Tag Archives: Afghanistan

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In New Book, Whistle-Blower Alleges U.S., UN Involvement in Bosnian Sex Trafficking

By Daisy Sindelar


In 1998, divorced and with her three children grown, Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer in the western U.S. state of Nebraska, was looking for a change. So she applied to join the UN’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The IPTF, created in the wake of the 1995 Dayton peace accords, was tasked with monitoring and training local law enforcement bodies during the uneasy years that followed the Bosnian war.

Shortly after her arrival in Bosnia, Bolkovac was deployed to the city of Zenica, where she was put in charge of a project aimed at fighting violence against women. Soon after, she encountered a battered young woman who was not from the Balkans but from Moldova. The woman, Viktoria, spoke neither English nor Bosnian, and could not explain what had happened to her. But she was able to point Bolkovac in the direction of a local nightclub, called the Florida. Bolkovac, joined by a translator and a member of the local police, headed to the club.

“We started looking around. The place was open. And I found behind the bar an actual metal box which had passports and U.S. dollars in it,” Bolkovac says. “And the passports were of numerous East European girls. And so at that point in time was when I started getting quite suspicious that obviously this girl as well as others had been held captive there.

“And we then looked around and walked the perimeter of the place and found an exterior staircase to a locked door on the second floor, and upon forcing that door open discovered seven more girls were being held captive there. And it was quite distressing. They were obviously being held against their will, locked in, no passports of their own. And that’s kind of where it all started.”

‘Progressively Worse’
What Bolkovac had stumbled upon, she quickly realized, was a sex-trafficking ring, operated by the Serbian mafia and trading in girls from Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, some as young as 12 years old. And the U.S. dollars in the metal box in the Florida added another sinister link—the possibility that the clientele for the trafficked girls were Americans working in Bosnia, potentially even Bolkovac’s own fellow police officers.

Her suspicions soon proved true. As more and more people heard of Bolkovac’s work, trafficking victims and Bosnian investigators began to step forward to share what they knew. Again and again, the evidence suggested that American and other international contractors were having sex with underage trafficking victims or even buying them outright. In some cases, she said, the men were not even bothering to hide it.

“The cases got progressively worse, involving all internationals—military, IPTF, civilian employees—until I actually had a U.S. contractor who was an American police officer working with me actually tell me that he had purchased a woman outright from one of the bar owners right outside Sarajevo, and taken her home to keep and to marry and to take back to the States with him.” she says. “But she ran away [and stole] his mobile phone, and that really upset him. So, yeah, there were some pretty incredible incidents that occurred, which I still really can’t believe.”

Immune From Prosecution
Alarmed by what she saw, Bolkovac—who has detailed her experiences in Bosnia in a new memoir, “The Whistleblower,” soon to be released as a film—sent repeated reports up the chain of command. Some investigations reached as high as the office for the UN special representative to Bosnia, Jacques Paul Klein. But time and again, her reports were ignored or summarily dismissed as “solved,” although the details of the “solution” were never shared with her.

Slowly, Bolkovac says, she began to see the difficulties of cracking down on international contractors who were not held to any law—U.S., Bosnian, or military. She and fellow members of the international police corps were effectively immune from prosecution. In a chaotic postwar country with flourishing trafficking rings, she says, the combination of freedom and immunity made for a “precarious” situation.

Increasingly, she directed her anger at her own immediate employer, a company called DynCorp, which had won the U.S. State Department’s $15 million contract for hiring American personnel for Bosnia. According to Bolkovac, DynCorp had been far from scrupulous in screening its American applicants, sometimes allowing in personnel with little experience or questionable histories. The end result, she said, was a group where some members fell all too easily into the local criminal scene.

“Certainly, the [Balkan] mafia is very well organized and they’ve infiltrated many facets of the international community, that’s no secret. And of course they’re involved in trafficking and in making a good bang for their buck,” Bolkovac says. “But the idea that international police officers are involved in this is so disturbing to me. That’s what I think is the most disturbing. Of course, coming from a policing background, you expect corruption. And we certainly expected corruption to be in Eastern Europe and in Bosnia. But once again, I would think the vetting process for recruiting police officers, especially from the United States, would be a bit better by our State Department than what it is for these contractors.”

Demoted, Then Fired
After less than two years on the job, Bolkovac was demoted and then summarily fired for gross misconduct, a charge she says was meant to cover up her employers’ discomfort over her allegations. She finally was forced to flee the country, carrying a bag packed with her investigative reports, after it was determined there was a probable threat to her life. Bolkovac successfully sued DynCorp for wrongful termination. DynCorp went on to dismiss seven of its employees in Bosnia for “unacceptable behavior” and publicized internal efforts to reform its screening mechanisms.

