The Natashas

8 BOSNIAN NIGHTS

IN DECEMBER 1995, in the wake of a brutal forty-two-month war against Serbian-led forces, more than 50,000 NATO peacekeepers marched into Bosnia and Herzegovina to restore law and order. A number of Serbian fighters were rounded up, charged with rape and sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. But in the peacetime that followed, thousands of women and girls—abducted from Eastern Europe and forced to work as sex slaves in the bars and brothels that dot the mountainous Bosnian countryside—became fair game for the tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers and international aid workers who poured into the region. The irony is ugly. During war, the rape of innocent women and children by soldiers is deemed a heinous war crime. During peacetime, it’s a different story.

OLENKA, A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD UKRAINIAN, sits across from me in a coffee shop chain-smoking cigarettes. She is tall and thin, her skin is pale and her dyed-blond hair cropped short. She stares nervously down at her ruby red fingernails as she recounts her six-month descent into hell as a sex slave in a bar in the northern Bosnian town of Tulza. Olenka was just seventeen at the time, but the nightmares still haunt her. She takes a long drag from a cigarette and begins her story.

“I went with between eight and fifteen men a night. I did not want to have sex with any of them. If I did not do as I was told, my owner said I would be beaten to death. This man was cruel and vicious. You did not cross him.”

In the months she was held captive, Olenka figures she was raped more than 1800 times. The men each paid the owner $50. She never saw a penny. On one particularly harrowing evening she was passed around to a dozen soldiers. The men were rambunctious, celebrating a birthday in the bar. One of their buddies had turned twenty-one. She was the birthday present… for the entire platoon. Whatever the peacekeepers wanted, she was forced to give.

“The entire time, I must smile and make them believe I am enjoying this humiliation,” Olenka said in a barely audible whisper. “These men were animals. They cared nothing that I was there as a prisoner. They simply wanted sex.”

She doesn’t know the names of any of the men who used her over that period, but she remembers the uniforms and the insignias emblazoned on their shoulders—American, Canadian, British, Russian, French. Many were soldiers. Some were police officers with the UN. Others were among the thousands of workers—with either the myriad international agencies or the UN—that flooded the region after the conflict. Many times, she would plead for help. Some of her international “patrons” had cell phones dangling from their belts. She asked them to let her make just one call.

“They all refused. All they cared about was they had bought me for the hour and I was there for their pleasure. One of them told the owner I asked to use his cell phone. For that, I was beaten and left in a cellar without food for three days.”

When Olenka was finally arrested in a raid on the bar, she recognized eight of her “clients” among the police who carried out the bust. Some were with the UN International Police Task Force (IPTF); others were with the local police. After her arrest she was interviewed by an international human rights worker. “I told her about the soldiers, the police officers and the internationals, but nothing ever came of it.”

Two weeks later Olenka was sent home—penniless, shattered and in disgrace. For the UN Mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina (UNMIBH), however, she numbers among the statistics as yet another trafficked woman “saved” by the IPTF.

PROSTITUTION IS ILLEGAL in Bosnia, but since the war it has skyrocketed. Throughout this tiny region, population 3.5 million, there are now more than 260 bars. They’re really brothels, housing up to 5000 Eastern European women who’ve become nothing more than playthings for the international soldiers and staff. Many of the very people entrusted with bringing stability to this region have resorted to what would, within their own borders, have them charged with complicity, corruption, abetting trafficking, sexual assault and rape. None of this nocturnal activity is news to the UN brass; they’ve tried desperately to keep a tight lid on it. That lid was blown off on October 9, 2000, by a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three from Nebraska.

