Women and Children for Sale

What Nita remembers about the day the Serb militia took her from her house in Pristina to a camp and raped her was that it was cold, and that snow was on the ground. She's forgotten whether it was just before or just after Christmas in 1996, the year when fighting broke out between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. Too many terrible things have happened to her in the last ten years; they have, she says, clouded her mind. In 1996 Nita was eighteen, married with an eight-month-old daughter, living close to her widowed father and her seven-year-old sister. The Serb militia who came for her took away the baby and the little girl, and led her husband, Milau, and her father off to another camp. Nita was repeatedly raped, along with seven other women, for four days, before being put into a car and thrown out near the Albanian border, joining thousands of terrified people fleeing the Serbs. In Tirana, there were people willing to give help to the refugees. During the next few weeks the man who took Nita into his apartment drove her from refugee camp to camp, so that she could search for her lost family. There was no trace of any one of them. [...]

During the next few years, as the UN adopted a policy of "zero tolerance" of trafficking, including among peacekeepers, and developed special training for UN employees worldwide, the number of international clients has dropped—or gone underground—to be replaced by the local new rich. Since late 2006, it has become a chargeable offense for members of NATO forces to pay women for sex. Even so, as Sarah Mendelson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told a congressional hearing on human trafficking in 2004, regulations against trafficking continue to be treated by much of the military with denial and indifference. Purchasing sex—wherever it comes from—remains a soldier's right.

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