27-01-2013, 06:14 PM
Magda Hassan Wrote:Thank you America. Not. Women in soviet times would never have to be subjected to any such inhumane treatment. Every one had a home and a job with dignity. Such a system was unacceptable to the US and was not permitted to stand.
Yes.
I came across the Arizona Market in free market thinktanks a few years ago. These thinktanks were lauding the Arizona Market as some sort of Fundamental Proof of the Inevitable Victory of Capitalism. Out of Chaos, Dynamic Markets would arise and create Order.
Well, here's the truth about your fucking Arizona Market and Capitalism as Divine Scripture:
Quote:The shabby streets of Cheb are but one staging post in a necklace of shame that encircles the globe.
To the east of Cheb, a battered Volvo crossed into northern Bosnia. Hidden under filthy blankets were four teenage girls. One, a blonde called Maria, had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
To prepare for the long and uncomfortable journey, the girls had each been given an injection by a doctor. They were told it was to alleviate travel sickness. In reality it was a cocktail of drugs to keep them drowsy and unable to try and escape. This is standard procedure for the men operating this segment of the network in sexual trafficking that criss-crosses the Balkans.
The doctor is a man known by his first name only, Goran, in the girl's hometown of Chisinau, the capital of Europe's poorest country, Moldova. It has some of the prettiest children in central Europe. This has made it a magnet for the traffickers.
They moved in soon after the collapse of the Communist system in the country. Since then there is a widely accepted estimate that some 6,000 girls have been trafficked out of Moldova. No one knows how many of them received their drug injections from Dr Goran.
The girls in the Volvo had answered advertisements in a Chisinau newspaper. The ads promised them work in Paris, London and Dublin -- and even in the United States. The posts on offer included maids, nannies, house-keeping and bar work. The ads stressed no previous experience was required. The salaries were far beyond those available in Moldova.
A Moldavian recruiter told the girls their journey would involve them first being secretly driven over the border into Bosnia. There, they would receive passports, for which they had already paid him US $100 -- money borrowed from their families and friends. Then they would go West to earn undreamed of money. So they had been promised.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia, followed by a vicious war in the region and the establishment of new states under the 1995 Dayton peace accord, had left many Balkan countries with virtually no legislation or border controls to deal with the sexual traffic in young women and children.
By the time Maria and her three young friends had been tricked into making the journey in the Volvo, the profits from sexual trafficking in the Balkans were matching those of the drug trade -- and the penalties for smuggling humans were minimal.
The border guards into Bosnia waved the Volvo through. The car was a familiar sight to them. Each time it crossed, the guards received US $200 for allowing its unhampered passage.
Five hours later the Volvo reached its final destination. "Arizona Market" is on the outskirts of Kosovo. The town resembles the old Wild West rather than Central Europe in the Third Millennium. It is also the UN headquarters in Bosnia.
An area interlaced with muddy tracks lead to establishments with names like Café Marlboro, Café Don, and The Golden Heart. Fronted by heaps of refuse, used condoms and empty liquor bottles, they are brothels. Between them stand wooden huts selling cheap denim clothes, alcohol, perfume, and guns.
Inside the sleazy bars, the scene seldom changes: dimmed red lights, loud music, cheap drinks -- and semi-naked girls. Usually they are draped over the men known as "the internationalists". These are the soldiers of the United Nations multi-national peace keeping force. In 2003, it consisted of 45,000 soldiers drawn from 39 countries. In addition, there were some 7,000 UN staff as well as members of over 200 Western aid agencies.
Many of the girls appear to be drugged -- and not only from the ready supply of cocaine and heroin on open sale.
An American aid agency worker said: "Lookit, the bar owners who bought these girls like to keep them nice and quiet. So they buy drugs from some of the UN medics to do so. When a girl has finished her shift, she is taken to her room by a bar man and given a shot. When she wakes up she is ready for her next shift".
This is Arizona Market. Officially established by the peacekeeping forces to foster trade between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, today its five square miles is the epicenter of Bosnia's booming sex-slaves trade.
This was the destination of the four young girls. They would work here as prostitutes -- and maybe die -- in this forsaken place.
Quote:A UN report into trafficking claims that some Western officials are undermining attempts to clean up the trade by becoming cronies of Balkan pimps. The same is true of some of the international and local police. In one case, cited by the report, Bulgarian border police took money from girls to secure their safe passage back to Bulgaria, only to hand them back to the traffickers in exchange for yet more money.
The fate of those four young girls who were smuggled over the border into Bosnia to work in Arizona Market was to be hustled from the Volvo into a large wooden building. Standing around its walls were the brothel keepers of Arizona Market. Maria and her companions were ordered to undress. When Maria refused, her dress was ripped from her. Naked, she and the other girls were forced to stand on wooden crates. The brothel keepers physically inspected the women.
Then the bidding began. In minutes Maria had been sold to a brothel keeper for US $1,500. The other girls fetched prices ranging from US $350 to US $1,200.
For US $20 a client could spend thirty minutes with Maria. For US $2.50 he could buy a bottle of beer while he satisfied himself.
Maria would soon discover that there was no escape from a life where she is expected to have unprotected sex. She is owned body and soul by the man who bought her. All she receives are three meals a day, a bed to sleep on and the skimpy clothes her owner insists she must wear to attract clients.
A UN peacekeeper in Kosovo, who asked not to be named, told me: "Often the girls are sold on by other brothel keepers. They are traded like cattle and are routinely beaten and drugged. If a girl tries to escape, she is raped or tortured -- or told that her mother back home will be killed."
Milan Sitilovic, the Bosnian police chief with responsibility for Arizona Market says: "How can we stop it? Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world".
Frederick Larson who headed the office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Sarajevo identified the problem, "the girls are terrified of testifying against their owners. Those who dare to do so are simply murdered".
In 2001, the naked bodies of several girls were found in a river near Arizona Market. They bore the hallmarks of Russian mafia-style killings; hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet set in concrete. Their breasts had been slashed off.
Arizona Market is situated close to the Bosnian headquarters of the US peacekeeping force. During 2002, six Russian soldiers, members of K-For, gang-raped two girls in the Arizona Market. As they were "owned" by the club owner, the soldiers paid him a small sum in compensation. No other charges were brought against the rapists.
Those who survive such inhumane treatment are often sold on to the international slave market.
Paul Holmes, of London's Metropolitan Police Vice Squad, has estimated that 80% of all women working in the brothels of Britain's capital are from the Balkans. His own investigations concluded that the traffic in women had made their owners at least US $75 million since the start of the Third Millennium.
His facts and figures can be repeated through the Western world. In Paris, Dublin, Rome, New York, Montreal and Los Angeles, police report the same story: when rescued from sexual bondage, the women are too terrified to testify against those who traffic in them.
Before the free market thinktanks started mythologising about the Arizona Market, Thomas Pynchon described it in the context of WW2, in his masterwork Gravity's Rainbow:
Quote:"What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars."
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war

