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Last week Italian police rescued 12 women -- some as young as 16 -- from Nightclub International, located near the headquarters of the Russian forces outside Pristina. The women claimed they had been abused and sold several times to different owners as they were smuggled from their homelands to Kosovo. At Nightclub International they provided sexual favors to Russian and American troops at a cost of about $48 for 30 minutes.

The International Organization of Migration (IOM) in Pristina estimates that there are "thousands of girls who are now prisoners in the European sex trade."

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While British troops are subject to a strict "no walking out" policy and not permitted in such bars, American, Russian and Italian soldiers are less closely monitored and have easier access to the brothels proliferating across the province.

International agencies trying to assist the enslaved women are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. The Albanian pimps are also dangerous. Staff members at the IOM were threatened after the Italians confiscated the 12 girls because the Mafia-style gangs viewed the women as their "property."

The sex merchants were enraged because they had paid from $1,597 to $2,237 for each of the girls, plus they retained half the cash from every trick and another 10 percent for the girls' room and board. The unhappy hookers have the option to buy back their freedom with the remaining fraction, but in actuality they end up with little or nothing, said an IOM official.

Kosovo girls are also unsafe because flesh-traders can eliminate costly fees to distant middlemen if they successfully abduct regional girls. Several teenagers have vanished recently; the resulting panic emptied the province's streets after dark.
salon.com | Feb. 9, 2000

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