But the sex-trafficking scandal has not prevented DynCorp from winning a number of lucrative State Department contracts, including similar police-training missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company has faced accusations of massive misconduct in those countries as well. In Iraq, DynCorp is believed to have squandered more than $1 billion in U.S. government funds. And a U.S. diplomatic cable published by the WikiLeaks website suggests that DynCorp workers employed to train Afghan policemen had been witnessed taking drugs and paying for young “dancing boys,” or child prostitutes.

DynCorp authorities have defended their company’s performance in both Iraq and Afghanistan and have taken steps to encourage a more transparent and disciplined corporate culture.

Looking The Other Way
Bolkovac says she believes her work has helped raise awareness of human trafficking in the Balkans. But she’s less certain it’s had any impact on the lawlessness that still exists within the international contractor system.

“I don’t believe that every person going over there who are employed by the contractors, the international community, or even the State Department are involved in this. I think it’s, at the max, 10 to 20 percent of these people who are involved in these crimes,” she says.

“But the problem is that the other 80 percent who aren’t involved aren’t doing anything to stop it. And they’re looking the other way. It’s like these people, when they go overseas, because they’re 5,000 miles away from home, think they’re not going to get caught. And many of them don’t, and many of them continue.”

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Remember the Ladies: Isabella Bird Bishop

Isabella Lucy (Bird) Bishop, 1831-1904, English traveler and writer. I have her book, A Lady’s life in the Rocky Mountains, sitting on my bookshelf. Bishop was a traveler. At 25, she made her first voyage, in 1856. Sickly, and listless, she traveled to the United States, recovered her health somewhat, and wrote about her experiences in The Englishwoman in America. For the remainder of her life, she traveled and wrote about her travels, and got famous for that. While traveling she felt strong, while at home, she felt ill. She traveled to India, Afghanistan and Persia, Canada, Japan, Korea and China. At 68 she made a 1,000 mile trip on horseback through Morocco. That’s my kind of gal!
Find more about her through Google, but here’s one site…

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Muslims Report Rising Discrimination at Work

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE


Mohammad Kaleemuddin was fired after complaining that his supervisor and several co-workers had called him “Osama” and “terrorist.”

At a time of growing tensions involving Muslims in the United States, a record number of Muslim workers are complaining of employment discrimination, from co-workers calling them “terrorist” or “Osama” to employers barring them from wearing head scarves or taking prayer breaks.

Such complaints were increasing even before frictions erupted over the planned Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, with Muslim workers filing a record 803 such claims in the year ended Sept. 30, 2009. That was up 20 percent from the previous year and up nearly 60 percent from 2005, according to federal data.

The number of complaints filed since then will not be announced until January, but Islamic groups say they have received a surge in complaints recently, suggesting that 2010’s figure will set another record. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found enough merit in some of the complaints that it has filed several prominent lawsuits on behalf of Muslim workers.


Imane Boudlal stopped working at a Disney cafe until a dispute over her head scarf is resolved. Disney says it clashes with the cafe’s early-1900s theme.

Last month, the commission sued JBS Swift, a meatpacking company, on behalf of 160 Somali immigrants, saying supervisors and workers had cursed them for being Muslim; thrown blood, meat and bones at them; and interrupted their prayer breaks. On Sept. 1, the commission filed a case against Abercrombie & Fitch, the fashionable clothing retailer, accusing it of discrimination for refusing to hire an 18-year-old Muslim because she was wearing a head scarf.

And in June, the agency sued a Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Phoenix, asserting that its management had illegally permitted a hostile work environment in which workers called an Iraqi immigrant a “camel jockey,” mocked him with Arab ululations and taunted him over news items about captured terrorists. (The hotel’s manager said many of the claims were untrue.)

“There’s a level of hatred and animosity that is shocking,” said Mary Jo O’Neill, regional attorney of the E.E.O.C.’s Phoenix office. “I’ve been doing this for 31 years, and I’ve never seen such antipathy toward Muslim workers.”

Although Muslims make up less than 2 percent of the United States population, they accounted for about one-quarter of the 3,386 religious discrimination claims filed with the E.E.O.C. last year. Complaints filed by Jews rose slightly in fiscal 2009, while complaints filed by Catholics, Protestants, Sikhs and Seventh-day Adventists declined. Claims of race, sex and age discrimination also fell. The rising number of complaints by Muslims, which exceeds even the amount filed in the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, comes as tensions rise between Muslim Americans and those of other faiths.

