NY Time Article re Albania -- 11/13/2003

November 13, 2003

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November 13, 2003

For Albanians, It's Come to This: A Son for a TV

By NICHOLAS WOOD

URRES, Albania, Nov. 11 Fatmira Bonjaku's husband is in jail, accused by the police of selling their 3-year-old son to an Italian man in return for the television set that six other children watch in the family's dimly lighted room. The police also say her husband had plans to sell their newest born, whom she is breast feeding.

Mrs. Bonjaku, interviewed at her family's two-room shack on the outskirts of this port city, denied that she intended to sell her newborn but admitted trading her son, Orazio, thinking the Italian man "would provide a good life."

Over the past 12 years, since the collapse of Stalinism here, a substantial trade in children has established itself in Albania, Europe's most impoverished and long most isolated country.

No one has exact figures for the number of children involved, but the government estimates that 6,000 children have been sent abroad for use in begging and prostitution rackets, or in some cases sold to Western couples for adoption.

A vast majority come from the Jevgjit community, a group of some 300,000 Albanian-speaking Gypsies, or Roma, who have fared even more poorly than most.

Albania's anti-trafficking police estimate that more than 1,000 children are currently in Greece, working mainly as beggars. One or two Albanian minors are arrested every day on Albania's border with northern Greece and sent home, the Swiss charity, Terre des Hommes, reported this year, citing the head of the police's juvenile department in Salonika in northern Greece.

The trafficking is part of a larger trade in humans, including East European women shuffled through Albania for prostitution, and is an outgrowth of the misery and the organized crime that has blossomed in this clannish society.

In Albania most documented cases of child trafficking have involved older children who are sold or rented by their families to minders, or pimps, who take them to Greece and Italy, where they work as beggars or child prostitutes.

Many families apparently believe, like Mrs. Bonjaku, that their children will gain better lives abroad; for several, too, it can seem a relatively small step to send children from the streets of Albania to neighboring Greece.

"You also have to understand what immigration means to most Albanians," Pierre Ferry, a child protection officer with Unicef in Tirana, the Albanian capital, said. "To send your child abroad is also a kind of success and does not appear as primitive exploitation."

In Pogradec, a town of 20,000 on the shores of Ohrid Lake, which straddles the Albanian border with the Macedonian republic, half a dozen young children beg on the waterfront on most days.

Judy Mitstifer, 43, a missionary from Liberty, Pa., has set up a school for street children in Pogradec. Many of them, she said, are on the cusp of becoming child prostitutes and run a high risk of being trafficked.

"The kids here, we try to keep track of them," said Ms. Mitstifer, after approaching two girls, Bukuria, 11, and Bala, 12. "We know who buys and who sells. Our hope is that the school is attractive enough so they stay."

Ms. Mitstifer showed a visitor a school photograph of 12 children from 2000. Seven, she said, had already been sent abroad or their families were involved in the trade. The proportion, she said, was typical for her 110 pupils, three-quarters of them Roma.

Lila Shuli, who herself begs a living in Pogradec streets, sends four of her children to Ms. Mitstifer's school. Over the past decade, she said, her family has been split up by trafficking.

Lila's younger sister was married at 14 to a man from the next town who later took her to France and made her work as a prostitute. Nine years ago, Ms. Shuli said, her mother sent Lila's 6-year-old son, Armandor, to work in Greece. He has not been heard from since.

In an interview, Lila's mother, Kimete Sinani, denied that she sold the boy but admitted to "hiring" him out for $80.

Now, Ms. Shuli said, she is coming under pressure from a neighbor who said he could take her son Fadil, 11, to Greece.

The Albanian government has introduced public awareness campaigns to alert families to the potential dangers of such decisions. New laws penalizing child trafficking have been enacted, and policing has been stepped up.

Twelve anti-trafficking police units have now been set up nationwide, one of which uncovered the case of the Bonjakus, the family alleged to have traded their son for the television set.

Albanian investigators in the port of Durres arrested Mrs. Bonjaku's husband, Kjutim, 60, on June 26, along with two middlemen.

They were charged with arranging the deal with the Italian, Angelo Borelli, a 69-year-old pensioner, who was arrested by the Italian police in the port of Pescara in late September.

The Italian police say Mr. Borelli paid a total of $6,000 to the middlemen in 1999 to take charge of the Bonjakus's son Orazio, then 3.

Mrs. Bonjaku denied receiving anything beyond the television. She said she and her husband were working as street cleaners when they were first approached by a local man, Gjergj Shkembi, on Mr. Borelli's behalf.

She said she was promised that the whole family would go to Italy in exchange for Orazio. But that trip never took place.

Instead, she said, Mr. Borelli himself came several times to the family's shack, bringing small amounts of money and clothing, a gesture that Mrs. Bonjaku said convinced her that Orazio was being treated well in his new home. Family photos show Mr. Borelli standing with Mrs. Bonjaku and her other children.

Flamur Gjuzi, the head of the anti-trafficking unit in Durres, said wiretaps on Mr. Borelli's telephone showed that he also intended to buy the family's newborn, arranging to pay the Bonjakus 5,000 euros (about $5,750) before the baby was due, and another 5,000 euros upon delivery of the child.

Mrs. Bonjaku admitted to receiving what she called limited payments from Mr. Borelli each month of her pregnancy, but she insisted that it was merely to help her out and that she had no intention of selling the child. Since her husband's arrest she has heard nothing more from Mr. Borelli, nor anything about Orazio, now 7. The Italian police say he is being cared for in a state-run home for children.