FROM THE MEDIA

Appeal: Hard lessons that keep the children of Kosovo safe

By Daniel Howden in Pristina

09 December 2003

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 recentlybeen 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.