Flight from poverty ends in tragedy for many women

By Brian Murphy

By the millions, people are on the move around the world, crossing borders to escape war and tyranny or to pursue economic betterment. This report, part of an occasional series on immigration trends, looks at the young women of Eastern Europe being lured to the West with promises of jobs. Some are lucky. But for a growing number, their journey leads to an ignoble end as chattel in illegal brothels.

RACOVAT, Moldova (AP): Victoria's grave waits for her.

Flowers lie limp and blackened from the winter cold. Snow has covered over the tracks of mourners who assembled for a memorial service with Victoria's body still far away.

The empty cemetery plot commands a broad panorama. Just below is her village. Children sled on icy roads too dangerous for vehicles. Adults hack at walnut and birch trees for firewood to keep some heat until the electricity comes on -- about two hours each day if they're lucky.

Beyond a patchwork of field and forest lies the main road through northeastern Moldova.

Victoria Timofei Zabulica traveled this route in November. She had agreed to a smuggler's deal for passage to Greece. The trip costs US$500. But you can pay later, she was told. There will be work. In a bar or perhaps as a domestic helper.

She trusted.

"All the pretty stories she was told about going abroad, she believed them," sobs her mother, Maria Zabulica, who wears a black scarf in mourning. "Her mind was clouded by the need to make money for her family."

Victoria's body rests in a morgue in Greece, where her brief time was cloaked in misery and disappointment. Police first found her being held in what they allege was a way station for prostitution rings, a place for brothel operators to look over newly arrived woman and cut deals.

Victoria was freed. But apparently she was still bound by her own hunger to find work in Greece.

Less than two weeks later, police found her dead after she jumped from a train on which she was being deported.

Her husband wonders how he can ever raise the money to bring her home for burial.

Her young sons come in from playing and innocently ask when mommy is coming back. They want her to fix them soup.

The lifeblood of the immigrant trafficking trade -- porous borders, grinding poverty, corruptible authorities -- courses through the former Soviet bloc. It nourishes a system of raw primacy. The smugglers rule and profit. Their human cargo pays and submits to any number of hazards en route to the West: random robberies, apprehension, even death.

For many young women, the end of the journey is just the beginning of a brutish limbo. Without documents and money -- and likely still in debt to smugglers for their fee -- the women are forced into indentured prostitution, experts and activists say.

Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that sprawls across Eastern Europe, offers a glimpse into the scale of the traffic, says Steve Cook, chief of mission at the Kiev office of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency that deals with migrant issues.

Ukraine officials estimate 500,000 women have left the nation of 52 million people since 1991 and it's believed a "significant majority were trafficked for some variation of the sex trade," Cook says.

"It's clear that forced prostitution is widespread and is growing exponentially," he says.

The latest U.S. State Department human rights report on Greece, issued Feb. 25, cited trafficking in women as a "growing problem" and noted prostitution-related arrests grew fivefold since 1998. The report estimated there are 20,000 prostitutes in Greece, mostly from Albania and the former Soviet bloc.

Several international conferences have discussed forced prostitution since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The United Nations has launched a two-year program to fight immigrant trafficking.

Appeals and campaigns seem galaxies away from the hardscrabble reality of Victoria's village, Racovat, near Moldova's border with Ukraine. The only water is drawn from common wells. There is no sewer system. Money has almost disappeared, replaced by bartering. "Life is marching backward," moans Victoria's uncle, Mihail Mitrofan.

This is the heartland of the smugglers' trade. Officials say a network of advance men travel the countryside. They peddle Western Europe the way carnival barkers used to plug snake oil: a guaranteed cure-all. The good life awaits -- for a price, of course. Moldovan authorities say it's between $500 and $1,000 for clandestine passage to Greece, currently the favored destination.

Men must pay the bulk up front. Women can often go on credit -- setting in motion the cycle of forced prostitution.

"The smugglers come in with nice clothes, watches, cellular phones," says Ion Borozan, the mayor of Racovat. "This is like casting a magic spell."

Nearly 10 percent of Racovat's 4,000 natives have left to seek work abroad, he says. "Our town is hemorrhaging," he adds with a sigh.

So is the rest of Moldova. The former Soviet republic is one of the poorest pockets of Eastern Europe. The mainstays of the economy, agriculture and winemaking, have collapsed with the falloff in demand in the former Soviet states that used to be its customers.

Outside the capital, Chisinau, utilities are spotty at best. The government is months behind paying state salaries. And when the money arrives it's a puny sum. The average monthly wage is less than 200 lei, about $15.

The exodus of illegal migrants occurs throughout Eastern Europe. But it rips particularly hard at the fabric of tiny Moldova, where an estimated 400,000 of its 4.5 million people have left.

"In every village, there are at least four or five young women who have gone," says Antonina Sirbu, head of the Women's Program at the Soros Foundation in Chisinau. "They all think, 'Yes, I will be among the lucky ones to get a nice job.' Unfortunately, the story can be very different."

Once Victoria decided to leave, events moved quickly.

