Magazin:

The billboard in downtown Brcko looks as if it is advertising a shopping mall in California.
It is Sunday afternoon at the “Faraon” restaurant, a slightly more substantial wooden building than the rest of the 3,000 wooden kiosks that make up the Brcko District’s sprawling Arizona Market in northeast Bosnia. But just like the rest of them the Faraon has a parking lot for a toilet.
Like many of the people who indirectly gain from one of Arizona Market’s traditional businesses, Gordana, owner of the aptly named Koridor restaurant, does not see any victims at her tables when the prostitutes from Eastern Europe totter in the door on high heels.

To produce this series, an all-Balkan team of seven journalists and a photo-journalist from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia went in spring 2002 to the infamous Arizona Market in the Brcko District of northeast Bosnia Herzegovina to investigate the coming showdown between its western style future and its lawless past.

It seemed like a good idea to a female colleague and me. No one on our all-Balkan seven person reporting team had ever been to a night bar. Yet, we were collaborating on a two-week investigation that included the sex trafficking business in northeastern BiH.

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