Polls have shown that many Americans feel a growing wariness toward Muslims after the 9/11 attacks and after years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mosques and Islamic community centers in the United States — most prominently one proposed near ground zero in Manhattan — have faced substantial opposition. And a Florida pastor received national attention this month for threatening to burn the Koran on Sept. 11.

“We can go back in history and find other times when there were hot emotional and political tensions over religion,” said Michael J. Zimmer, co-author of several books on employment discrimination and a law professor at Loyola University in Chicago. “Right now, there is a lot of heat as to the Muslims.”

Mohammad Kaleemuddin, a Pakistani immigrant who drove trucks for the American war effort in Iraq for three years, said that while he was working for a construction company in Houston, his supervisor and several co-workers called him “Osama,” “al Qaeda,” “Taliban,” and “terrorist.”

“It was very rough,” said Mr. Kaleemuddin, who was fired after protesting to management about the ethnic slurs. “It brought a bit of terror in my chest. I’d wonder, ‘Why are they doing this? I’ve always been nice to them.’ ”

After he filed a complaint, the E.E.O.C. sued the company he worked for, Pace Services. The company agreed last April to pay him $61,250 to settle the case. Experts on religion and employment discrimination say many factors are behind this surge in discrimination claims.

“In America right now, there are intense concerns about many issues — immigration, the faltering economy, the interminable wars” and the erroneous belief, held by many Americans, that the first nonwhite president is Muslim, said Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University.

“In all of these, there’s one link, Islam. Islam is the lightning rod. Whenever there is a great distrust or antipathy, it spills beyond religion into public life,” the professor said.

Professor Ahmed said that Muslims in the United States were generally reluctant to stick their necks out and complain about discrimination, partly in the belief that attitudes toward them will gradually improve. But he said that growing intolerance has prompted more Muslims to stand up for their rights and file E.E.O.C. complaints.

Workers have complained of discrimination even in regions known for their diversity. Halla Banafa filed a claim with the commission after she was turned down at age 18 for a job stocking merchandise at an Abercrombie Kids store in Milpitas, Calif., in Silicon Valley. According to the E.E.O.C., the manager made a note of “not Abercrombie look” on the interview form.

“I never imagined anyone in the Bay Area would reject me because of my head scarf,” Ms. Banafa said.

Federal law requires employers to accommodate head scarves, also called hijabs, as well as prayer breaks and other practices based on sincere religious beliefs unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the employer.

“Abercrombie just decided they’re not going to comply with the law requiring religious accommodation,” said William R. Tamayo, regional attorney of the commission’s San Francisco office. “Their intolerance is off the charts.” Last year, the commission also sued Abercrombie for refusing to hire a 17-year-old wearing a hijab at a store in Tulsa, Okla.

Ronald A. Robins Jr., Abercrombie’s general counsel, said the company disputed both claims, adding that the retailer “makes every reasonable attempt to accommodate the religious practices of associates and applicants, including, when appropriate, allowing associates to wear a hijab.” In 2004, Abercrombie agreed to pay $40 million to settle an E.E.O.C. lawsuit charging it with racial bias against Asian, black and Hispanic employees, many of whom said they had been steered to low-visibility, back-of-the-store jobs.

At Swift, the meatpacker, the charge of discrimination dates back to 2008, when Somali workers complained that the restroom had profanity-laced anti-Muslim graffiti, that their prayer breaks were often interrupted and that the company would not move their meal breaks to right after sundown during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day. After Muslim employees staged a walkout, the company fired all the protesters, the commission said.

Chandler Keys, a Swift spokesman, declined to discuss the lawsuit, but said that since 2008, the company has had no similar incidents. “We’ve worked closely and diligently with the East African community and other groups to avoid a recurrence of such problems,” he said.

Sometimes sharp disputes arise over whether employers have done enough to accommodate Muslim employees. Imane Boudlal, a 26-year-old from Casablanca, Morocco, had worked for two years as a hostess at the Storytellers Cafe at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., when she decided she would begin wearing her hijab at work during Ramadan last month. Ms. Boudlal said her supervisors told her that if she insisted on wearing the scarf, she could work either in back or at a telephone job. She refused and has not worked while the dispute continues.

Disney officials said her head scarf clashed with the restaurant’s early-1900s theme, and they proposed a period hat with some scarf that would fall over her ears. Ms. Boudlal rejected that as un-Muslim. “They wanted to hide the fact that I looked Muslim,” she said.