Kathryn Bolkovac was one of 2100 police officers serving with the IPTF in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The force was created to help restore law and order after the war and train a new breed of officers to police the region. Bolkovac signed a three-year contract to work with the IPTF in 1998. For her it was the opportunity of a lifetime—a chance to travel abroad and to do something meaningful. Her placement was arranged by DynCorp Inc., which hires American police officers on behalf of the U.S. State Department to serve in UN missions around the world. DynCorp, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, was contracted to provide up to 300 IPTF officers in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Soon after she arrived in Sarajevo, Bolkovac was asked to run the IPTF’s Gender Office—a unit handling a wide variety of offenses and investigations, including sex trafficking, sexual assault and domestic abuse. In no time at all, she found herself swamped with trafficking cases. One of her jobs was to interview rescued women, and it was during these sessions that the officer began to notice an alarming trend. Time and time again the young women revealed that peacekeepers, UN workers and international police frequented the brothels where they had been forced to work. Yet, strangely enough, each time Bolkovac filed a report it disappeared, unacknowledged, into a black hole.

She decided to take matters into her own hands. On October 9, 2000, she snapped the chain of command and fired off an explosive email to more than fifty people in senior positions—including Jacques Klein, the UN secretary-general’s special representative in Bosnia. Entitled “Not to be read by those with a weak stomach or guilty feelings,” her missive charged that NATO soldiers, humanitarian workers and UN police were regular customers of bars where Eastern European women—some as young as fifteen—were being held.

Based on her interviews with more than eighty of these women, Bolkovac described the rape, torture and humiliation they endured on a daily basis. “If the women refuse to perform sex acts with the customers they are beaten and raped in the rooms by the bar owners and their associates.” She didn’t mince words. Frequenting these brothels was akin to aiding and abetting “sexual slavery,” she wrote. But that wasn’t the worst of it. IPTF officers were also facilitating trafficking, in more ways than one—forging documents for trafficked women, aiding their illegal transport into Bosnia and tipping off bar owners about impending raids. Lest her allegations be dismissed as generalization, Bolkovac offered up a few specifics. An American police officer had bought one of these women for $1000 and had kept her locked in his apartment, using her on a whim for his sexual pleasure. In another case, a NATO peace-keeper was intercepted by local police as he tried to enter the region with four Moldovan women in his car. When the women were questioned by the IPTF, they said they were “brought across the border illegally, sold and forced into prostitution.”

Within days, Bolkovac was removed from front-line policing and banished to a telex room in a Sarajevo suburb, far from trafficked women and investigative police work. Her boss, Mike Stiers, who was then deputy commissioner of the IPTF, claimed she had been reassigned for behaving unprofessionally in her quest to help trafficked women. What’s more, he noted, she had lost sight of the main priority of the IPTF—ending the ethnic violence that threatened to unravel the country’s fragile peace.

Stiers was immediately confronted by Madeleine Rees, head of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Sarajevo. Rees, a lawyer and human rights activist, maintains that what happened to Bolkovac was wrong. “He told me that ‘she’s burnt out. She’s too close to the issue. We need a more objective picture.’” Rees countered that Bolkovac was a good investigator who simply wanted to get something done. “When she tried to raise the issue with the command, she got no backing,” Rees recalled. “The attitude was, Why are you wasting so much time on these whores?”

Less than a year later, Bolkovac was fired for allegedly fabricating her timesheets. This, the police officer avows, was blatantly false; she was being punished for breaking the chain of command. “I was driven out,” Bolkovac said, “because I was outspoken on this issue.”

Upon leaving Sarajevo, she sought legal advice and filed a complaint against DynCorp before a labor tribunal in Southampton, England. The evidence at the hearing painted an ugly picture of the very people who, as she says, were sent to the region to help. Bolkovac testified that “the victims of trafficking were reporting extensive use of the brothels and other criminal acts by the international community and international police task forces.” In Bolkovac’s view, the reason behind her eventual dismissal was clear.

DynCorp held that the dismissal had nothing to do with her email. It also denied turning a blind eye to its employees’ inappropriate behavior. In fact, the company argued that it always took “swift action” whenever it learned of “moral misconduct by a U.S. police officer.” It noted that in November and December 2000, after Bolkovac’s allegations first surfaced, it had fired two officers for “participation in prostitution” and one for purchasing a trafficking victim and forcing her to live with him for six months to provide sexual services.

