Human Goods

Wedged into a space between Romania and the Ukraine lies the tiny Eastern European nation of Moldova. It is Europe’s poorest country, officially classified by Washington as a “failed state,” and it has been in the news recently since raids in London and Surrey rescued trafficked Moldovan women and led to 15 arrests.

That is, it’s been in the Tiraspol Times, which never passes on a good Moldova-bashing opportunity.

I know, I know — Where’s Tiraspol?

Wedged into an even slighter slice of space between Moldova and the Ukraine is the breakaway state of Transnistria, and Tiraspol is its capital. It’s a bizarre urban landscape cast eerily in utopian Soviet iconography — fields of red stars and gleaming statues of Stalin — that somehow doesn’t realize it’s no longer the Cold War era.

Unrecognized by most foreign governments, Transnistria seceded from Moldova in 1990 in a violent blink of a rebellion supported by Russia.

Today, Fistful of Euros calls it a “post-communist gangster state.” But Igor Smirnov, the little rogue state’s president, would probably disagree, since he professes he lays claim to 103.6 percent of the vote, according to Benjamin Skinner’s book, “A Crime So Monstrous.”

The government controls almost all media outlets, so it’s no wonder that Transnistria’s reports on human trafficking both at home and in Moldova are, to put it nicely, skewed. Articles, like this one in Pridnestrovie , are more reminiscent of an insecure high school queen bee making passive aggressive jibes at someone in the cafeteria:

• Despite persistent allegations, there is no evidence (unlike in Moldova) that hordes of young women have gone to work as prostitutes in the West. Instead, it is Moldova that holds a dubious world record: The country is today the leading haven for pedophiles and for traffickers who earn fortunes enslaving underage kids in a brutal international sex trade.

(Pay special attention to those less-than-necessary parenthetical asides, ahem..)

Despite such assurances, Skinner reports that “it was an open secret in Transnistria that police officers moonlighted as slave dealers.” Since it is an unofficial nation, almost no NGOs will go there, and few foreign governments deal with it.

But it is a primary trafficking corridor for arms (which Transnistria is suspected of manufacturing) as well as humans from Eastern Europe.

This BBC series explores the ghostly countryside of Moldova (where a huge percentage of its young people have gone abroad to work, thousands against their will). Some poor villagers sell organs to make money. Economies like this compel millions of people worldwide to fall into the trap of slavery.

Places That Don’t Exist: Transnitria - Volume 1: Worth watching to get impressions of the largely abandoned and destitute Moldovan countryside. Or at least for when the host runs into the Moldovan president on a casual-jeans day, who invites him to go fishing, randomly.

Volume 2 - The host demonstrates how easy it is for smugglers to hop across the border to the Ukraine. Literally, he hops across.

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