Michael Griffin, a Disney spokesman, said the company’s “cast members” agree to comply with its appearance guidelines. “When cast members request exceptions to our policies for religious reasons, we strive to make accommodations,” he said, adding that Disney has accommodated more than 200 such requests since 2007.

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New Poll Finds Americans Favor U.S. Isolationism, Acting Alone

Antiwar protesters mark the eighth anniversary of military action in Afghanistan at a demonstration outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles.

By Heather Maher
A new poll shows that a growing number of Americans feel that the United States should “mind its own business internationally” when it comes to foreign affairs.

The title of the Pew Research Center poll, which asked 2,000 U.S. citizens about United States’ role in the world, says it all: “Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High.”

The survey found that almost half of Americans (49 percent) think the United States should stay out of foreign affairs and let other countries get along the best they can on their own. That number is the highest in 40 years and represents an increase from 30 percent who felt that way just seven years ago. Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Center, calls it “an extraordinary spike in isolationist” sentiment and thinks he knows why. “I think part of the reason here is the American public’s focus on a bad economy, also feeling badly about the world,” Kohut says.

“There are two wars that the public thinks are not going well, terrorist concerns are even greater than they were four years ago, so the American public is not looking fondly at the rest of the world.”

Paralleling the rise in isolationist sentiment among Americans is a sharp rise in unilateralist feelings. Fully 44 percent of Americans—the highest percentage in more than 45 years—say that because the United States is “the most powerful nation in the world, we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying about whether other countries agree with us or not.”

Skepticism On Afghanistan
The survey’s results also reveal a distinct lack of public enthusiasm for President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy approach, especially toward Afghanistan. The poll, which was conducted before Obama announced that he is sending an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, found that only 32 percent of the public favored adding more U.S. soldiers to the fight. Forty percent said they would like to decrease the size of the U.S. force. There is also skepticism that the war is worth fighting. Fewer than half (46 percent) of those surveyed said they think Afghanistan will be able to stand on its own and resist the Taliban and other extremist groups once there is no longer an outside force like the United States to help them.

James Lindsay, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, which co-sponsored the poll, said those results could mean problems for Obama as he tries to make the case that the country must deepen its involvement in the Afghanistan.

“My guess is as long as the public and influential [thinkers] are persuaded that Afghanistan can’t be fixed, it’s going to be very hard to sustain strong public support for staying in Afghanistan,” Lindsay says.

The survey also found that just half of Americans (51 percent) approve of Obama’s overall job performance on foreign-policy issues. Americans also think the United States’ role in the world has diminished considerably in the last decade. Forty-one percent said the United States plays a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did in 1999—the highest number who have ever said so, according to the polling agency.

China’s Rise
By comparison, more Americans than ever now see China’s role in the world, especially economically, as having grown. Forty-four percent said China is now the world’s leading economic power, compared with 27 percent who said the United States is. In February 2008, before the global recession hit, 41 percent of Americans considered their country the world’s leading economic power. But Americans also see China’s new role as an economic powerhouse as something to fear. A majority of those surveyed (53 percent) believe China is a threat to the United States.

Kohut says Americans don’t necessarily see China negatively, but they do worry about what its rising power means for the United States.

“I think in an era where the public feels that China has surpassed the United States economically, and people are feeling very, very badly about the American economy, it’s not unreasonable that people would conclude that China represents a threat,” Kohut says.

Americans’ top three foreign fears, according to the survey, are: Islamic extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, Iran’s nuclear program, and international financial instability. Russia, on the other hand, is no longer seen as an enemy.

“Russia has obviously over the years declined as a threat in the view of the public. The public certainly doesn’t put it at the top of its list as it once did, and we only get 2 percent of the public saying, ‘Russia represents the greatest danger to the United States,’” Kohut notes.

“You get 21 percent saying Iran represents the greatest danger to the United States.”

A little more than a third of Americans are worried about the growing tensions between Russia and its neighbors, while two-thirds say North Korea’s nuclear program constitutes a major threat to the United States.

Obama’s declaration that, “under [his] administration the United States does not torture,” doesn’t seem to have changed many Americans’ minds about the necessity of using harsh interrogation techniques.

The proportion of the public that says torture is at least sometimes justified against suspected terrorists has actually increased slightly over the past year. Just over half of Americans (54 percent) say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 44 percent who said so 10 months ago.

The Pew survey was conducted between October 28 and November 8 of this year.