Perhaps the most damaging testimony before the tribunal was the description of how trafficked women are viewed in the eyes of international police. Bolkovac said that her supervisor, Mike Stiers, had flippantly dismissed trafficked women as “just prostitutes,” leading many officers in the mission to believe it was acceptable to frequent the brothels where these women were held. Her evidence was bolstered by Madeleine Rees, who described how officers working in Bosnia believed investigations into the use of prostitutes were “inhibiting their freedom.” According to Rees, “They almost always referred to the trafficked women as ‘whores seeking a free ride home’… I know of these opinions first-hand since this was also the attitude of those in very senior positions.”

Rees rocked the tribunal when she testified that a top UN official was spotted at the bar of one of the most notorious brothels in Bosnia. She said that one of the women held at the brothel had identified American Dennis Laducer, a deputy commissioner of the IPTF, as a patron. (Laducer is no longer involved with the organization; his employment records state that he should never work for the United Nations again.) Rees boldly accused the UN of failing to properly deal with officers who were sexually abusing women. Bolkovac, whom she described as having “absolute integrity,” was the only person confronting the issue. “I am in no doubt Kathy was taken out of the mission because she confronted the issue of trafficking,” she told the tribunal.

The tribunal agreed. In a searing twenty-one-page judgment, it ruled that Bolkovac had been unfairly dismissed. Tribunal chairman Charles Twiss concluded that “there is no doubt whatever that the reason for her dismissal was that she made a protected disclosure” when she sent the email.

Bolkovac wasn’t the only one to run into the infamous “blue wall,” nor was she the only one in Bosnia to meet with resistance while investigating the behavior of the international police. David Lamb, a former police officer from Philadelphia, had also signed up with DynCorp for a three-year stint with the IPTF in Bosnia-Herzegovina. By February 2001 he was working as a human rights investigator in central Bosnia. In the course of one investigation, Lamb happened upon a group of trafficked women rescued in a raid. They described how a Romanian IPTF officer and his wife were directly involved in the recruitment and sale of women to a brothel in the Bosnian town of Zvornik. Like Bolkovac, Lamb dug deeper, and like Bolkovac, he was stunned by what he learned.

Within weeks, his investigation turned up more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation. He discovered that IPTF members were directly linked to forcing girls into prostitution. In one case, two Romanian IPTF cops were said to have recruited Romanian women. They purchased false travel documents for them, smuggled them into Bosnia and sold them to local bar owners to work as prostitutes.

The story—which started out like Bolkovac’s—seemed to be repeating itself, but this time Lamb’s team was explicitly warned not to dig too deep. At one point a senior IPTF officer ordered them to end the investigation altogether. Other times, they were pulled aside by colleagues and threatened with physical harm if they pursued the matter. Pablo Bradie, a police officer from Argentina who had been assigned to Lamb’s investigative team, described in an internal memo dated March 18, 2001, how one Romanian IPTF officer admitted to buying travel documents for two women. At the same time, the officer warned Bradie: “Stop immediately anything against the Romanians. Do not mess with me, neither with my colleague… I will not tell you more, but I think you can guess what will happen.”

Lamb refused to back down. A week and a half later he sent an email to the IPTF command, identifying five UN police officers “linked to allegations of involvement in prostitution and women trafficking.” In it, he pointed out that whenever investigations uncovered UN involvement, support from UN headquarters coincidentally dried up. But that wasn’t all. “During investigations by my office into UN personnel involvement in women trafficking, my investigators and I experienced an astonishing cover-up attempt that seemed to extend to the highest levels of the UN headquarters.”

