The Balkan eyewitness
First, two episodes from recent European history as documented by Human Rights Watch:
9 September 1998: The bodies of thirty-four people, including both ethnic Serbs and Albanians, were found in an artificial lake near the village of Glodjane.
26 September 1999: Serbian special police forces massacred twenty-one members of the Delijaj family, including women and children, one as young as eighteen-months-old, in Gornje Obrinje.
So much for fact, now let's turn to fiction. Outside Priština, old men and women, young children, too, 26 in all, are herded into a truck, the doors are sealed and the vehicle is driven into a lake. But there is a witness, a young girl, and Jack Solomon, a former London policeman now working in Sarajevo for an NGO identifying the dead of the Balkan Wars, is determined to track her down. That's the core of The Eyewitness by Stephen Leather.
What starts as a search for answers, soon turns into a dangerous obsession that takes Solomon into the dark heart of the Kosovo economy. It turns out that the place is the European centre of the sex slavery trade. Groups of young women are sold at public auctions to pimps, who then traffic them to Rome, Berlin and London and keep them enslaved indefinitely as they generate huge amounts of money for their "owners". And everyone, from the local police to the employees of the international aid agencies, is in on the act as Solomon discovers.
Stephen Leather has created an original and highly-readable novel with The Eyewitness. The Balkans, with all their brutality, are authentic and his take on the NGO industry, with its idealists and its cynics, is convincing. Best of all though, is the realism of his characters. When Jack offers a young prostitute in London a chance to escape from the trade, their conversation goes like this:
"Jack, it's all right. I choose this life, I wasn't forced into it."
"That's not true," said Solomon. "If you had money, you wouldn't have to do what you do."
"And if you were rich, would you do your job? Would you spend your time telling people that their loved ones are dead?"
"It's not the same," said Solomon.
"To me it is," said Inga. "We do what we must to survive. Neither of us takes pleasure in what we do, but we do it, and we make the best of it."