Her husband -- unemployed and with no prospects -- agreed with Victoria's mother to share the care of their two sons, 4-year-old Ion and 2-year-old Grigore. Victoria's mother made a final appeal for her daughter to stay. Victoria's brother and sister are in Russia doing sporadic factory work. She didn't want to lose the company of her youngest, 21-year-old Victoria, as well.

"She told me, 'Don't worry. I'll earn some money and be back soon. It's for the best,"' her mother recalls.

In Victoria's three-room home, the kitchen is adorned with a faded wall-size poster of a beach dotted with flowers and palm trees. Under this cheerful scene, she packed some bread and cheese into her single bag. In a driving rain on Nov. 15, she joined a group leaving the village: six men and seven other women, including her niece.

They had been given a phone number in Bucharest, Rumania. Their contact, they were told, would lead them south to Greece.

"We never stopped moving for three full days after that," says Victoria's niece, Inga Soimu, who at 18 already has a 2-year-old daughter. "It was walking, truck, walking more. Always I kept thinking, 'Are we there yet?"'

They followed one of the well-established immigrant smuggling routes. From Bucharest, they passed through Sofia, Bulgaria, then onto Macedonia's capital, Skopje, and finally crossed into Greece over a mountain pass.

About two months later, another group of 22 women from Eastern Europe would travel the same way over the Mount Belles range. Two froze to death Jan. 15 when they were left stranded by smugglers in a blizzard. The others survived by eating snow.

During the Cold War, Greece's northern border was among the world's most closely guarded. Now, it is punctured daily by outlaw convoys: guns and drugs from Albania, bootleg CDs from Bulgaria and waves of illegal immigrants entering the region's only European Union member.

Greek police have stepped up sweeps in immigrant areas and added more border patrols. But the crackdowns often turn up allegations of a disturbing alliance: smugglers and brothel operators paying off police for protection.

"Without corruption, these smugglers couldn't work," says Ala Mindicanu, a parliament member in Moldova who has led efforts to draw attention to forced prostitution. "The corruption exists at every point along the way. It's a corruption of mentality. It's a corruption of the people."

Weak laws also give immigrant smugglers an open field in Moldova. A special commission has been formed to draft statutes against human trafficking, but the changes come slowly, says Larisa Miculet, an official in Moldova's general prosecutor's office.

"It's easy for the smugglers to prey on people, especially girls and young women," she says. "We always say, 'Be careful. It's not worth the risk.' But who really listens to such talk when you have no money?"

Victoria and the other women from her group found themselves stashed away in a nether world more dreary than anything they had left behind. Rotting trash and the jetsam from an old clothing factory filled the storeroom. The windows were locked and shuttered.

They knew they were in Greece. But where? No one would say exactly. As the days passed, they grew more frightened. Yet at the same time, more acquiescent.

"We were sleeping on the floor," says Victoria's niece. "We couldn't contact anybody. We were all thinking, 'We'll do anything to get out of here."'

They were freed by Greek police in a Dec. 3 raid and learned they had made it as far as Melisohorio, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Thessaloniki. Authorities say a local bar owner allegedly linked to smugglers had put the women on the market.

"They were trying to strike a deal with other pimps," says Brig. Athanassios Dalamagides, head of the Thessaloniki police division.

Victoria and the others were transferred to a pre-deportation center for illegal aliens on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Hundreds of women were packed into the cells, which line both sides of a short corridor. The place smells of cigarette smoke, heavy perfume, unwashed clothes.

And another type of essence is in the air: the gloom of those whose plans have turned out all wrong.

Victoria sat quietly to the side as some other women in her group spoke to a reporter. She offered just one observation: "I'm sorry to go home with nothing to show except a sad story."

Just after midnight on Dec. 12, Victoria made another fateful decision. She would jump from a train before it left Greece in an attempt to stay.

She was being sent over the border along with several people from her Racovat group, including a former grade school classmate, Veaseclav Novitchii, 21. They were shipped back by train because their documents were clean. The others in the group, including Victoria's niece, would be deported by plane since had been caught in Bulgaria on a previous trip and were banned from entering.

Some of her companions refused to jump. "So it was only us three: me, Victoria and a Rumanian guy," Novitchii says. "You know, I don't even remember his name."

They separated into different compartments, Novitchii says. The plan was to wait for the train to begin slowing down for the Bulgarian border post. Then it would be a leap into the darkness and a second chance.

"I saw the Rumanian throw his bag and I jumped. I hit the ground and rolled into bushes. I never saw Victoria jump and I never saw the Rumanian again," Novitchii says. "I was alone."

He started walking along the tracks, but in the wrong direction. He was arrested by Bulgarian police.

Days later, back in Moldova, he learned Victoria had died in the fall onto the jagged roadbed.

Authorities found a short letter written on toilet paper on Victoria's body. It's not clear who she was writing to. It didn't sound like the words of someone who had resigned herself to deportation.

"I am fine," she wrote. "I will not forget you ... And now I say to you good night and sweet dreams."