Lamb’s tenure with the IPTF ended in April 2001. There was no attempt to extend his contract, and he was sent packing back to Philadelphia. The investigation was turned over to Rosario Ioanna, a Canadian member of the IPTF. Ioanna picked up where Lamb left off, compiling a list of about a dozen Romanian officers said to frequent brothels. But he too faced an uphill battle: according to a confidential report prepared by the investigative team for the UN Internal Affairs Section, Romanian officers tried to impede Ioanna’s investigation by attempting to remove four trafficked women from police custody and intimidating them during questioning. Like Lamb, Ioanna was learning that some of the officers were doing more than just frequenting brothels. In one instance, a Romanian police officer was given a tractor to work his family farm back home. In return, he was using inside information to tip off brothel owners about impending raids.

By this time the UN mission understood it was facing a colossal problem. In the span of eighteen months, the IPTF’s own investigators had shone a spotlight on police involvement in prostitution and trafficking. Some of the top UN brass began pushing for an independent inquiry, among them Mary Robinson, the UN’s high commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. At Robinson’s insistence, the UN Office of Internal Oversight (OIO) sent two investigators from New York to conduct a preliminary inquiry. The investigators arrived on June 26, 2001, and less than two weeks later they reported their findings. Fred Eckhard, chief spokesperson for the UN, announced, “They did not find any evidence of systematic or organized involvement in human trafficking.” Eckhard did, however, concede that the OIO crew had offered a number of recommendations on “how the UN police could strengthen their role in combating human trafficking.”

The announcement was met with astonishment by most human rights observers on the ground in Bosnia. Madeleine Rees was appalled. She wondered how the OIO investigators could have arrived at such a quick and unequivocal conclusion, considering that “they never once ventured out of the UN building in Sarajevo… They said they had complete access to the files. But there was nothing in them.” They did not contact the IPTF investigators who had voiced the concerns—such as Bolkovac and Lamb. They did not interview any of the rescued women who had made the allegations in the first place. They did not speak to any of the international police officers who had been accused of trafficking in women, and they did not even read what Rees later described as a very telling and crucial internal report that had been prepared by Internal Affairs at the UN office in Sarajevo:

So why was the UN’s own report ignored? Perhaps the answer lies in what the OIO investigators were sent to do. In the course of their investigation they had met with Rees: “They told me they were here to disprove Kathryn Bolkovac’s allegations.”

For Jacques Klein, head of the UN mission in Bosnia, the OIO’s conclusions were a clear vindication. They weren’t at all convincing, though, and the word “cover-up” began reverberating down corridors of his own mission. Klein responded by issuing a press release in which he trumpeted his success. First, he boasted of having implemented a “zero-tolerance policy toward sexual or other serious misconduct.” He went on to concede that on a number of occasions, individual officers had been sent home: “The ultimate sanction against offenders is removal from UN service and repatriation to their home countries… This has been the fate of 24 international police officers, among them eight Americans.” The admission, however, was tempered by a warm tribute to the 10,000 police officers who had served with the IPTF since 1996: “The vast majority have performed in a highly professional manner and to the great credit of their home countries and the United States.”

As to the real issue at hand, Klein was brief: “I can assure you that during my tenure there have been no cover-ups.” He stressed that the allegations against DynCorp and American IPTF officers had been investigated not only by the OIO but also by the U.S. State Department itself. “All have reached the same conclusion,” he proclaimed, “namely, that the allegations could not be substantiated.”

Then came the clincher. Klein griped that shining a negative spotlight on UN peacekeepers was interfering with the real problem at hand. “Placing undue and unfair emphasis on UN peacekeepers diverts attention away from those ultimately responsible for trafficking. The focus of our efforts should be on corrupt government officials and members of organized crime who perpetrate the trade and allow it to flourish.”

This very mindset was undoubtedly behind the spectacle that had unfolded just a year earlier, when a raid on three brothels in the town of Prijedor in northern Bosnia quickly escalated from a goodwill rescue to a public relations nightmare.

