Why did the court fail to prove that Ukrainian girls engaged in prostitution under duress?
Prostitution is legalized in Germany. There are 400,000 women of the world’s oldest profession registered there. Suffice it to cast a cursory look at certain pages of many German dailies to know the prostitution market situation. Offers include Thai mice, Russian and Ukrainian supermodels, hot women from Africa, and voluptuous Cubans. According to the Federal Association of Sexual Services or, in plain English, the association of German prostitutes, about 60% of the women who do this business in Germany come from abroad. The Russians account for 90% of the illegal hookers apprehended during police roundups. Next come the Ukrainians followed by the Bulgarians... Yet... “This business cannot survive without immigrants,” association president Stephanie Klee says. “They are high in demand because customers increasingly want foreign girls. This is a wish that the sex industry willingly fulfills, for no other sector depends on the wishes of customers as prostitution does.” It should be noted that customers prefer foreigners not only because they are sometimes better than their German counterparts. Illegal prostitutes are cheaper rather than better. They will satisfy any whim, and none of them will hasten to raise a complaint.
PROFITABLE BUSINESS FOR CRIMINALS
The current generation of Germans seems to be on the point of studying Ukrainian geography by the place of residence of some of our citizens, such as Kyiv, Cherkasy, Poltava, Kremenchuk, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, etc., rather than by textbooks. The names of these cities were more than once heard pronounced during a Frankfurt-on-Main trial of what the prosecution calls a gang of Ukrainian citizens, aged 39 at most, charged with white slave trade and other related crimes. By profession, they are an engineer, an economist, a teacher, a driver, and a cook. To look at, they absolutely do not resemble (at least in my view) wicked pimps who rob the poor girls of the money they earned.
Oleksandr L, 39, a former Kyiv teacher of physical training, known in the local underworld as Alex, emigrated to Germany 13 years ago. In 1999 he founded the Puma travel agency in Yoshkar-Ola with branches in Moscow and other cities. He found those willing to cooperate with him — a few compatriots of ours who had come to Germany on a tourist visa, hoping for a lucky chance to find an odd job. The chances were not so lucky, the visas were expiring, and there was hardly any money to get around. Each of them, cook Serhiy Sh. from Kremenchuk, driver Valery K. from Cherkasy, engineer Oleksandr Y. From Dnipropetrovsk, and economist Valery D. From Poltava, told the court they had come to Germany as gostarbeiters because they could not find a job in their homeland. Almost all of them had to care for their wives, children, and parents living in Ukraine. As it is also difficult for an illegal to find work on his own in Germany, they intuitively leaned toward their own kind, the Russian-speaking residents, who were normally ready, albeit at some profit, to help with a job offer or a piece of advice.
Their searches finally brought them into contact with former Kyivan Oleksandr L. whose activities had nothing to do with local sightseeing. The advertisements the company was quite officially placing in ex-USSR media outlets promised not only travels but also employment abroad. Local agents would recruit young good-looking women ostensibly to work in Germany as waitresses, cleaners, baby-sitters, or patient attendants. That those willing to clean other people’s toilets and wait on bar customers had no money to apply for the passport and the visa did not embarrass the recruiters, for they offered to bear all expenses provided the recruited ladies worked them off.
The girls usually traveled to Frankfurt-on-Main to be received by the illegal dealer Alex or his assistants. The latter claimed on trial they had not always known why the girls came to Germany because their job was only to deliver the newly-arrived to the proper places. They said the girls arrived on their own, without any coercion, and none of them ever turned in to the police. Then they would take the guests, as if they were ordinary passengers, to hotels or saunas in a rented car, for which the girls had to pay from their own pocket.
