INTERNATIONAL: Former Lincoln Cop Discusses Movie 'Whistleblower' of Her Work with UN

Kathryn Bolkovac was looking for adventure when she left Lincoln in 1999 to join the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. The Lincoln police officer got her adventure. But not as she planned. Working as a member of the International Police Task Force, she found young women from Eastern European countries being brought to Bosnia as sex slaves to service the internationals who flooded the country after its brutal ethnic civil war. Worse yet, Bolkovac unearthed evidence that members of the IPTF, who were employees of DynCorp, the contractor that supplied the police for the peacekeeping force, and people associated with the U.N. were involved in the human trafficking. As word of her investigation and findings filtered out, Bolkovac's co-workers began hearing rumors that she would be attacked to stop her from revealing what she knew. Her life, they believed, was in danger.
"I had been threatened several times," Bolkovac said. "I was told, 'Car accidents happen every day. You need to be careful about what you're doing and what you're saying.' I came from a background where I can take care of myself. For me, it was more of a psychological intimidation, that I couldn't trust my kind." Bolkovac was first demoted, then fired by DynCorp in 2001. She fought her dismissal in an English court, using secret tape recordings she made of DynCorp officials threatening her to prove she had been dismissed for her revelations, not for falsifying time sheets, which was the corporation's reason for her firing.

Bolkovac's book, "The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors and One Woman's Fight for Justice," recounts her story, a tale of crime, corruption and courage that inspired the film "The Whistleblower," which is showing this week at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center. "The book is totally factual," Bolkovac said in a phone interview from New Mexico. "The movie is not completely factual. They're doing things around what happened. Even at the first of the movie (where she leaves Lincoln), that's not what happened in my life." In the film, Bolkovac, played by English actress Rachel Weisz, is seen with her ex-husband and his new wife, who are leaving Lincoln and taking her daughter with them. She then meets with the police chief about her decision to answer the ad from the corporation; its name has been changed in the movie. What really happened: "I had just been through a divorce," she said. "My kids were growing up, two of them were in college and the other was 15," she said. "I had started my career late. I was 28 when I started. I felt I was ready for an adventure. I wanted to build my CV, and I was interested in international policing."

The job paid $85,000 tax free, money that would cover much of her children's college expenses. She attempted to get a year's leave from the Lincoln Police Department but was turned down. She nonetheless signed on with DynCorp.
Sent to Fort Worth, Texas, for a week of "training," which amounted to little more than corporate propaganda, Bolkovac got the first inkling of what she would encounter in Bosnia. "A guy from Texas who had been to Bosnia before bounded into the pool with a beer in his hand and said he knew where to find really nice 12- to 15-year-olds," she said. "I started taking mental notes. I thought, 'This is tax dollars. I'm going to go talk to a congressman when this is over.'" Once in Bosnia, Bolkovac found it didn't matter much what she did. Many of the IPTF officers spent the day driving or sitting around doing nothing and no one seemed upset. But she wanted to do something and got herself assigned to the Human Rights Watch, "the only department that did any work," she said. After working with domestic abuse cases of women severely beaten by their husbands, a crime that had not been prosecuted in Bosnia, Bolkovac took part in a bust at a decaying nightclub called the Florida, where she found seven terrified young women huddled in a room. Lured into Bosnia with the promise of high-paying jobs in hotels, the young women were forced into prostitution and sometimes sold to internationals who took them to their homes to live as "girlfriends."

That began her investigation of trafficking and the sex trade. "It was pretty simple," she said. "It was not being hidden. It was so out in the open, you had to be blind not to see it going on. They had these brothels all over. They would call them restaurants or bars. Wherever the internationals were concentrated, these brothels would be all over the place."
In six months, Bolkovac met with 100 young women, many of them 15- to 18-year-old girls, who told her of their horrific captivity. They were repeated raped and beaten, devastated psychologically and physically before being put "out on the floor" as prostitutes with the promise of getting to go home if they earned enough money. Some of the girls identified internationals, including men connected with DynCorp and the U.N., as their captors and abusers. Bolkovac had found organized crime at its most disgusting among the peacekeepers. She continued to investigate. But she could not get superiors, who had a vested interest in protecting the U.N. and DynCorp, to act on her findings. Eventually, Bolkovac wrote an email to about 50 mission officials, both with the U.N. and DynCorp, titled "DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH OR GUILTY CONSCIENCE."
In that email, she laid out her findings, drawing a distinction between a prostitute, who willingly sells her body for sex, and the victims of trafficking, arguing that "this is serious organized crime, making huge amounts of money in this country."
"I wrote an email," she said. "I was fed up with it. It's the infamous email that was decreed as my protected declaration."
That email led first to her demotion, then to her dismissal -- along with threats against her.
In April 2001, she was accused of falsifying her time sheets and fired. She admits to missing a day of work when she and a number of other internationals, including the head of the mission, could not get back to Bosnia because of bad weather, but did not intentionally falsify any documents. She left Bosnia for the Amsterdam home of Jan G. H. Van Der Velde, a Dutch officer she met in Bosnia and to whom she is now married.

