Neither the Government, Nor the Society Offers Prospects to the Returnees

Silvana, a 19-year-old girl from Kavaja, is the only one who will admit the truth.

She is standing in the detention area at the Rinas Airport for women returned to Albania as suspected prostitutes. A few minutes ago she and eight other women were escorted off the plane from Rome Italy. They are tired, hungry and in no mood to discuss their fate.

Each woman denies to police that she has worked as a prostitute, and says upon her release she will return as quickly as possible to Italy where her "boyfriend," "fiancée" or "husband" is waiting for her.

Then Silvana, who is a little younger than the others, is confronted by one "policeman," who is actually an undercover reporter for a team of eight Albanian journalists organized by the Media Diversity Institute in London and the Albanian Media Institute in Tirana, to investigate human trafficking in Albania.

Silvana's story about a "fiancée" in Italy and a "mother-in-law" who will give her a place to sleep tonight begins to fall apart. She is, in fact, quite alone with no future and no one, least of all the Albanian government or her family, to turn to.

"Please don't tell (anyone) I work as a prostitute," she says with a child's, not a woman's, tears in her eyes. "I have done it, but only for two weeks."

Silvana is only one of hundreds of Albanian girls, abducted, coerced or enticed into prostitution in Italy who are sent home every year. The two-week investigation by the journalists' team found that when they arrive at Rinas or the ports in Durres or Vlora, these Albania daughters and victims of one of the most vicious trades of organized crime, are treated as criminals by police and scorned by their families as tainted women.

In this story, about the lack of options returnees face, and in the other articles in this series, the investigative team looks at how and why Albanian society at large and the government that represents it, simply refuses to deal with the plight of the Albanian children they allow, and to some extent, encourage to be sold into slavery.

The minute she gets off the plane each trafficking victim is a step closer to her most likely fate: a return to her waiting pimp, who will immediately put her on the first clandestine speedboat back to Italy.

Although there are hundreds of girls like Silvana who return every year, reliable nationwide statistics on how many Albanian women are caught up in trafficking are difficult to come by, according to local and international NGOs. Even the Public Order Ministry, which is responsible for collecting national figures, told the Save the Children NGO that its data is "incomplete."

But specific local data and anecdotal information from shelters, police departments and NGOs do give glimpses that extrapolate to the shocking scale of the tragedy.

In one of the latest local reports, the NGO "Vatra" in Vlore, said that in 2001 it had interviewed 428 women and girls (36 were foreign nationals), who were caught in a clandestine boat, returned to Albania from Italy or who walked in to the NGO's offices looking for help.

Despite a widely held belief that overall trafficking in illegal immigrants has been declining since the 1997 boat exodus in Vlora ended, trafficking in sex slavery has steadily increased in the Vlora area, the NGO's report said. Compared to the total of 267 girls in 2000, last year the NGO was seeing a shocking160 percent increase in women threatened by trafficking.

But far more troubling to the NGO was the sudden drop in young girls among the returned. In the first half of 2001 all the women brought back on the Vlora ferry were from 22 to 27 years old. The year before 70 percent of the returned seen by the NGO were 14- to 18-year old children, the report said.

The NGO attributes the fact that trafficking totals are up but numbers of returned younger girls are down, to the increasing sophistication of the trafficking industry, which discards its older used "product" by turning them in to police.

The signs of "use" are one of the badges that the victims of trafficking share.

Silvana has a scar on her lip and a black bruise on her jaw.

Another woman at Rinas had two missing teeth and a black bruise on one of her cheeks. "I had a car accident when I was with a (female) friend of mine," she said.

The other four women returned the same day had similar signs of abuse on their bodies. "I slipped in the bathroom," said another, who said she was from the Puke district in northern Albania.

But police will tell you that these are the signs of abuse from pimps that keep the girls from identifying their tormentors.

But the returned women have a stigma that goes even deeper than a pimp's cigarette burn on the shoulder or breast.

As soon as they walk off the ferry at the Durres port they are social lepers.

Instead of the fancy Italian clothes that so many other Albanians coming off the boat went to Italy to buy, they are wearing the loose fitting pants and blouses typical of the southern Italian on a tight budget.

The first to meet the returning women at the Durres ferry are the Albanian Border police, who quickly end any hope of the women attaining victim status and ending their odysseys of abuse.

"They are prostitutes but we treat them very well," a border policeman told a reporter from the investigative team as they waited for the ferry.

No matter what their rank, the policemen consider the women as criminal, though they have committed no crime in Albania but crossing the border illegally.

"Naturally, I am sorry for them but they become prostitutes voluntarily," said Major Fatmir Shkreta, head of the port police, who admits his men treat these prisoners a little differently. "But if there is a pretty woman among them, it is normal that a man turns his eyes on her."

For Shkreta, the returning women--their faces and their stories--have all run together after watching so many go through the port.

That is, all but one.

