Whistleblower #2: Kathryn Bolkovac
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A DAMNING dossier sent by Kathryn Bolkovac to her employers, detailing UN workers’ involvement in the sex trade in Bosnia, cost the American her job with the international police force. She was fired after disclosing that UN peacekeepers went to nightclubs where girls as young as 15 were forced to dance naked and have sex with customers, and that UN personnel and international aid workers were linked to prostitution rings in the Balkans.
After a two-year battle, an employment tribunal ruled that Ms Bolkovac was unfairly dismissed by DynCorp, an American company whose branch in Salisbury, Wiltshire, dealt with the contracts of the American officers working for the international police force in Bosnia. One thing that Bolkavac points out during the trial is how deep the tentacles of the cover up went into the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the UN. In April 2003, Dyncorp dropped its appeal against the verdict, and three days later announced an award by the US state department for a contract to police Iraq.
During her time in Bosnia as an investigator, Ms Bolkovac uncovered evidence of girls who refused to have sex being beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid $700 to a bar owner for an underage girl who he kept captive in his apartment to use in his own prostitution racket.
She detailed her findings in a series of explicit e-mails to DynCorp, but after first being demoted and transferred from the investigation she was sacked for allegedly falsifying her timekeeping records.
Charles Twiss, the tribunal chairman, said: “We have considered DynCorp’s explanation of why they dismissed her and find it completely unbelievable. There is no doubt whatever that the reason for her dismissal was that she made a protected disclosure and was unfairly dismissed.”
There are powerful voices in support of her claims, including that of Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, who is in no doubt that trafficking in women started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.
As well as 21,000 Nato peacekeepers and aid workers, there were police from 40 countries trying to keep Bosnia’s warring factions apart.
“When the civil war ended in 1992 there were curfews and ordinary people didn’t have cars or money,” Ms Rees said. “Only the international community would have been able to get to the flats and bars being made available with foreign women.” She estimates that there are more than 900 premises in Bosnia where sex can be bought.
Richard Monk, a former senior British policeman who ran the UN police operation in Bosnia until 1999, said:
“There were truly dreadful things going on by UN police officers from a number of countries. I found it incredible that I had to set up an internal affairs department to investigate complaints that officers were having sex with minors and prostitutes.
The British officers were on the whole extremely good and very professional, setting a great example. But there were policemen from other countries who should not have been in uniform.”
The tribunal was told that a senior UN official, Dennis Laducer, was caught in one of the most notorious brothels. Mr Laducer, Deputy Commissioner of the International Police Task Force, was investigated by UN human rights officers and is no longer with the mission.
In March investigators disclosed that British aid workers and the UN contingent in Sierra Leone were demanding sex from teenage refugees in exchange for food and money. The UN’s refugee agency, which carried out the inquiry, told of “a shameful catalogue of sexual abuse”.
Ms Bolkovac, a mother of three who now lives in The Netherlands, said that she was elated by the tribunal’s ruling. “Now I hope to gain more international exposure for this problem,” she said.
She was posted to Sarajevo in 1999 to investigate the traffic in young women from Eastern Europe. “When I started collecting evidence from the victims of sex-trafficking, it was clear that a number of UN officers were involved from several countries, including quite a few from Britain,” she said. “I was shocked, appalled and disgusted. They were supposed to be over there to help, but they were committing crimes themselves. But when I told the supervisors they didn’t want to know”.
Ms Bolkovac said that she witnessed frightened young women given exotic dance costumes by club owners, who told them they had to perform sex acts on customers, including UN personnel, to pay for the outfits.
“The women who refused were locked in rooms and food and outside contact was withheld for days or weeks. After this time they were told to dance naked on table tops and sit with clients, recommending the person buy a bottle of champagne for DM200, which includes a room and escort”.
“If the women still refuse to perform sex acts with the customers, they are beaten and raped in the rooms by the bar owners and their associates. They are told if they go to the police they will be arrested for prostitution and being an illegal immigrant.”
Within days of reporting her findings in October 2000 she was demoted and six months later was fired. She claimed that DynCorp wanted her removed because her work was threatening its “lucrative contract” to supply officers to the UN mission. DynCorp said that she was dismissed for gross misconduct. During the hearing DynCorp admitted that it had dismissed three officers for using prostitutes. Since 1998, eight DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia; none has been prosecuted.
