Bid for Better Life Leads to Sexual Enslavement

For Lydia Dineva, it began with friends of friends referring her ever farther from her home in Bulgaria to Switzerland, then Sweden.

Toward the West and its wealth, toward the promise of escape from poverty, toward a job, maybe just waitressing at first, toward a future.

At 20, she trusted her friends’ friends. That is, until she found herself in a Stockholm apartment, where the man who was her contact tossed a pack of condoms on the table in front of her.

Dress up, he told her. Get ready to leave.

“I could not get anything through my mind,” she would say later.

As they drove down Stockholm’s streets, the language around her incomprehensible, her passport taken by the man she now recognized as a pimp, she started sobbing.

“I don’t want to do that!”

“If you don’t do it, I can lock you up in the apartment and have customers come over,” he shouted back. “What did you expect? You are a young girl going to another country.”

On the other side of the world, a life of sexual servitude began in a much more businesslike way for a woman called Sonya.

In Houston, thousands of miles from her home in the hills of rural Thailand, a trafficker presented a photo of the petite, 28-year-old woman, along with her real name, Sriwan Sakyai, to a man who said he could get a federal I-94 form, which allows foreign nationals to stay in the United States.

The form would cost $3,000.

Sonya arrived in the United States, not smuggled in a shipping container at a busy port nor through the roasting heat of a desert border, but by commercial flights. Bangkok to Los Angeles, L. A. to Houston, where a brothel awaited.

Sonya, according to those who know her, accepted her new life as an indentured prostitute. In about a year, she had worked off a $40,000 debt to the trafficker, then turned trafficker herself.

Dressed in fine clothes, she returned to her home village in Thailand to recruit. On a return trip to Thailand, she did not realize that her supposed middleman supplying additional I-94 forms was an undercover agent with the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

She was arrested after trying to arrange I-94 forms for young Thai women, who had readily come forward.

“It’s not easy to find work making more than pennies there,” said the Rev. David Wells, former pastor of the Thai Presbyterian Church in Houston, who would be Sonya’s interpreter during court proceedings.

Sonya is now in prison in Dublin, Calif., serving a two-year sentence.

The cases of Lydia Dineva in Europe and Sonya Sakyai in the United States illustrate the complexities of today’s human trafficking--a multibillion-dollar industry that authorities say is growing and challenging traditional notions of what slavery means in a have-and-have-not world.

For centuries, people have been shipped from city to city, even from nation to nation, to satisfy carnal desires.

But with the onset of border-melting globalization and the growth and better organization of criminal syndicates, the sex-slave trade is thriving as never before, say victims’ advocates and government officials.

It might get an indirect boost, according to one expert, from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which have brought toughened immigration controls in many Western nations.

“As borders get tight in receiving countries, traffickers will tell desperate women they have ways to cross and they [the women] then find themselves as trafficking victims,” said Widney Brown of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring organization.

More than $7 billion is generated for traffickers annually, say law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe. Only drug smuggling and possibly gun sales generate greater profits for criminals, police agencies say.

How many women and children are moved across international borders by traffickers? The numbers are high--700,000, the U. S. government reported last year, or even higher, according to some nongovernmental organizations. CIA statistics say 50,000 people, mostly women and some children, are smuggled to the United States each year.

Some are destined for servitude in sweatshops, kitchens, farm fields or orchards.

But many end up in the lucrative Western sex trade.

Some 10,000 Asian women work in Southern California brothels alone, says the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The same number of Bulgarian women are moved across borders annually for prostitution around Europe, says the International Organization for Migration, an immigrant advocacy group founded in 1951.

And 10,000 Chinese women may be sent into Southeast Asia every year, says the monitoring group Human Rights in China.

“Our children read about the slave trade a century ago, little knowing that it still exists today,” Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem said.

He and other law enforcement officials spoke of the “purchase” of women for as little as $1,000, and of the need to make laws tougher and more uniform across national borders.

“It is nothing other than a slave trade,” Bodstroem said. “For women who are sold 18 times over, there is no freedom whatsoever.”

Lydia Dineva’s ordeal started with a broken jaw given her by a boyfriend; she believed that she had to leave her hardscrabble Bulgarian hometown.

She accepted help from friends and traveled through Switzerland and the Czech Republic, then on to Scandinavia.

She crossed many borders, but the only real border control came at the customs post between Denmark and Sweden, where she presented agents a Czech passport that she’d been given.

“They were suspicious because Czech people bring drugs,” Dineva said in an interview, her story backed up by police and court records. “So they looked for drugs in the luggage, under the seat.”

Trafficking in drugs, not people, was their only concern.

Once in Stockholm, Lydia Dineva found no way out. She was soon picking up midnight clients: cabbies, electricians, lawyers. Her rates: about $80 for sex in the car, $150 for one hour in an apartment. Rates rose around payday at the end of the month.

“Every night I was forced to work; it was like a dream,” she recalled. “All the time I went around crying. The customers didn’t like it.”

The proceeds all went to the pimp, who was on the lookout for social service workers driving through the neighborhood looking to rescue young women like Lydia.

She and other victims of the trafficking gang had to share a room in a suburban flat, sleeping on mattresses. All they thought about was escape.

