FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Eva Ndoja shone in the metropolis of Zurich in Switzerland, but her performance ended in scandal. The 36-year-old Albanian singer sang for only a few minutes in April 2024, when police raided the nightclub and arrested her.
Ndoja is a singer who has been viewed millions of times on YouTube and is followed by over 130,000 people on social media.
The club's owners in Brüttisellen tried to capitalize on this fame. The nightclub is located in a simple industrial building near a motorway junction. They print leaflets with Ndoja's portrait and promise a glamorous evening.
Those present at the party were celebrating Eid. It was three in the morning when Eva Ndoja and a friend of hers took the microphone. After a few minutes, panic suddenly broke out in the club, and the police arrested the surprised singer.
Suspicion: Ndoja was singing without a work permit. She spends a night in detention and the prosecution issues a sentence order against her. But Eva Ndoja does not give up, she objects.
Police action
The singer's case leads to the world of Balkan clubs. There are dozens of them in central Switzerland, and they all operate according to the same concept: Balkan beats, concerts and dancers.
With well-known names, club owners try to attract as many guests as possible to their venues. Old folk singers cater to the nostalgic feelings of the diaspora, while wild rappers target the young audience.
But investigators believe that some of these clubs are much more than entertainment venues for young people from Serbia, North Macedonia, Croatia or Kosovo. According to the justice authorities, they serve as a mask for dubious businesses, which also involve organized crime. This is shown by several major investigations in recent years.
However, it is a world that investigators have difficulty penetrating. The scene is well-organized, hierarchically structured, closed and silent to outsiders. For this reason, Zurich investigators focus on precise and targeted strikes.
Actions like the one in April 2024, when Eva Ndoja was escorted by the police, are part of this strategy. Then, investigators searched a total of thirteen clubs over two weekends, including owners, employees and guests. 47 people were temporarily arrested, mainly for violating the law on foreigners.
Among them were several musicians. In Buchs in the canton of Zurich, investigators arrested several singers, a singer and a rapper, because they did not have work permits. In a bar in Schlieren, they also accompanied Serbian pop star Seka Aleksi.
In addition, during the operation, police found firearms, ammunition, a signal gun, rubber bats and a baseball bat in several locations. In the end, 70 people were charged.
The singer and her "ace" hidden up her sleeve
Dressed all in black, with her sunglasses raised high and her coat thrown over her shoulder, Eva Ndoja appears, a year and a half after the incident, in the courtroom of the Uster District Court. The singer did not accept the criminal order, which accused her of having engaged in profitable activity without a work permit in a nightclub. Instead, she hired a lawyer.
For the trial, Ndoja has traveled from Germany, where she lives, to Switzerland. She speaks to the judge calmly and decisively. She says: “I am here today to present the case properly.” And she adds: “ I demand my rights .”
Although she was singing at the moment the police entered the club, and although the organizers had distributed leaflets with her face on them to promote the evening, the singer declares: "I was not working there."
Ndoja tells a completely different story. She leaves a few days before Eid, from Kosovo. There, the singer had visited a friend of hers who was later arrested as well. The two had planned how to spend the holiday. According to her, the friend had told her: "We will go to Switzerland as guests."
As soon as they arrived in Switzerland, the acquaintance took them to a nightclub in Brüttisellen. She had no contact with anyone else, Ndoja swears: “ I didn’t know these people.” She didn’t receive any money then or later. And she only found out about the leaflet with her portrait when the police showed it to her. “Of course I was angry,” she says.
The singer emphasizes that she was at the club as a guest, not as an artist. She and her friend had only wanted to continue the party at a disco. But then, the acquaintance asked her to sing a song together.
According to Ndoja and her lawyer, she was unscrupulously used as "bait" to attract people to the event. Moreover, they add, if a Swiss musician were to sing as a guest at a party, no one would think that he was working. To prove her innocence, Eva Ndoja had a "trick up her sleeve": she presented a witness in her defense, the owner of the nightclub, in court.
More than just a club owner
The woman, a Swiss woman with Albanian roots, speaks quickly, but hardly answers any of the judge's questions. On the contrary, at one point she asks the judge herself if she can ask a question. His answer: "No. I ask the questions here."
The 43-year-old is more than just a club owner. According to well-informed sources, she has been working for years as a broker for young girls from Southeast Europe. These girls have to work in clubs, in bars, as singers or as girls who entertain customers to increase turnover.
At the club, they must dance in provocative clothing with male guests, encourage them to drink and serve them expensive drinks. The 43-year-old serves as an important link between club owners and the girls she brokers. She also maintains contact with club officials who have faced court. She herself has not been prosecuted so far.
The same pattern has been observed in several recent investigations in Zurich into Balkan clubs. It always involves young girls from Southeastern and Eastern Europe, lack of work permits, and exploitative working conditions.
The night her club was raided by the police, the owner was there. She told the judge that she had nothing to do with the management of the club. The owner of the club took on this task; she was only the owner of the company. At the party, she met Eva Ndoja for the first time. "I had never heard her hit."
And she adds: "I was happy that we had such a famous guest." The owner was happy too, which is why he had ordered the leaflets."
The owner claims that a few hours before the police check, she realized something was happening: "There were two guests who were acting strangely, I didn't know them. I told them: You are not invited."
One of them was Albanian. At first he wished her a happy birthday, then he laughed and said he was from the police. When the police searched the club, they also took the owner with them. "They accused me of working without a permit. It wasn't true."
After the judge's question, she repeats what Eva Ndoja had said: the singer did not know about the leaflet, had no prior contact and had not received any money. The club owner says of Ndoja: "She is completely innocent."
Eva Ndoja says that because of this case, she has had many problems. She has been banned from entering and was once blocked at Zurich airport. Her friend, with whom she had sung that evening, according to the singer, has accepted the criminal order. Why she did this, Ndoja says she does not know.
She says: " There are murders in our country. And I come here for such a thing in court . "
Her lawyer speaks of an unfair criminal trial: " She has lost faith in Switzerland ."
In the end, the 36-year-old triumphs. The court declares her completely innocent. The judge says that no profitable activity was observed by her, nor that she had come here intentionally for this.
He adds: “The situation seems unclear to us, but the state must prove guilt and not the citizen's innocence.” The singer receives compensation for the process and a moral reward of about 6,000 francs in total.
After the verdict is given, the singer leaves the court, never to return./ Taken from Neue zuercher zeitung
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