Fall of Communism sparks job growth

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 09:27:50 -0400
>To: marxism at lists.panix.com, pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
>From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
>Subject: [PEN-L:2045] Fall of Communism sparks job growth
>
>NY Times, Sept. 19, 2000
>
>The Oldest Profession Seeks New Market in West Europe
>
>By ROGER COHEN
>
>DUBI, Czech Republic - Early this summer, Pavlika, a young Bulgarian woman,
>boarded a bus in Varna on the Black Sea coast and traveled westward to this
>town on the Czech-German border, where she now stands on the road in
>vampish boots and a skirt so short it leaves little to the imagination.
>"Work," she says simply, a helpless smile spreading across her broad face.
>"Work, that is why I came. In Bulgaria, there was no way to make money."
>
>Prostitution is an old trade but not an honored one, so Pavlika prefers not
>to give her family name. At the age of 21, she has plenty of company. Dubi
>now forms the center of a five- mile sex strip leading to the border where
>bars have names like "Libido" or "Kiss" or "Alibi" and young women loiter
>on every corner.
>
>About 70 percent of the prostitutes are foreign, most of them from
>Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, said Vladimir Kriz, the Dubi police
>chief. He said several hundred women cater to "sex tourism" from Germany -
>the ugly face of the economic divide that scars the land where the cold war
>died. Many of the women end up here because it is easier and cheaper to get
>a Czech visa than one to a European Union country.
>
>Average wages are $110 a month in Russia, three times that in the Czech
>Republic, more than fifteen times that in the European Union. No wonder a
>tide of more than one million migrants, a growing number of them women, is
>washing up each year on the European Union's borders and within them.
>
>Communism put women to work; post-cold-war capitalism does not necessarily
>do so. More than 60 percent of Russia's unemployed are women. A Russian
>girl called Luda, in a bar in southern Spain, put the West's lure simply:
>"One-zero-zero- zero," she said laughing, "instead of one-zero-zero" - the
>chance to earn $1,000 a month instead of $100.
>
>But the laughter can be short- lived, promised money illusory and the human
>cost high. Scratch the surface in the Dubi area and a world of violence,
>xenophobia, disease and misery is revealed.
>
>At the orphanage in nearby Teplice, Jirina Rajtrova, brisk in white
>uniform, points to three babies in a large bed and says two of them, Adam
>and Lucia, were born to local prostitutes. Of the 55 infants under her
>care, half are children of prostitutes. "You see," she said, "There are
>regular clients for pregnant women." Mr. Kriz, the police chief, said he
>last saw "some pregnant girls working" several months ago.
>
>As for child prostitution, Jiri Voralek, the chief of police in nearby
>Usti, says nine pimps are being prosecuted in three cases this year
>involving 12 children. "The youngest was 9," he said.
>
>Those are extreme cases. But, generally, moral codes are loosening in a
>Western European society that is ever more mobile and bereft of the old
>constraints that church, community and steady jobs provided. Wealth is
>widespread, but so is alienation; sex has been commercialized like
>everything else. Fast money is in; so is fast sex.
>
>Central and Eastern Europe are far poorer, their once sealed borders now
>open, their sense of what Bernd Burgfeldt, a Berlin police officer, called
>the "Golden West" still full of illusions, their young women liberated but
>often idle - and desperate.
>
>For the sex trade, the balance of supply and demand could scarcely be
>better. Women have been coming to this border town for several years, and
>the influx shows no sign of abating. "Between the two parts of Europe, the
>business of trafficking for sexual exploitation is booming," said Bjorn
>Clarberg, director of the "Illegal Immigration and Human Beings Group" at
>the European Union's joint police force, Europol. "It's an industry now
>worth several billion dollars a year."
>
>Irene Freudenschuss-Reichl, an Austrian activist working to curb that
>business, estimates that half a million women from Eastern Europe and the
>former Soviet Union are being shipped abroad each year.
>
>At Frankfurt an der Oder, on the German-Polish border, Mirko Heinke, a
>senior border guard official, said about 60 percent of the 681 people
>apprehended so far this year were women, with the largest numbers from
>Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. In Berlin, Mr. Burgfeldt put the number of
>prostitutes in the city at close to 7,000, "most of them from Eastern
>Europe, women who have poured in since the fall of the wall."
>
>Some move westward without illusions, convinced, however reluctantly, that
>prostitution for a wealthier clientele is the only way to feed their
>families and fashion a future. Others come deluded, lured into thinking
>that they will work as babysitters or barmaids, forced into unpayable debt,
>deprived of all freedom in the end.
>
>Pavlika, the Bulgarian prostitute, saw no alternative to her current work
>on the E-55 highway. Her parents are dead, killed in a car crash when she
>was 16 and still at school. She took a succession of odd jobs, but they
>were insufficient to support her 10-year-old sister. Hardship. Dead ends.
>Vague dreams of "getting married and maybe living in Germany."
>
>She stops talking, abruptly, says she has to work. The going rate is about
>$35 for 30 minutes, or about half the price over the border in Germany.