WITH THE IPTF STILL REELING over Bolkovac’s incendiary email and with its force under a black cloud of suspicion, the UN command needed to show that it was serious about trafficking. The solution: a high-profile raid. On November 13, 2000, the IPTF hit three clubs in Prijedor. The bars, known to be holding trafficked women, were called Crazy Horse 1, Crazy Horse 2 and Masquerade. Two days later the UN proclaimed its success in a press release: “This was the most significant police action taken to date by police in Bosnia and Herzegovina to address the serious problem of human trafficking and forced prostitution.” Thirty-three of the women rescued from the clubs were “victims of human trafficking for the purpose of forced prostitution.” The women were from Romania, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine. Several were believed to be as young as fourteen.

One week later, after all the congratulatory slaps on the back, the raids were about to make the news again. This time, however, the key player wasn’t the IPTF but rather the owner of the bars, Milorad Milakovic, who had been arrested during the raids and charged with inducing women into prostitution. Milakovic decided to call a press conference of his own on the outskirts of the town of Banjaluka, not far from Prijedor. Banjaluka had its own press club, but Milakovic staged his spectacle at the side of a dirt road. The reason, he explained to the gathered newshounds, was that the local police had barred him from entering the town.

The press conference itself was a curious sight. Several thuggish-looking men wearing black leather jackets milled about on the road. They carried homemade signs, giving the event the feel of a union walkout. One of the placards was directed at the international police—an unimaginative

“IPTF GO HOME.” Another singled out a particular cop: “DAVID IS NOT A PEACEKEEPER BUT A PERVERT.”

Milakovic, a former cop, stood officiously in the middle of the rabble, flanked by his wife and son, along with two “dancers” from his clubs by the names of Kristina and Lujz. With an indignant air, he launched into his spiel. First, he attacked the IPTF, claiming that six of its officers were regular patrons at his bars, and some were among the squad that had raided them the week before. But that wasn’t all. According to the businessman, the raids weren’t “rescues”; they were retribution.

Then Milakovic dropped a bomb. He had been asked, he said, to pay $10,000 in bribes to certain IPTF officers, and when he refused his bars were raided in direct retaliation. He cited one officer in particular—the “David” whose name was plastered on the placards carried around by his goons. David had demanded not only protection money in monthly installments but also free access to his female dancers for sex. Milakovic revealed that he had audiotapes and eyewitnesses to corroborate his claim.

UN officials in Sarajevo dismissed Milakovic as a lunatic hell-bent on revenge… but the allegations, damaging as they were, were never actually denied.

The following day brought more bad news when the “good news” raids hit the spotlight again. Although the original UN press release had said the raids had been carried out by local Prijedor police monitored by members of the IPTF, a high-ranking official with the Bosnian government now pointed out that they didn’t involve any local police. The implication was clear: rather than “monitoring,” the IPTF had actually staged and carried out the raid. This was in direct contravention of the IPTF’s mandate—which was to assist and supervise—and it flew in the face of the UN’s own procedures and regulations, which required that all raids be conducted by local police.

Reporters smelled a rat and went on the hunt for Alun Roberts, the official IPTF spokesman for Banjaluka. For two days Roberts was nowhere to be found. When he finally surfaced, he was peppered with questions to which his only response was a terse “No comment.” He refused to confirm or deny the existence of “David.”

It didn’t take long, however, for reporters to figure out who David was. According to UN police sources, he wasn’t a commander but a regular IPTF cop. He was of Irish descent and was either British or American. It was rumored that he loved beautiful women, booze and brawls. After the scandal broke, the elusive David disappeared from Prijedor and soon after vanished from Bosnia altogether. Several other IPTF cops involved in the raid also grabbed a cab to the airport. In late November, Roberts resurfaced and read a carefully worded statement. While he refused to name the officers, he announced that a number of them had been sent home. “The six were removed for exceeding their duties in the UN mandate and… for inappropriate behavior and violation of the UN mission code of conduct.”