Shkreta doesn't like to talk about the girl who came off the boat one day obviously pregnant. She was taken with the others to the detention room at port headquarters until the women could be moved to Durres central police station.

But before they could be moved, the woman miscarried her fetus on the floor of the detention room.

Shkreta said the agonized woman's face had made him think that she could have been his own daughter. But he immediately withdrew the comment. His daughter could not end up this way because she had a good education and came from a good family, he added quickly.

"I am very sad for these women," Shkreta said. "But sometimes they seem to have very bad characters when they cross their legs suggestively and start to smoke."

If the police distrust the returned women's motives, the feeling is often mutual.

"They kept us for a day in a cell here with no food or water," one woman complained to a reporter in front of a policeman.

The policeman protested he had given the women water but admitted he had not given them food.

"But I am going to buy a sandwich for each of you with my own money," he added.

When police try to get the returned women to identify their pimps and traffickers and become witnesses against them, they also find a lack of trust, this time because the police have a poor record of protecting the returned women from their pimps.

When the women agree to bring charges against their pimps the police tell them they will be protected. But the police admitted to the investigative team reporter that they cannot protect the majority of the women until the pimp is arrested and brought to trial.

"We cannot protect them," Arben Ruci, head of Durres police, said. "We send them back home because we have no money, no food, no shelter, and no officers to stay with them."

The lack of resources is reflected in the prosecution success rate. Thus far this year in Durres there have been five complaints by women against their pimps, Ruci said. To date, only two cases have gone to court, and in all the cases, the women have fled back to Italy, which dooms any prosecutions to failure.

With the threat of a pimp waiting outside the police station door for them, returned women are understandably loyal to the pimps, who would seem to have the upper hand in the battle with Albanian law enforcement.

"Normally, three days are needed even for them to admit that they were forced to become prostitutes," said Flamur Gjuzi, head of the Durres police anti-trafficking department. "Learning the names of their pimps is very difficult. Pimps use pseudonyms but the women are so afraid they won't even tell us that."

When police and shelter counselors do get the real stories of the women they are surprisingly similar. Most of the women encountered in Vlora, Fier, and Tirana jails and shelters by the investigative team journalists told a story of family neglect and abuse similar to Silvana's.

"I don't want to return home, since my father would beat me up," she told the border policeman at Rinas after he told her she could not go back to Italy. "My fiancé's mother's will give me a place to stay."

But the policeman tells the team's undercover reporter that the fiancé is really her pimp and she, like all the others that come through Rinas, has no where to go.

"Do not expect them to tell you the truth," the policeman says. "Each returnee asks to go back to Italy. This is because of the pimps' threats, but also because their families won't accept them."

But Silvana finally admits her plight and asks to be sent to a shelter. The police agree to help if she will identify her pimp. Silvana will now have to make probably the most important decision in her young misguided life.

If she is lucky, Silvana may find her way to one of two hidden women's shelters in Vlora or Tirana supported by an international and local NGO. They are the first of their kind in the country, dedicated to mediating with the girls' families to overcome the stigma of trafficking victims and let them go home.

But there are few shelter beds and few individuals dedicated enough to withstand the constant assault waged by trafficking cartels against them.

One of the Vlora shelter's benefactors has been offered 5 million lire for each girl the benefactor returns to traffickers, and then threatened when the deal was declined.

"I am horrified by this job," the benefactor said, asking not to be identified when one of the investigative team's reporters visited the center for the first time.

Not the least of the pressure of the job is simply listening for hours to the stories of the girls' lives under the control of their pimps.

"You will not believe what it means to talk to them," the benefactor said. "Their spirits have been altered (by the violence)."

The Vlora shelter opened just last month. Since then it has sheltered 35 girls and successfully convinced families to take back 29 of them.

The mediation process is arduous because even the families, like the police, see their daughters as criminals rather than victims.

"We do not tell the family that their daughter worked as a prostitute because they would not accept them," the benefactor said. "The families that know about it do not accept them, and this makes the work more difficult, because the girls do not want to stay at the shelter all the time."

Even the girls who go back to their families face an uncertain future. There still remains the ostracism of neighbors and employment discrimination for the girls returned from Italy who have committed no crime in Albania.

Sevim Arbana, head of a women's association, "For the Albanian Woman's Benefit", says there is a desperate need for rehabilitation centers across the country to give the returning girls vocational training.

But the government will not fund such projects, Arbana said. The association has funded a small mini-project to teach sewing and hairdressing to a small number of returning girls in rural areas.

The association is trying to raise funds for two more projects but the climate of fear and condemnation that surrounds the returning girls has made the effort difficult.

Meanwhile, the lives of returning girls like Silvana are hanging in the wind.

"There are cases when I go back to visit the girls who were accepted back by their families but I don't find them in the home anymore," said the Vlora shelter's benefactor. "There is really little hope now for a trafficked girl to get back to a normal life in this country."