The women arrive in Trabzon by ferry from across the Black Sea, sometimes dozens at a time. Whatever their real names, they are known in Turkey as Natashas, and often end up working as prostitutes in this country's growing sex trade, sometimes against their will.
Turkey, with its now booming economy and lax visa requirements, is becoming the world's largest market for Slavic women, one of the most visible exports of the former Soviet Union's struggling new states.
"Think of many rivers flowing into one sea," said Allan Freedman, who coordinates countertrafficking programs at the Ankara bureau of the International Organization for Migration, an independent body that works closely with the UN. "That sea is Turkey."
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
Most of the women come of their own free will but many end up as virtual slaves, sold from pimp to pimp through a loosely organized criminal network that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul and beyond.
Prostitution is legal in strictly secular Turkey where the government licenses brothels, known as "general houses," and issues prostitutes identity cards that give them rights to some free medical care and other social services. But women working in general houses -- there is usually one in each large city -- tend to be older, and the demand for young, slender women has outstripped supply as Turkey's economy has improved. Slavic women are meeting that need.
"Women are recruited at home with the promise of employment," Freedman said. "But once they are across the border their passports are taken away and they are beaten and raped and forced into prostitution."
The women are typically kept locked in an apartment except when they are taken out to customers.
The trade is not hard to find. Outside Istanbul's general house, a collection of tiny brothels in a warren of alleys behind a guarded metal gate, touts accost visitors with whispered promises of beautiful young Russian girls at not much more than the price of the older Turkish women waiting for customers inside.
"I can bring you any kind of girl you want," promised an eager man in a black shirt and pants with a gold-faced watch, saying that his girls were kept in a building downtown.
Part of the reason Turkey has become a magnet is that the more lucrative markets of Western Europe are protected by increasingly strict visa requirements that take weeks to work through, with only uncertain results. A young woman from Moldova can be in Istanbul in a day by paying just US$10 for a month-long visa at the border.
Turkey is also becoming a staging area for illegal migration elsewhere.
"This is one of the reasons why the EU is so worried about Turkey," Freedman said, referring to European resistance to Turkey's quest to join the bloc. "It's increasingly a migrant hub."
Turkey has been working in the past two years to stop the trafficking and get off the US government's blacklist. In 2003, the State Department listed Turkey in its report on trafficking as a "Tier 3" country, meaning that it had taken no significant action to eliminate the trade. The status jeopardized US financial aid to Turkey and helped spur it to act. On the State Department's most recent report, issued earlier this month, Turkey was moved up to "Tier 2," which means it is making significant efforts but still falls short of US government expectations.
Turkey lists trafficking as a separate crime in its new penal code, which took effect at the beginning of this month. A one-year, US$600,000 grant from the US is being used to train police officers to recognize trafficked women among the unlicensed prostitutes they arrest. The money is also paying for a hotline to help women caught in a trafficker's grip. A campaign to publicize the phone number includes billboards in the country's international airports and inserts that immigration officers slip into the passports of women arriving at Turkish border crossings.
Freedman said the hot line led to the rescue of a Moldovan woman in Antalya, a southern city, within days of its inauguration this month. Her captor was arrested.
Turkey's Interior Ministry has also enlisted nongovernmental organizations to provide support for women identified as victims. Because of that support, Turkey's independent Human Resources Development Fund opened the country's only shelter for trafficked women last October in downtown Istanbul. But the shelter, which has helped 74 women, holds only 12 people.
"That's nothing when compared with the number of victims," said Berna Eren, president of the organization.
More than 200 trafficked women were identified in Turkey last year, but the authorities said they represented as little as 10 percent of the women bought and sold during that time.
Most of the women Eren's organization has seen are from Ukraine and Moldova, but the group has also helped women from Russia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Georgia and Iran.
"Some girls in the shelter say they have been sold more than once," she said, but added that as the women are sold "from city to city, the traffickers are hard to trace."
Every victim identified by the police is interviewed by a psychologist and referred to a psychiatrist if needed. Eren said that women living in the shelter were kept under constant watch by a counselor and, when eventually repatriated, were met by a protective authority in their home country in an effort to keep them from falling back into the hands of traffickers.
"In the past they were simply deported as a prostitute and would arrive in their home countries with no money," Eren said. "Traffickers would pick them up, get them new passports and send them back."
The most attractive women move on to Istanbul or the tourist resorts of the country's southern coast. At the Hotel Seranda in the Aksaray district of Istanbul on a recent night, 50 women sat crowded into booths while the basement "disco" filled with men. The women periodically got up to dance on a small dance floor, beckoning to the men seated around it. Once they found a customer, they would lead him upstairs.
Trabzon is one of four or five major centers of trafficking in the country, according to the International Organization for Migration. Kemal Uzun, who owns a storefront shipping agency beside Trabzon's small port, said hundreds of women arrived each week at the height of the tourist season.
His business partner, Gokhan Yilmaz, said the trend began shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the so-called "luggage trade" flourished -- women from the old Soviet states would travel to Turkey and fill their suitcases with goods bought from wholesalers for resale in Russia and neighboring countries. As Turkey's economy improved, many of the women turned to prostitution.
The men have watched the industry grow. Hotels acting as illegal brothels have sprung up along the Black Sea coast controlled, they said, by organized crime networks.
"We've also heard about women brought here by force," Yilmaz said.
The hotels are periodically raided and closed but quickly reopen under new names. East of Trabzon, the former Zirve Hotel has been renamed the Elegante. A young Slavic woman sat in the dim lobby of the hotel one afternoon this month staring at mottled goldfish turning circles in an aquarium while half a dozen middle-aged Turkish men waited in armchairs across the room. One eventually got up and gave his identity card to a clerk at the front desk. After a curt nod from a man who appeared to be the boss, the woman rose and followed the man into an elevator.
Despite the apparent transaction just witnessed, the clerk denied to a reporter there were any Russian women there.
"You've been misinformed," he said.
Elena, a bottle blonde with frosted blue nails drinking pale pink cherry-flavored water in a cafe next to the rundown Ural Hotel in town, said she had also heard of women who had been beaten and forced to work as prostitutes.
She counted herself lucky because, she said, she had a boyfriend. Given the availability of women, the practice of keeping paid mistresses has blossomed anew.
But most of the women lead more desperate lives. At the Dilek Cafe, a small storefront room decorated with strings of colored lights in an area of Trabzon known as the Russian Bazaar, a half-dozen garishly made-up women sat beckoning passers-by.
One woman in 10cm platform shoes agreed to talk to a reporter, but her smile froze when asked about trafficked women.
A Turkish man approached, shooed her back to her spot by the door and told the reporter to leave.
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