Hard lessons that keep the children of Kosovo safe
Children in other countries
It's cold and dark by the time Pristina's youngest
shift workers traipse through the mud to reach the gates of Dardania
school. Some of these seven-year-olds start as dawn is breaking; others
won't escape the packed and dimly lit classrooms until 7.30 at night.
After the war in Kosovo, so few schools are left
standing that pupils and teachers are crammed into the buildings in four
separate daily shifts. Three and a half thousand children pass through
Dardania's cheerless concrete walls each day. But this is not a story
about schools and high child mortality levels, though the country is the
worst in Europe for both those. An additional threat stalks them: child
traffickers.
With the winter nights drawing in and the power cuts
that punctuate each day more frequent, 13-year-old Arta, a Kosovar
Albanian, is worried that her friends will be whisked away in the
darkness. “I'm frightened for my friends being snatched after school,”
she said. “Most evenings there's no electricity and the traffickers
could come. When we go home after school it's late and it's dark
everywhere.”
While some children are kidnapped, the real threat is
more insidious. With unemployment soaring, traffickers lure teenagers
with false promises of jobs in countries such as Italy and Germany. What
awaits them is forced labour, sex slavery or, in a few cases, the
horrific trade in human organs. Until now, Kosovo has been the chief
transit centre for human traffic into Europe. Thousands, mainly women
and girls from Moldova, Ukraine or neighbouring Albania, have been
trafficked by criminal gangs, either bound for Western Europe or forced
to work in the burgeoning local sex industry.
The capital boasts at least 130 brothels, which
flourished in the cash-rich chaos that accompanied the end of the war in
1999 and the huge influx of international organisations that followed.
Over the past 18 months, the foreigners have begun to pull out, reducing
the expat population from 60,000 to 10,000. The grim irony facing this
war-torn land is that as the soldiers, police and international workers
depart, demand for the local sex industry is declining and traffickers
are turning their attention to local Kosovar children.
Save the Children, one of the three charities being
supported in this year's Independent Christmas Appeal, is trying to get
the message to those most at risk, teaching the young to resist the lure
of the traffickers and look out for their friends. Many young people
remain unaware of the dangers of trafficking and the associated criminal
networks. When asked, many thought it was something to do with cars.
Katherine Mahoney, the programme director for Save the
Children, believes that raising awareness of trafficking is the best way
to fight the traffickers.
Fazli spent the war hiding in the mountains with the
rest of his ethnic Albanian village. “We kept moving, running away from
the shooting,” he said. Now he is 15, part of the age-group Save the
Children is educating about the new threat. “They are people without
feelings, people with a bad heart and they do anything for money,” Fazli
said after an awareness session.
Pointing to the cocktail of social disintegration,
poor education, poverty and the breakdown of the rule of law, Ms Mahoney
warns that Kosovo is now on the brink of a disastrous move from what
trafficking experts call a transit country to a sending country. “All
the factors are there,” she said. “There's no reason why it shouldn't
end up like Albania,” which is among the worst hit by the criminals. The
first cases of Kosovar women and girls being trafficked have
recently been reported by the International Organisation for Migration.
It has recently helped 17 victims, including one girl who was rescued
from traffickers in Britain.
Ms Mahoney's concerns are echoed by Blerim Blaku, who
runs the youth centre in Podujeva, 20 miles north of Pristina, which
Fazli and Arta attend and which was among the first places to trial the
charity's programme. “Some sort of dead end is coming ... something is
going to collapse,” he warned. Meanwhile, the money for the centre is
running out and similar projects have been forced to close. It is the
only service of its kind for the 70,000 children in the area.
The divisions that prompted the civil war remain raw
and real, with the Kosovar Albanian majority separated from the Kosovar
Serb and Roma minorities. Save the Children cannot ignore the
demarcation. The threat facing the children of Kosovo face is all too
terribly the same.
By Daniel Howden in Pristina
11 December 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=471464
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