Madeleine Rees had no doubt that this “inappropriate behavior” involved frequenting brothels. Rees herself had interviewed the thirty-three women who had been pulled from the clubs after the raid. The girls told her that they had “regularly” had sex with the IPTF cops.

And if the six who were sent home got off easily, Milakovic too received only a slap on the wrist. A few weeks after the raid, he was back in business.

WHILE THE UN MISSION IN SARAJEVO was desperately trying to scrub away the tarnish, yet another sex trafficking scandal was brewing in Bosnia, this time on the civilian side of the peace effort. The controversy involved American workers hired by DynCorp to repair Apache and Blackhawk helicopters at a U.S. military base near the northern town of Tuzla. It didn’t come to light until the next year, in June 2000, after DynCorp fired another one of its employees. Two months later, in Fort Worth, Texas, aircraft mechanic Benjamin Johnston sued the company.

Johnston claimed he was canned because he had blown the whistle on the raucous nocturnal activities of some of his American colleagues. According to the lawsuit, Johnston witnessed co-workers and supervisors “buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment,” some even bragging about “the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.” The main reason he had been fired, he said, was “to preserve the status quo of DynCorp in Bosnia” as well as “the sanctioned buying and selling of women, minor girls, firearms, forged passports and frequent trips to whorehouses.”

As Johnston and his legal team prepared to enter the courthouse on the first day of trial in early August 2002, DynCorp quietly settled the lawsuit.

I spoke with Johnston just before the settlement from his home in Lubbock, Texas. He was still shocked and disturbed by what he had seen in Bosnia, and openly shared his side of the story.

He had been stationed in Illisheim, Germany, with the U.S. Army when he was approached by a DynCorp recruiter. The recruiter described the company’s many career opportunities, including the chance to contribute to peacemaking missions abroad. The offer was tempting. And so in early 1999 Johnston received an honorable discharge and, on the same day, signed up to work for DynCorp in Bosnia. He was sent to Comanche Base Camp outside Tuzla, where his job involved the maintenance of military aircraft. Within months, the hulking six-foot-five Texan stumbled on a disturbing trend.

“I would see these very young girls walking around town with older guys I worked with,” Johnston recalled. “These men would have their hands all over these girls… Everybody in the hangar would say, ‘I’ve got this girl and that girl.’ At first I didn’t know these girls were being bought as slaves, but the longer I stayed, the more I learned what was really going on.” His voice breaking in anger, Johnston recounted one particularly upsetting event.

Johnston approached the men and told them what they were doing was “just plain wrong.” When they ignored him he went to his boss, DynCorp’s site manager, John Hirtz. “He told me not to worry about it. He said, ‘You can’t control what Americans do in their off time.’ He just told me to mind my own business… At the time, I didn’t realize how deep into it he was.”

With some digging, the former soldier learned that the girls were being smuggled into Bosnia from Eastern Europe by the Serbian Mafia. They were bought and sold, along with their forged passports, by some of his co-workers and supervisors for $1000 to $1500 each. The DynCorp employees kept their purchased women locked in their apartments for their sexual pleasure.

“This one guy, he was about 400 pounds, just the hugest guy you could imagine,” Johnston said. “He had this girl who was just a child, and it just breaks your heart seeing this fifteen-year-old with this man… You could see in her face—she was dying.” On one occasion, Johnston and his wife had invited a co-worker over to their home for dinner. “The man was in his sixties and he arrives with a fourteen-year-old girl. My wife was just appalled.”

Although he had been told repeatedly to butt out, Johnston voiced his concerns to management. But “all stayed the same in DynCorp’s little Bosnian Boys’ Club,” and in no time, Johnston was completely shut out. “The guys just stopped talking to me. I was ousted, shunned. I was one of the few people with an aviation mechanic’s license, highly skilled and highly trained. In the end, they had me washing aircraft because I wasn’t part of the boys’ club.”