>Hence the steady stream of German cars.
>
>Pavlika takes a wad of notes out of a bag. She hands them to her pimp. Like
>others around here, he has a look: track suit, Adidas sneakers, gold chain,
>sleeves short enough to reveal the bulge of his muscles.
>
>Leona, 19, works in the nearby Bihac bar, an upscale brothel owned by
>Bosnian immigrants. She is a Ukrainian girl from Uzhgorod; she seems
>desperate, to judge by whispered confidences. Unlike Pavlika, she is in the
>second category of women, those deceived, trafficked and ultimately trapped.
>
>She came westward believing that she would work as "a gardener or some
>normal work." But upon arrival this summer her passport was taken. She was
>told she had been "sold" to the bar where she now works. She has no money,
>she says. Her gaze is vacant.
>
>"Money, money, money, money," says Natasha from Brest, Belarus, who is
>sitting next to her. "There is none for young women in Belarus. There is
>none in Ukraine. We are here because we can get a Czech visa for $25. A
>German one is much more difficult, much more expensive."
>
>But many women do get into Germany, some illegally, some with three-month
>tourist visas arranged by the gangs that bring them. Barbara Eritt, a
>social worker, says about 1,000 women a year are coming to Berlin from
>countries further east to work temporarily as prostitutes. She tries to
>help the casualties.
>
>Their stories tend to resemble one another. The women may be teachers or
>farm laborers or unemployed, ages 18 to 30. Often they have one or two
>children to support. They receive an offer of temporary work and good
>earnings in the West. Even an au pair in Berlin may earn several times the
>wage of a teacher in Kiev.
>
>Travel and visas are arranged for $800 to $1,000 - the women's debt to the
>gangs that organize their transportation and work. After arrival, passports
>and any money are taken and the women are deposited, often in groups of
>four or more, in small, guarded apartments. Then they are told what their
>real job is to be.
>
>The Berlin tabloid newspaper, BZ, advertises them daily: "The best from
>Moscow," "Sweet, fresh Poles," "New! Ukrainian Pearls." Some are taken to
>work in clubs or brothels; others are driven to clients' homes.
>
>The average rate in brothels is about $75 a half-hour, but no more than a
>tenth of that reaches the women's pockets. The women have to buy food and
>pay rent from their earnings, and so the debts mount.
>
>"The women are terrorized," said Ms. Eritt, who has helped about 30 of them
>in the last two years. "They are often unable to pay off their debts. And
>they are paralyzed, afraid to go the police, terrified the gangs will do
>something to a member of their family back home if they try to escape."
>
>Prostitution is not illegal in Germany, if confined to designated urban
>areas. But trafficking in women, and their exploitation, is illegal; so,
>too, is working with a tourist visa or with none at all. Mr. Burgfeldt, the
>police officer, said he had 20 staff members fighting prostitution rackets,
>with limited success.
>
>The trade in women from the East has spread throughout Europe and is
>increasingly well organized. The Russian-German and Ukrainian- German
>mafias that dominate the business are an outgrowth of the long Soviet
>presence in East Germany. Their networks are old, slick, flexible and
>elusive. Everywhere, women are reluctant to testify because they are
>afraid; without them convictions are almost impossible to get.
>
>"If they are going to testify, these women need witness protection, new
>names, new passports, assurances they can remain in Germany," said Cornelia
>Býhrle, an expert on illegal immigration. "But German authorities will not
>provide this. And the mafias are often much more sophisticated than the
>police or the border police."
>
>For Dr. Hana Duchkova, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases at Usti
>Hospital, the collapse of Communism and the order it imposed have been a
>"recipe for many problems." Foreigners have no medical records, and spread
>disease. Cases of syphilis at the hospital are up to 134 so far this year
>from 59 in 1999, she said, heaping blame on foreigners and a large Gypsy
>population she described in disparaging terms.
>
>One young Gypsy woman on the highway said she was 19 and had been put to
>work at age 15 by her family. On a good day, she could make about $150.
>With a tattoo of a rose on her upper arm and a ravaged look in her big
>brown eyes, she seemed a waif broken before she could live.
>
>Under the former Communist government, Gypsies had jobs, however menial,
>and overt racism was repressed, although a contentious program involving
>paid sterilization also existed. The women here from Belarus, Bulgaria,
>Russia and elsewhere would also have had jobs.
>
>"Poverty was not the same in Communist societies," said Mr. Burgfeldt of
>the Berlin police. "What we are facing now is people moving because of the
>poverty they face."
>
>Bara Rempertova, 26, who is Czech, sells her body voluntarily on the
>highway. At least, it is "voluntary" work in the sense that it is the only
>work she has been able to find that allows her to make what she called "a
>reasonable living." After six years, she plans to stop next year.
>
>"I met a German here who is now my stable boyfriend and he wants to marry
>me," she explained. "He understands why I have to do this. If things work
>out, I plan to go and live with him in Germany."
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>
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