Of human bondage

By Raf Casert and Paul Shepard

Associated Press

For Lydia Dineva, it began with friends of friends referring her ever farther from her home in Bulgaria, to Switzerland, then Sweden.

Toward the West and its wealth, toward the promise of escape from poverty, toward a job, maybe just waitressing at first, toward a future.

At 20, she trusted her friends’ friends. That is, until she found herself in a Stockholm apartment, where the man who was her contact tossed a pack of condoms on the table in front of her.

Dress up, he told her. Get ready to leave.

As they drove down Stockholm’s streets, the language around her incomprehensible, her passport taken by the man she now recognized as a pimp, she started sobbing.

On the other side of the world, a life of sexual servitude began in a much more businesslike way for a woman called Sonya.

In Houston, Texas, thousands of miles from her home in the hills of rural Thailand, a trafficker presented a photo of the petite, 28-year-old woman, along with her real name, Sriwan Sakyai, to a man who said he could get a federal I-94 form, which allows foreign nationals to stay in the United States.

The form would cost $3,000.

Sonya arrived in the United States by commercial flights. Bangkok to Los Angeles; LA to Houston, where a brothel awaited.

Sonya, according to those who know her, accepted her new life as an indentured prostitute. In about a year, she had worked off a $40,000 debt to the trafficker, and then turned trafficker herself.

Dressed in fine clothes, she returned to her home village in Thailand to recruit. On a return trip to Thailand, she did not realize that her supposed middleman supplying additional I-94 forms was a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service undercover agent.

She was arrested after trying to arrange I-94 forms for young Thai women and is now in a Dublin, Calif., prison serving a two-year sentence.

The cases of Lydia Dineva in Europe and Sonya Sakyai in America illustrate the complexities of today’s human trafficking – a multibillion-dollar industry that authorities say is growing and challenging traditional notions of what slavery means in a have-and-have-not world.

For centuries, people have been shipped from city to city, even from nation to nation to satisfy carnal desires.

But with the onset of border-melting globalization and the growth and better organization of criminal syndicates, the sex-slave trade is thriving as never before, say victims’ advocates and government officials.

It might get an indirect boost, according to one expert, from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which have brought toughened immigration controls in many Western nations.

“As borders get tight in receiving countries, traffickers will tell desperate women they have ways to cross and they (the women) then find themselves as trafficking victims,” said Widney Brown of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring organization.

More than $7 billion is generated for traffickers annually, say law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe. Only drug smuggling and possibly gun sales generate greater profits for criminals, police agencies say.

How many women and children are moved across international borders by traffickers? The numbers are high – 700,000, the U.S. government reported last year, or even higher, according to some non-governmental organizations. CIA statistics say 50,000 people, mostly women and some children, are smuggled to the United States each year.

Some are destined for servitude in sweatshops, kitchens, farm fields or orchards.

But many end up in the lucrative Western sex trade.

“Our children read about the slave trade a century ago, little knowing that it still exists today,” said Swedish Justice Minister Thomas Bodstroem.

Once in Stockholm, Lydia Dineva found no way out. She was soon picking up midnight clients: cabbies, electricians, lawyers. Her rates: about $80 for sex in the car, $150 for one hour in an apartment. Rates rose around payday at the end of the month.

The proceeds all went to the pimp, who was on the lookout for social service workers driving through the neighborhood looking to rescue young women like Lydia.

She and other victims of the trafficking gang had to share a room in a suburban flat, sleeping on mattresses. All they thought about was escape.

Later when she told her pimp she was pregnant and had to stop work, she was commanded to get an abortion. “He told me, “You know how many girls that have tried to quit this job have died,” said Dineva, who spoke on condition that her exact whereabouts not be revealed.

Around this time, a victim of the gang was able to call home to the Czech Republic and give her family enough of a description of where she was held for police to free her and others from a flat on the outskirts of Stockholm.

The case was at first reminiscent of so many trafficking cases across the world: Police pounce on a prostitution den, find women without passports, treat it as an illegal immigrant issue, remove the witnesses by expelling them to their home country.

But this case would be different, partly because of the dogged prosecutor, Nils-Eric Schultz, and partly because women such as Lydia Dineva would confront the traffickers in court.

Schultz went to the Czech Republic and Slovakia and saw how easily traffickers could operate. Many of the women were gypsies living in poverty, all young with little hope.

“These pimps drive down with their Volvos, credit cards and mobile phones and make a big impression. Then they say, ‘Just come along to work in a bar and you’ll make enough for the whole family.’ It wasn’t hard to get these girls to follow them,” said Schultz.

As Schultz made arrests, Lydia Dineva agreed to testify on video. At trial, all four gang members were convicted. During their appeal, she finally had to face them.

The central issue at trial: Were the women truly enslaved?

Defense lawyers argued they were not.

“They weren’t forced,” said Thomas Martinsson, a defense lawyer. “I think they came voluntarily.”

His defense had little impact. Late last year, the four traffickers’ convictions were upheld, and they were sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison.

For Sonya Sakyai, the story is far from over. She remains in a federal prison where she cuts the hair of other inmates, a skill she learned while a hairdresser in the Thai homeland she longs to return to, friends say.

She declined AP requests for an interview.

“Her feeling now is that she has bad karma and it’s her destiny to be in jail. It’s a feeling of: ‘I did wrong and must accept it,’ ” said Rev. David Wells, former pastor of the Thai Presbyterian Church in Houston who served as Sonya’s interpreter in court.

Among some Thais, poverty is seen as reflecting bad karma, and this provides an extra incentive to move up economically, he said, adding that attitudes toward sex are often more casual than in America.

Tej Bunnag, Thailand’s U.S. ambassador, disputed any suggestion that his country is especially tolerant of sex slavery. But is that even the right term in cases like that of Sonya Sakyai, an ambitious woman from a poor Thai village?

The slavery question elicits complex, contradictory answers.

“These women couldn’t even go to a local restaurant to get something to eat. We are talking about slavery,” said Roger D. Piper, deputy district director of the Houston INS office. “And individuals like Sonya make the problem worse. … She was a good recruitment poster” for trafficking.

Wells says of his friend: “She didn’t feel tricked, manipulated or cheated. And she wasn’t trying to trick anybody. The girls contacted her in Thailand to get here.”

Sonya Sakyai’s lawyer, Richard Kuniansky, recalled his client as “a nice sweet woman” who did not really understand the U.S. government’s view of what she considered a service.

In sentencing her and other traffickers in the so-called Little Dragon case, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt recalled “a very fundamental and difficult area that this country has also had to deal with in slavery.”

Edward Gallagher, the federal prosecutor in the case, agreed. Even if Third World women say they’re acting voluntarily, “there is a psychological coercion,” he said.