Traders in People Prey on Refugees Stuck in Albania

In the miserable camps and shelters for Kosovo refugees, the notorious scafisti who for years have spirited Albanian women across the Adriatic Sea to lives of prostitution have found lucrative new prey for their nocturnal crossings.

At least six young women have disappeared from the squalid camps here in Vlore during the past month, and hundreds of other displaced and despondent Kosovo Albanians have paid small fortunes to the body traffickers to smuggle them into Italy in dangerously overcrowded rubber speedboats under cover of darkness.

Miftar Imeraj couldn’t imagine a worse fate for his family than to be stuck in the crime and poverty of Albania for the duration of the war in his homeland, so he sold the tractor that was the family’s last possession to buy passage on an ill-fated boat earlier this month.

The unregistered high-speed vessel crammed with 46 people crashed into a rock jetty shortly after midnight when an Italian navy crew spotted the boat and gave chase.

“The driver was trying to get away when we hit some rocks,” Imeraj, 35, recalls of the accident that killed his 5-year-old son, Egzon, and his daughter, Ilirjana, 3. His sister-in-law also died, and his wife lost a leg in the disaster.

Most of the 38 survivors plucked from the water were treated for trauma injuries at the hospital of the Italian refugee camp at Vlore’s airport and have been interrogated by Italian and Albanian police. The boat pilot or pilots--scafisti in Italian--got away.

As many as 10 boatloads of 40 or more illegal emigrants slip out of Vlore each night, headed for the Italian coast, says Eric Filipink, an observer here for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE.

Unlike the Albanian prostitutes and job seekers who have been the chief customers of the scafisti since hard-line communism collapsed here more than seven years ago, refugees from Kosovo have the right to claim political asylum in Italy if they manage to get there. Many refugees also have relatives in Germany and Switzerland who will give them shelter if they can somehow circumvent the time-consuming visa routines, making Italy a convenient corridor to illegal Western refuge.

“The smuggling network was set up for Albanians, but once you have the refugees here, they fit very nicely into the equation,” Filipink says of the trafficking that has lately focused on getting refugees to their Western destinations.

Vlore has long been the hub for illegal human trafficking because of its proximity to the Albanian mafia strongholds of Fier and Berat. Recent shake-ups of local and national law enforcement administrations in Albania have also allowed the scafisti unfettered pursuit of passengers from among the refugees.

Since the refugee crisis in Yugoslavia worsened two months ago, Italy has stepped up its naval presence along the Albanian coast to intercept the scafisti before they enter international waters. Rome has also stationed 100 troops of its Guardia di Finanza, or financial police, at Sazan island at the mouth of Vlore Bay to keep an eye out for the high-speed boats.

Still, the traffickers have been mostly successful in getting their human cargo across the sea.

“Sometimes when the scafisti realize they are being chased, they will throw a child into the water to force the Guardia di Finanza to stop and perform a rescue so the rest can escape,” says Lino Sciarra, an Italian observer with the OSCE mission in Vlore.

According to Filipink, the scafisti can earn as much as $50,000 a night if the weather is good enough to allow two round-trip crossings, providing a strong economic incentive for the smugglers to find ways of getting around obstacles imposed by the Italian navy. Imeraj paid 1,300 German marks, or about $725, for each of the five members of his immediate family.

Less numerous but all the more troubling for the anti-trafficking forces have been recent incidents in which young Kosovo Albanian women have been recruited or abducted by Albanian mafia figures to be taken to Italy and forced into prostitution.

Five women ages 16 to 18 disappeared from the Italian-run camp at the airport May 3 after being visited the previous weekend by “men dressed like police and carrying Kalashnikov rifles,” confirms Italian navy Capt. Giovanni Caradonna of the San Marco Battalion posted here. He intimates that the camouflage-clad men were mafia masquerading as local authorities.

“At the beginning, nobody knew these kinds of things could happen,” says Caradonna, noting that major security improvements have been imposed on the camp that is home to 4,000 people.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees plans to eventually assume responsibility for the dozens of camps in Albania now being run by troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations, but some fear that the absence of foreign military security will allow easier access for the unscrupulous traffickers.

“If we leave this place, it is going to be a mess,” Caradonna says. “As long as we’re here, there is less opportunity for corruption.”

He alludes to the reportedly widespread mafia practice of paying off police to look the other way as they lure women away with empty promises of a better life across the sea.