Ashamed and frustrated that he couldn’t get DynCorp management to bring the hammer down on its wayward employees, he turned to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the U.S. Army. Johnston and his wife, Denisa, were immediately placed in protective custody for fear of retaliation by the Serbian Mafia and DynCorp employees. During the investigation Johnston worked closely with the CID, even though it put him at considerable risk. “I drove around with the CID investigators, pointing out everyone’s houses who owned women and showing them the DynCorp vans parked outside the whorehouses all night.”

In early 2000 the CID, backed by military police, raided the DynCorp hangar. The evidence seized included a pornographic video handed over to military investigators by Kevin Werner, a DynCorp employee. In a sworn statement, Werner admitted to buying a Romanian woman to “rescue” her from prostitution. He also fingered other DynCorp employees who had purchased their own women. The most damaging evidence was the videotape, which featured DynCorp site supervisor John Hirtz. The amateur home-videotape captures Hirtz gleefully having sex with two trafficked women. One of the women is clearly resisting, and he’s not taking no for an answer.

Hirtz had made the video but Werner had secretly dubbed a copy for himself as insurance. “I told him I had a copy and that all I wanted was to be treated fairly. If I was going to be fired or laid off, I wanted it to be because of my work performance and not because he wasn’t happy with me.”

CID investigators then moved in on Hirtz, the one who had first told Johnston to mind his own business. According to a transcript of the interrogation, the investigator asked Hirtz if he had sex with the second woman on the tape.

“Yes,” Hirtz replied.

“Did you have intercourse with the second woman after she said no to you?”

“I don’t recall her saying that. I don’t think it was her saying no.”

“Who do you think said no?”

“I don’t know.”

The investigator replayed the tape.

“According to what you witnessed on the videotape played for you in which you were having sexual intercourse with the second woman, did you have sexual intercourse with the second woman after she said no to you?” the investigator asked again.

“Yes,” the DynCorp manager replied.

“Did you know you were being videotaped?”

“Yes. I set it up,” Hirtz admitted.

“Did you know it is wrong to force yourself upon someone without their consent?”

“Yes,” Hirtz said.

Despite the admission and the evidence against him, no criminal action was ever taken. In fact, none of the men who were purchasing these women faced any criminal sanctions whatsoever. In late June 2002, the CID simply closed the case.

DynCorp, however, fired three of its employees—Hirtz, Werner and, incredibly, Johnston. His termination letter said he was being let go for bringing “discredit to the company and the U.S. Army.” Eight months later, in a deposition for the lawsuit, Jonathan Lyons, the DynCorp supervisor who had signed the letter, testified that Johnston had been dismissed because of unverifiable statements he had made to the CID about fellow employees.

In DynCorp’s defense, spokeswoman Charlene A. Wheeless argued that it was unfair to blacken the company’s reputation because a few employees “behaved inexcusably.” Wheeless vehemently rejected any culpability, either in relation to the activity in Bosnia or to Johnston’s alleged wrongful dismissal:

Understandably, Johnston is dismayed at how the entire episode turned out.

His voice choked with emotion, Johnston recalled what it was like when the Americans first arrived in Bosnia. “The people were so happy to see them. Then they saw how they acted and asked me, ‘Are all Americans like that? Do they like to buy girls in America?’ They couldn’t believe we didn’t have a brothel in every town. I told them it wasn’t like that. They thought I was the exception.”

ON APRIL 24, 2002, David Lamb sat before the members of the U.S. Congress House Committee on International Relations.

In a measured tone he began his testimony, recalling what he had learned as a human rights investigator in Bosnia.

“UN peacekeepers’ participation in the sex slave trade in Bosnia is a significant, widespread problem. More precisely, the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the UN peace-keeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would’ve been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia.” Lamb also pointed out that the women in the sex trade are foreigners, mostly from Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, who are brought into the region to provide services to a paying clientele, “a large component of which is foreign workers and peacekeepers.”

