Women in Bosnia Reported Forced Into Prostitution

Bosnia is turning into an “El Dorado of organized crime” with foreign women forced into prostitution and police and judges too corrupt to stop it, the U.N. envoy for the Balkan nation said Friday.

Elizabeth Rehn, who might run for the Finnish presidency next year, ends her stint in Bosnia-Herzegovina this month as the U.N. representative in charge of an international police force. She will be succeeded by an American, Jacques Klein.

After briefing the U.N. Security Council, Rehn told a news conference that more than 1,000 women from Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine and, most recently, Kazakhstan are estimated to have been brought into Bosnia in recent months.

Among the few rescued, Rehn said it was clear that they earned little money and had entered the country without having to show any passports or ID cards.

“Someone is certainly getting money for this,” she said. “Most of the judges are corrupt, the prosecutors are afraid to do their job and the witnesses are not protected and also are afraid.”

Many known criminals can be seen walking the streets of Sarajevo with impunity, she added.

One remedy, recently initiated, is for the international police to look at each name in police precincts “so that we find out who really is a police officer and who is not.”

She also proposed increasing the “lousy” salaries of judges and police, which she said makes them “inclined to take bribes.”

Rehn, who works with an international “high representative” in charge of civilian operations in Bosnia, said the new U.N. mission in Kosovo would have problems unless it had the power to make decisions.

One problem in Bosnia was “too many actors at the same level” with overlapping responsibilities, Rehn said.

She said she hoped that Bernard Kouchner, the new U.N. representative in Kosovo, had the authority to make decisions for all concerned, whether it was the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the European Community.

“Otherwise we will lose time, manpower and money, as we have in Bosnia,” she said.

Among her accomplishments Rehn listed a border police force that would be integrated to include representatives from Serbian, Muslim and Croatian communities in all sectors of the frontier.

She said she expected the new force to be in place by Oct. 1, noting that the Council of Europe had made this a condition of membership for Bosnia.

Rehn also said two police academies had been set up, one in the Bosnian-Croatian federation and the other two weeks ago in the Serbian Republic. Both academies included all ethnic groups in large numbers.

But she said the individual police departments needed far more work in integrating minorities into the force, with Croats being the least cooperative and signing agreements they did not honor.