She did break free briefly, when the pimp attended his daughter’s wedding in Yugoslavia, but she was soon found.

Later, when she said she was pregnant and could not continue to work, the pimp told her to get an abortion. “He told me, ‘You know how many girls that have tried to quit this job have died?’ From then on, everywhere I went I was afraid.”

Finally, she offered to buy her freedom back for $1,300, and he accepted. “I borrowed the money and gave it to him,” working long shifts at an illegal bakery job to pay it off. “Then he came back for more,” she said.

Around this time, a victim of the gang was able to call home to the Czech Republic and give her family enough of a description of where she was held for police to free her and others from a flat on the outskirts of Stockholm.

The Gyllene Ratten, or Golden Wheel, housing complex gave its name to Sweden’s biggest sex slave scandal, setting up the conviction of four people for abusing about 20 women.

The Golden Wheel case was at first reminiscent of so many trafficking cases across the world: Police pounce on a prostitution den, find women without passports, treat it as an illegal immigrant issue, remove the witnesses by expelling them to their home country.

But this case would be different, partly because of the dogged prosecutor, Nils-Eric Schultz, and partly because women like Lydia Dineva would confront the traffickers in court.

Police gave up on the case at first because three women involved had been sent back to Eastern Europe, but Schultz kept digging. Wiretaps on suspected traffickers produced compromising conversations.

One call, between a gang member in Sweden and another on the road, picking up new women, went like this:

“How many have you got? Three?”

“Two. Two, they had problems in Denmark getting through.”

“Why only two?”

“How many should I have?”

“You only have Gina and Alexandra?”

“Yes.”

“You said you had three?”

Even now after the convictions of the gang members, Schultz still gets angry about it.

“The women were not human beings. They were merchandise,” he said. “You could buy them as you could buy anything.”

Schultz went to the Czech Republic and Slovakia and saw how easily traffickers could operate. Many of the women were gypsies living in poverty, all young with little hope.

“These pimps drive down with their Volvos, credit cards and mobile phones, and make a big impression. Then they say, ‘Just come along to work in a bar and you’ll make enough for the whole family.’ It wasn’t hard to get these girls to follow them,” Schultz said.

“They could get a new dress, new underwear, clean themselves and apply makeup. Every person wants to be clean and have new clothes,” he said. “Then it was just another step to ask if you can come to Sweden. They had no education.”

As Schultz was building his case, Lydia Dineva was finding Sweden unlivable.

“They refused me as a refugee and they wanted me to leave,” she said.

Besides, she said, the gang was after her. “Because they knew if police found me and questioned me I might tell something, because I knew a lot.”

She took her 7-month-old daughter, adopted the name on the fake Czech passport the gang had given her, and bolted abroad. (She spoke on condition that her exact whereabouts not be revealed and that she not be photographed.)

As Schultz made arrests, Lydia Dineva agreed to testify on video. At trial, all four gang members were convicted. During their appeal, she finally had to face the people who had wrecked years of her life.

For a week, the issue of sex slaves and human trafficking was played out amid oil paintings in the cool grandeur of the 17th-century Wrangelska Palatset, a palace overlooking the Stockholm archipelago, with its glistening waterways and verdant hills.

The central issue: Were the women truly enslaved?

Defense lawyers argued that they were not.

“The girls spoke about the social problem. Why would a young girl otherwise be a prostitute? But they weren’t forced,” said Thomas Martinsson, a defense lawyer. “I think they came voluntarily. . . . My client denied through the whole procedure that he had ever forced them.”

His defense had little impact. “In this case, you also had a very good prosecutor . . . who argued with his heart.”

And, he added, “Lydia was perfect. . . . She knew everything.”

Last year, the traffickers’ convictions were upheld, and they were sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison.

“I’m not happy with the outcome,” Lydia Dineva said. “They don’t deserve to come out for a really long time.”

But at least it is over.

For Sonya Sakyai, it is not over. She remains in a federal prison where she cuts the hair of other inmates, a skill she learned while a hairdresser in the Thai homeland she longs to return to, friends say.

She declined AP requests for an interview.

“Her feeling now is that she has bad karma and it’s her destiny to be in jail. It’s a feeling of: ‘I did wrong and must accept it,’ ” said Wells, the pastor who served as her interpreter in court.

Among some Thais, poverty is seen as reflecting bad karma, and this provides an extra incentive to move up economically, he said, adding that attitudes toward sex are often more casual than in the United States.

Tej Bunnag, Thailand’s U. S. ambassador, disputed any suggestion that his country is especially tolerant of sex slavery. But is that even the right term in cases like that of Sonya Sakyai, an ambitious woman from a poor Thai village?

The slavery question elicits complex, contradictory answers.

“These women couldn’t even go to a local restaurant to get something to eat. We are talking about slavery,” said Roger D. Piper, deputy district director of the Houston INS office. “And individuals like Sonya make the problem worse. . . . She was a good recruitment poster” for trafficking,

From his bulging case file, Sonya Sakyai’s lawyer, Richard Kuniansky, pulls a card she sent him after the case ended, thanking him and adding, “May God bless you and your family.”

“I argued for downward departure in her sentencing, but the judge made the slavery argument so I knew I wouldn’t be successful.”