"I stayed in the mission as long as I could, got my records and got out," Bolkovac said. "When I got to Jan's house in the Netherlands, that's where it hit me. I slept for a week, cried a lot. I was pretty fragile. But I eventually decided this is my challenge, my calling." Bolkovac, who was born in Ohio, moved to Nebraska when she was in the fourth grade. She went to the University of Houston on a volleyball scholarship, then returned to Nebraska to start her family. At age 28, she saw an ad in the Journal Star looking for police officers. That experience, she said, was critical to how she dealt with events in Bosnia. "Being a Midwest girl, growing up in and around Lincoln, had a lot to do with it," she said. "I had a sense of a moral foundation and a sense of ethics that police officers are supposed to be good. My strength of character from my upbringing, from the way my parents raised me to stand up for what I believe in and speak up, carried me through Bosnia." Additionally, she said, working in Lincoln with its progressive police department is what gave her the investigative skills and understanding of proper police work that laid the groundwork for her Bosnian investigations.

After the 2002 trial, Bolkovac appeared in several documentary films and received several offers to make a feature film about her story. She turned them down until a couple of Columbia University film school graduates approached her about doing a movie. They reminded her of her children, she said, and she agreed they could do the movie, signing off on the project for $100.
The aspiring filmmakers asked why she hadn't written a book, prompting Bolkovac to write a 650-page manuscript. She gave a copy to the filmmakers, then put the book on the shelf. As it became clear that a film inspired by her story and book would be made, Bolkovac got a book deal and a co-author and trimmed the long manuscript into a 240-page book, which was released earlier this year. In 2009, Bolkovac went to Romania, where "The Whistleblower" was being shot, watched the filming and met with Weisz, a small, dark-haired woman who doesn't at all resemble the blonde former volleyball player she plays.
"'You at least could have given her a Kevlar vest to give her some bulk,'" Bolkovac told the filmmakers. "I'm a little bigger than that." That said, Bolkovac said that she talked at length with Weisz, who won an Oscar for "The Constant Gardener," about what she had gone through in Bosnia. During the filming, the actress would ask her how she would have reacted in the situations being portrayed on camera. "She really wanted to get the heart and soul and passion," Bolkovac said. "It's really difficult. I think I'm a difficult person to portray. My kids would certainly say I am." Bolkovac first saw "The Whistleblower" when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last year and has watched it a handful of times since. She will see the movie again Thursday at Ross.
By chance, Bolkovac, who now lives in the south of the Netherlands, was to be in Kansas City this weekend for a family wedding. She arranged her schedule to come to Lincoln for the screening, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session and, if books arrive in time, a book signing.

"I'd been praying it would come to Lincoln," she said. "It played Omaha quite some time ago. I'd been asking them to try to get it to Lincoln. Two days before I left, I found out it was going to be playing at the Ross. I'm happy it's showing there, where I'm from." That said, Bolkovac usually tries to forget about the film. "I try not to think about it day to day," she said. "It's like being a cop. It brings back the time, the reality of it. You try to remove yourself from it. It's been a really tough 12 years." Those 12 years included the court case, which had to be brought in England, where DynCorp registered its rent-a-cop division, avoiding U.S. law and lawsuits. She received 110,000 English pounds from the lawsuit, about $175,000 at the time. One-third of that went to her attorney, and one-third to cover credit card bills run up during the trial. But she was without a job and had few prospects. She couldn't return to police work in the U.S. without re-entering a police academy and starting again as a street officer -- something didn't want to do in her 40s. Her efforts to get an international policing position were stonewalled, for reasons she believes are obvious. "I think I'm pretty qualified," she said. She tried nursing and spent three years in school before deciding it wasn't for her. She now works for the European office of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, an international auction house that specializes in sales of heavy equipment and trucks, which has an office in Lincoln. Bolkovac said she'll likely stay in the Netherlands until she retires. Then she hopes to return to Lincoln, where her children live, or to New Mexico, where her parents retired and she has some property.
No matter where she is, she said, she will continue to fight for accountability for international contractors and their employees. She's urging people to marshal support for a bill in Congress -- the Civilian Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- that would bring international State Department contractors and their employees under U.S. law."I'm dedicated to it," Bolkovac said. "I feel like it's my social responsibility. I'm always going to be a cop at heart. I'm never going to make any money off of it. It's a labor of love and, to be honest, revenge. I'm a thorn in the side of DynCorp. I'm not going away."