At the State Reservists Camp controlled by local Albanian police just north of the airport, refugees say they have had recent visits by men offering restaurant jobs or work as nannies.

“I’ve told my girls to keep away from them, and they will because they are smart,” says Husnije Muqaj, who has been at the shabby, unfenced cluster of barracks with her two teenage daughters for nearly a month. “They know that those who go with such men either end up dying in the water or getting sold into prostitution.”

One teenage girl disappeared from the camp earlier this month, Muqaj said, soon after an old man on a bicycle was seen approaching young women on behalf of local “businessmen” to offer them domestic work abroad.

In Kukes, the refugee-thronged northern town near Albania’s border with Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, one young woman was abducted at gunpoint by two Albanian men early this month, says Sevim Arbana, head of an organization that has been active in fighting the human trafficking. That kidnapping was foiled by a helicopter crew from the United Arab Emirates.

Conditions at some Albanian-run refugee camps are so appalling that despondent young inhabitants may have their guard down in desperate pursuit of escape, says Lajla Pernaska, who heads the Albanian Women’s Federation, which is active in aiding Kosovo refugees.

“Trafficking in human beings has increased lately, in both prostitutes and children,” says Pernaska, who has been monitoring the plight of the refugees from the capital, Tirana. “The Greek and Italian mafias are involved as well as our own. They are all trying to exploit this situation in which you have a lot of children, girls and young women here on their own.”

Especially vulnerable are Kosovo women who were raped by Serbian gunmen as they were driven out of their homes, Pernaska says. “They feel their lives are ruined anyway, so it’s just a small step from suffering in these terrible conditions with no hope for the future and leaving for a life of prostitution in a place where at least the living conditions are better.”

At one filthy, odorous camp where refugees are housed in big chicken coops in the village of Gruze, near Fier, young Kosovo women say they are aware of the dangers of heeding the mafia recruiters but note that they cannot bear the conditions of their exile much longer.

“Look at these things we have in our beds!” laments Kosovo refugee Merita Tafoli, 27, holding up a jar containing two 3-inch-long centipedes she found on the face of a girlfriend sleeping on the floor.

Men in expensive cars and gold jewelry have visited the camp to offer girls an opportunity to study in Italy, Tafoli says. She adds that she knows better than to believe the offers are genuine, but she remains desperate to move elsewhere.

The boat accident earlier this month, from which five of the 46 aboard remain missing, has sent a chill among those ethnic Albanians still waiting to escape.

“How can I leave on a boat like that? I have two small children,” says Rakhman Sadiqi, loitering with his family outside the Vlore ferry terminal in search of some other way to buy illegal passage to Italy.

He had planned to use money wired by his brother in Switzerland to go across the Adriatic with the scafisti but has been frightened off that escape route by the tragedy.

But the accident is unlikely to serve as a long-term deterrent for the tide of Kosovars trying to flee their Albanian shelter.

“This business will go on for a long time because people want to go and the only way to go is on the boats,” says cafe owner Piro Xhaka. His eatery sits atop a rock jetty on an area of the coast called Skela, from which many of the scafisti collect their passengers each night.

“It takes too long to get a visa. If the West wanted this to stop, the German Embassy would issue more than five visas a day,” he said.

With cool calculation, the businessman estimates that 2,000 Vlore residents are indirectly employed by the trafficking trade and that the body-ferrying flotilla numbers about 100 boats.

“There have been accidents with the speedboats for 10 years now, but people still want to go,” Xhaka says. “This latest one was not the fault of the scafista but the Italian naval police who attacked him.”

Aid workers and human rights activists express frustration about fighting the trafficking in refugees. But they have few ideas for a solution.

Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, warned in testimony before the Security Council this month that “human traffickers are a serious threat, especially in Albania,” where young women have already been forced into prostitution and children are also among the victims.

“This phenomenon will increase if it is not addressed more forcefully and immediately,” she told the council, acknowledging that security is lax at many camps.

Meanwhile, the refugee agency has been pressuring Kosovo Albanians massed in Kukes to move to southern regions of Albania where the proximity to ports means better access to food and shelter.

But those same outlets to the sea present their own dangers for the refugees because traffickers can quickly dispatch their human cargoes to the pernicious traders across the water.

“We don’t walk around the camp alone anymore, even in daylight,” says 17-year-old Nazone Mikolovci, one of 2,000 unhappy residents at the State Reservists Camp.

“We don’t know what happened to the girls that disappeared, but we can assume it is something very bad.”