response.

After the Fier police sponsored 40 community meetings on the cost of trafficking to the community, charges against pimps went up 400 percent, Shala said.

He started the shelter to give the women a safe place to stay while the police investigated charges against their pimps. After convincing the women to voluntarily stay in the shelter and then to overcome their fears and name their pimps, the women eventually gave up their cases because court delays went on for weeks.

Shala asked the Justice and Public Order Ministries and Prosecutor General Office to streamline the court process but never got an answer from Tirana.

The victims end up in a worse situation when they leave the shelter and their pimps, still at large, are waiting for them on the corner outside the police compound, Shala added. The women are quickly back on the boats heading for Bari and another round of servitude on Italian streets.

The desperate Albanian economic situation is the root cause of trafficking but changing the trafficking and prostitution laws is the place to start fighting the problem, said Elsa Ballauri, head of the Albanian Human Rights Watch.

"Our political and judicial system are corrupted because traffickers are capable of paying large amounts of money," Ballauri said.

Maybe so but Shala, the Fier police chief, would like just a little money from Tirana.

He recently made a modest request for funding from the interior ministry to feed the women in his shelter. The ministry already does the same for the common criminals in his jail and even for his police officers.

This time the government did respond. And they said no.

"I am not asking assistance from the central authorities any more, only that they stop putting obstacles in my way," Shala said.