Upon arrival in Frankfurt, the girls were put up in apartments. The employers would take their passports away, explaining without too much scruples what exactly they were supposed to do. There were no problems with those who had willingly accepted their lot. But many girls maintain they really hoped to find the promised job in Germany and refused pointblank to engage in prostitution. At first these girls were reminded about the money spent on them, almost two thousand euros, which they were to refund immediately if they did not want to work. But nobody had that much money. Offering resistance was out of the question, for the employers were not inclined to joke. Police interrogation records show that the girl were turned into slaves — in an alien country whose language they could not speak, without documents and money but with a substantial debt, and stricken with the fear that the first encounter with a policeman would mean going to jail. So-called bad behavior usually resulted in a beating. The girls themselves testified that they quite often behaved “badly:” they drank alcohol to repress the feeling of hopelessness, despair, and inability to counter the brutalization. And what Dutch courage leads to is common knowledge.
The indictment read out in the courtroom cites hundreds of instances of the cruel treatment of the prostitutes. Alex himself also lost no opportunity to wield the whip: police files quote the girls as saying that he mercilessly punished them for refusal to attend to their customers or even for the request to be transferred to another brothel if conditions became utterly unbearable. For the well-heeled customers, in many cases perverts, treated the whores the way they pictured it in their sometimes morbid imagination. The more so that the whores were illegal, i.e., they did not seem to exist.
The police had been spying on the gang’s connections and activities for two years. Oleksandr L. and his accomplices were arrested a year ago, as were tens of the prostitutes, 26 of whom agreed to testify in court. Still, they do not know what is in store for them because the witness protection law only defends them when they are in Germany, and none of the girls has been granted the right to reside in that country after the trial. So after being deported to their own country, they can only rely on Ukrainian law, local law-enforcement bodies, and themselves.
FAILING TO FIND A LUCKY STAR
The stories of how the girls were forced into prostitution are much the same as if written under dictation. Is it not strange that quite grown-up women should have been plunging head-on into an abyss, relying on pure chance? Did they not know that a brothel is a production line on which they would have to pander to the whims of sometimes slatternly, old, and obnoxious men and even perverts, people with a morbid imagination? They explain this as follows, “I thought I would perhaps have to sleep with somebody once or twice — so what? I’ll be none the worst for it.” But those who said they had really intended to work in Germany as governesses or waitresses did not ask themselves, for some reason, how they were going to do so without knowing German.
To draw a generalized picture of our prostitutes, they are 18-25-year-old girls, usually not very highly educated, who were unemployed before going to Germany or worked as kiosk or marketplace sellers, kindergarten nurses, or cleaners. They all say they failed to find a job at home with salary high enough to enable them to dress decently, go to discotheques, and eat good food. This is why they claim they swallowed the bait in the newspaper advertisements that promised jobs abroad. Moreover, many of them did not even ask what kind of work they would have to do. This is how, unbelievably enough, the people now called criminals and victims had their ways crossed: each of them says they were forced to follow this track by a wretched life and poor economic situation in Ukraine.
Oksana M., 20, a kindergarten nursemaid, herself advertised in a newspaper that she would like to work abroad. There was a prompt response from two polite youths who pointed out that their services — helping to get the passport, visa and a ticket to Frankfurt — would cost her two thousand euros. “No money now? We’ll wait until you earn it,” they told Oksana in comfort. To tell the truth, they organized everything quickly and practically without bothering her. Yet, it was a Lithuanian passport bearing a different name and a three-month guest visa. Oksana was told she would work as a waitress in a hotel bar, but if a customer would invite her to his room she should not refuse. Oksana says she understood what kind of work it was only when she was brought to her Frankfurt workplace, where she saw red lights on the building and almost naked girls in the bar. So she told her employers she wanted to go back home. “Pay off the debt and go,” they said in reply. “No money? Earn some!”
But she managed to earn nothing. And although she had to serve customers as if she worked on a factory production line, she was still short of money. This took several years.
“Did you try to run away or turn to the police?” I asked her, “or were you kept under lock and key?” “But where could I run to? I had my passport taken away all at once, I had no money. I was afraid to turn to police. I thought I would work off the debt, earn enough money for a new passport, and go,” Oksana says, but it is clear she does not believe she will manage to so.
