Blowing the lid on sex slavery

ALTHOUGH it might be mistaken for a glossy Hollywood thriller, The Whistleblower — which screens this Saturday as part of the Corona Cork Film Festival — tells an alarming, hard-hitting true story of brutality and institutional whitewashing in postwar Bosnia a decade ago, and under the nose of the United Nations.

In 1999, Nebraskan police officer Kathryn Bolkovac answered a recruitment advert by one of the world’s most prominent private military companies, DynCorp. The latter had been contracted to restore order in Bosnia in the wake of conflict there. Bolkovac believed DynCorp’s unit — under the auspices of the United Nations — would be a highly-trained team with a responsible policing agenda. What she encountered was the mercenary attitude of many recruits, and bureaucracy and indifference amongst the organisations stationed in Bosnia, not the least the UN.

She uncovered a sex-trafficking scandal in which young girls from around Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states were being forced into sex slavery, toiling in brothels for a clientele comprised of the international forces sent there to uphold peace and justice. Members of DynCorp’s policing unit were not simply ‘customers’ but involved in the trafficking.