Bolkovac was due to testify at the tribunal of Dyncorp whistleblower #1, Ben Johnston, who had claimed DunCorp workers at the airbase in Bosnia where he worked were regularly having sex with twelve to fifteen year old children whom they sold on to each other as slaves, noting each victim’s particular abilities.
However, when her trial ended and she called Johnston’s attorneys she discovered that he had agreed to accept an undisclosed amount to drop the case and had also signed a gagging order, something that Bolkovac refused to do when offered a settlement.
She said: “I really wanted this to be publicized in a way that it would stop and for me the money was not important, of course at the time I didn’t realize how much this was going to ruin my life and my career but I’m that hard headed that I wouldn’t have done it (even if I had known).”
Bolkovac found herself unemployed and, as far as international police work with the UN went, unemployable.
“I had to use my retirement from the (Nebraska) police dept to live on, I worked part time in entry level positions and I’m still trying to recover financially from (what happened to me) so that I can retire someday.”
In the twelve years since she left Bosnia she still hasn’t regained the same level professionally that she had when she answered the job advert in Lincoln Nebraska.
Dyncorp, on the other hand, has gone on to be named as one of the 50 fastest growing companies in Washington.
Watch FULL Discussion HERE (01:47:00)
On March 11th 2005, McKinney grilled Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers on the Dyncorp scandal.
“Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?”
The response and McKinney’s comeback was as follows.
Rumsfeld: “Thank you, Representative. First, the answer to your first question is, is, no, absolutely not, the policy of the United States Government is clear, unambiguous, and opposed to the activities that you described. The second question.”
On March 11th 2005, McKinney grilled Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers on the Dyncorp scandal.
McKinney: “Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls?”
The response and McKinney’s comeback was as follows.
Rumsfeld: “Thank you, Representative. First, the answer to your first question is, is, no, absolutely not, the policy of the United States Government is clear, unambiguous, and opposed to the activities that you described. The second question.”
McKinney: “Well how do you explain the fact that DynCorp and its successor companies have received and continue to receive government contracts?”
Rumsfeld: “I would have to go and find the facts, but there are laws and rules and regulations with respect to government contracts, and there are times that corporations do things they should not do, in which case they tend to be suspended for some period; there are times then that the – under the laws and the rules and regulations for the – passed by the Congress and implemented by the Executive branch – that corporations can get off of – out of the penalty box if you will, and be permitted to engage in contracts with the government. They’re generally not barred in perpetuity.”
McKinney: “This contract – this company – was never in the penalty box.”
Rumsfeld: “I’m advised by DR. Chu that it was not the corporation that was engaged in the activities you characterized but I’m told it was an employee of the corporation, and it was some years ago in the Balkans that that took place.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebBHRnx5bFE
Rumsfeld’s effort to shift the blame away from the hierarchy at Dyncorp and onto the Dyncorp employees was a blatant attempt to hide the fact that human trafficking and sex slavery is a practice condoned by companies like Dyncorp and Halliburton subsidiaries like KBR. Revelations cited in the Chicago Tribune may indicate that Halliburton subsidiary KBR and Dyncorp lobbyists are working in tandem with the Pentagon to stall legislation that would specifically ban trafficking in humans for forced labor and prostitution by U.S. contractors.
Recommended Books:
When Nebraska police officer and divorced mother of three Kathryn Bolkovac saw a recruiting announcement for private military contractor DynCorp International, she applied and was hired. Good money, world travel, and the chance to help rebuild a war-torn country sounded like the perfect job. Bolkovac was shipped out to Bosnia, where DynCorp had been contracted to support the UN peacekeeping mission. She was assigned as a human rights investigator, heading the gender affairs unit. The lack of proper training provided sounded the first alarm bell, but once she arrived in Sarajevo, she found out that things were a lot worse. At great risk to her personal safety, she began to unravel the ugly truth about officers involved in human trafficking and forced prostitution and their connections to private mercenary contractors, the UN, and the U.S. State Department. After bringing this evidence to light, Bolkovac was demoted, felt threatened with bodily harm, was fired, and ultimately forced to flee the country under cover of darkness―bringing the incriminating documents with her. Thanks to the evidence she collected, she won a lawsuit against DynCorp, finally exposing them for what they had done. This is her story and the story of the women she helped achieve justice for.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world’s most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such “processing,” and can be repeatedly “consumed.”
Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, in the first journey of its kind, he traveled across four continents to investigate these crimes and take stock of their devastating human toll. Kara made several trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them.
In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all.
The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves.