Oksana was popular among the customers and often earned up to 2,000 euros a week. Yet, half this amount was grabbed by the brothel owner, while half of the other half was to be paid to Alex, and she had to use the remaining quarter to pay the room rent, buy clothes and cosmetics, and clear the debt. There was a chronic shortage of money. She could borrow from Alex, which made her debts grow like mushrooms after a rain. Oksana had her visa renewed for times during this period. She had four — Lithuanian, Russian, Belarus, and Greek — passports in four different names and with overstayed visas. So when policemen apprehended her, they found it difficult for some time to identify her right name. Oksana feared to tell the truth because she had parents and a young sister at home. She kept silent for a month until the lawyer brought home to her that other girls had already come clean on everything, Alex and his accomplices had been detained, and she had better tell the truth. Oksana agreed and stated that she was forced into prostitution. Yet, she withdrew her previous complaint about beatings and told the court that this had happened to somebody else. She could not possibly tell about that because she was still in debt, and she learned when she phoned home that her two old acquaintances, who proved to be well informed about the Frankfurt court proceedings, had already come to claim the debt...
GIVE PROSTITUTES THE GREEN CARD!
The Frankfurt-on-Main trial of our people has not only triggered a heated debate in Germany, where the white slave trade is considered one of the most shameful things against which the law-enforcement bodies wage an out- and-out struggle, but also taken an unexpected turn. The German Association of Sexual Services and Donna Carmen, an organization that defends prostitutes’ social and political rights, demand that prostitutes from Ukraine, as well as from other countries outside the European Union, be eligible for a Gr een Card. In other words, they should have the same right to work as, for example, European Union people do. The point is foreign women of easy virtue are needed to no lesser degree here than programmers, while local ladies of the night are unable to meet the ever-growing demand.
This idea is also supported by the lawyers of both the accused and the victims. The Green Card would allow Eastern European, Asian, and African prostitutes to work legally in Germany, for in this case they would be free of police roundups and the related problems — in any case, they find their way here by hook or by crook. Having obtained a work permit, they would be paying considerable taxes and have their rights protected. As long as this impossible, white slave traders have the upper hand.
Yet, even those who demand illegal prostitutes to be legalized do not think it is a question of white slavery or women trafficking, as far as Ukrainian pimps and whores are concerned. For example, Stephanie Klee, president of the Association of Sexual Services, claims that just a tiny fraction — fewer than five percent — of foreign women are engaged in prostitution against their will even if they stay and work illegally in Germany. The overwhelming majority of the women voluntarily chose this occupation.
Many of our women, whom the police round up, knowingly come to Germany and other countries of Europe, obtaining fake passports and visas by all kinds of credible and incredible ways. Failing to find a job, they get into the snare of pimps. Even those now testifying in court, came here voluntarily after all. Even if they did know at first what they would have to do, they understood on arrival that they were cheated. Is it sexual slavery if they could freely move around and use mobile phones? In other words, each of them could leave her employer at any time. That they were not paid the money they earned is a different question. Still, when asked by the judge why they let the pimps pocket all their money, none of he girls could give a clear answer.
The Frankfurt-on-Main white slave trial is over. But, while in the beginning the course of event was covered in most newspapers, now journalists have almost lost their original interest: the case does not seem to be about white slave trade. The court failed to prove that the girls were engaged in prostitution under duress. Oleksandr L. and members of his criminal gang were convicted for tax evasion, an offense punishable in Germany as harshly as white slave trade, and for pimping. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to five years, with almost two years that they spent in a pretrial cell considered as part of their sentence.
AN EPILOGUE OF SORTS
The court sessions often heard references to an unfavorable economic situation in the post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine, which often prompts women to take this unwise step. Both the prosecution and the defense noted that criminal cases about trafficking in people — former or current citizens of Ukraine — are now as common as those about German citizens who have committed the same crimes. From this standpoint, they already consider, unfortunately, Ukraine as part of their community because it has mastered a new profitable business surprisingly quickly.
Incidentally, Ukrainians and Ukrainian-born Germans committed 17,331 crimes in Germany in 2002, up 100 from the year 2001.