In Bosnia, he said, trafficking and forced prostitution isn’t separate from a “legitimate” prostitution trade; it’s all the same. As a result, “anyone who is patronizing prostitution in Bosnia is supporting the sex slave trade. This fact is not acknowledged or disregarded by many UN peacekeepers who involve themselves with prostitution in Bosnia. Others knowingly become deeply involved in the sex slave trade, in partnership with organized crime.”

Lamb informed the hushed committee chamber that organized crime warlords control the prostitution and trafficking trade in Bosnia, “most of whom came to power as aggressive and ruthless military or militia commanders during the war.” These organizations, he said, are “the dominant power in Bosnia, controlling and infiltrating the political and criminal justice systems at all levels.”

Lamb openly criticized the UN mission: “The UN peace-keeping operation has been ineffective at confronting the organized crime problem in Bosnia, and the Bosnian criminal justice system is still not functional to the level necessary to confront the problem.” The UN, he added, has been largely passive and slow to exercise its authority. “Instead, the UN tends to practice a policy of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”

He then turned to the responsibility of the individual countries providing the police officers that make up the IPTF. While member governments have no direct role in running the UN mission, they do have control over the activities of their contingents, and “for this reason, the U.S. Department of State must share responsibility for the illicit activities of U.S. personnel.” Yet the department “purposefully distances itself from U.S. IPTF members by hiring DynCorp as the middleman” and “makes no attempt to know anything about the activities of its IPTF officers who are serving as representatives and ambassadors of the United States.”

Lamb concluded that “for the UN mission there are no greater problems” than those presented by the sex trade in Bosnia, adding that the UN’s “cover-up policy” serves to “undermine all that the UN should stand for, particularly in the minds of the Bosnian people.” Lamb’s words echoed through the committee chambers, weighing heavily on the hearts of those who believe the UN makes a difference. “Illicit activities of UN personnel are no secret to the Bosnians and many of them deem the UN to be hypocritical and unworthy of governing them. These same people accept the UN presence because the alternative is worse, but nevertheless the UN has failed them.”

THE UN’S LAISSEZ-FAIRE ATTITUDE is appalling. It needs to recognize the problem and take tough, unequivocal action. These men— these “peacekeepers”—are subjecting already victimized women to further servitude and abuse. The irony doesn’t end there. The very aid workers who are mandated to provide assistance are using their paychecks to actually purchase other human beings. They buy these women for themselves and lock them up in their own apartments. The UN must recognize this for what it truly is: an abuse of authority. It must be made to stop.

“Zero tolerance” demands more than a quiet discharge or an occasional slap on the wrist. Sex with a trafficked woman who is being held as a sex slave against her will is nothing other than rape. Rape is a criminal offense. These men should be charged and prosecuted.

In January 2003, a 500-strong European Union–led police force replaced the UN’s 1800-member multinational International Police Task Force. One of its first public relations moves was to announce the establishment of a team dedicated to counter-trafficking efforts. The EU force hit the ground by carrying out a number of raids on nightclubs and brothels. Madeleine Rees described the operations as a failure. “They were mostly for show and completely amateurish.”

However, four months later, on May 8, the anti-trafficking unit scored a major PR coup when it hit a nightclub and hotel in the town of Prijedor owned by Milorad Milakovic and three associates. The EU police mission in Sarajevo proudly announced that it had smashed a major trafficking ring that may have involved up to 200 “traumatized and damaged victims.” At the Masquerade nightclub-cum-brothel, for instance, police found six girls from Romania and Moldova locked in a room with metal bars on the windows.

According to mission spokesman Jon Oscar Solnes, “Indeed, the scope of the evidence gathered strongly indicates that here we have witnessed the most decisive blow against this appalling criminal activity yet seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The operation, he went on, “may arguably turn out to be the starting point for unraveling one of the biggest human trafficking rings of Europe.”