[PEN-L:30376] Outside the Law, Bosnia - Afghanistan

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   NYT  September 19, 2002

U.S. Company to Take Over Karzai Safety

By JAMES DAO

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 - The State Department plans to hire a private
company to help protect President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a job
currently handled by American Special Operations soldiers.

The plan has come under fire from senior lawmakers in Congress who
argued that protecting Mr. Karzai is too important to be entrusted to
a private contractor. Two members of Mr. Karzai's cabinet have been
murdered this year and the president himself was the target of an
assassination attempt earlier this month....

The State Department announced last month, before the assassination
attempt against Mr. Karzai, that its Diplomatic Security Service
would take over responsibility for protecting Mr. Karzai from the
military. At the time, administration officials argued that
diplomatic security agents were better suited than soldiers for
protecting a head of state.

But today Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said
the department needed to hire an outside firm because its security
agents do not have the proper training or weaponry to deal with the
kinds of combat conditions that exist in Afghanistan.

"Diplomatic Security Service is a civilian law enforcement and
security service," Mr. Boucher told reporters. "It operates in an
environment where the rule of law governs; that is not necessarily
the situation in Afghanistan."...

One firm the State Department is considering hiring is DynCorp of
Reston, Va. The company has numerous government contracts, including
ones for recruitment of retired police officers for United Nations
peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and pilots for American-financed
counterdrug operations in Colombia.

A former employee of a DynCorp unit sued the company last year,
asserting that she had been unfairly fired after complaining that
United Nations police officers and DynCorp employees frequented
brothels in Bosnia at a time when the United Nations was attempting
to eliminate prostitution rings. A British court ruled in her favor
last month. DynCorp has said it fired the employee for misconduct.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/international/asia/19SECU.html>   *****

*****   Outside the law

Pending lawsuits allege that U.S. military contractors on duty in
Bosnia bought and "owned" young women. But the accused men have never
been -- and will never be -- brought to justice.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Robert Capps

June 26, 2002  |  Ben Johnston recoiled in horror when he heard one
of his fellow helicopter mechanics at a U.S. Army base near Tuzla,
Bosnia, brag one day in early 2000: "My girl's not a day over 12."

The man who uttered the statement -- a man in his 60s, by Johnston's
estimate -- was not talking fondly about his granddaughter or
daughter or another relative. He was bragging about the preteen he
had purchased from a local brothel. Johnston, who'd gone to work as a
civilian contractor mechanic for DynCorp Inc. after a six-year stint
in the Army, had worked on helicopters for years, and he'd heard a
lot of hangar talk. But never anything like this.

More and more often in those months, the talk among his co-workers
had turned to boasts about owning prostitutes -- how young they were,
how good they were in bed, how much they cost. And it wasn't just
boasting: Johnston often saw co-workers out on the streets of
Dubrave, the closest town to the base, with the young female consorts
that inspired their braggadocio. They'd bring them to company
functions, and on one occasion, Johnston says, over to his house for
dinner. Occasionally he'd see the young girls riding bikes and
playing with other children, with their "owners" standing by,
watching.

But the bragging about a 12-year-old sex slave pushed Johnston over
the edge. "I had to do something," he says. "There were kids
involved."

So Johnston says he complained to managers at DynCorp, the Reston,
Va.-based company that had hired him to be a mechanic at the U.S.
Army's Camp Comanche in Bosnia, and to the Army Criminal
Investigation Command (known by the acronym CID). In the end, two
DynCorp employees would be fired for the activities Johnston
complained about -- including site supervisor John Hirtz -- but not
before Johnston himself lost his job. And nobody would face criminal
charges of any kind for their involvement with the young prostitutes.

Now Johnston is suing DynCorp in a Tarrant County, Texas, courtroom,
in a case that is set to go to trial in mid-July. He is claiming he
was fired for blowing the whistle on his co-workers' role in the sex
trade, and is seeking unspecified monetary damages. And he is not
alone. A second wrongful termination suit filed in the U.K. by a
former DynCorp employee contracted to the United Nations to be part
of the U.N.'s International Police Task Force in Bosnia charges that
she was sacked for implicating DynCorp employees who participated in
forced prostitution in the Balkans. In that case, which will likely
reach a conclusion in the next several weeks, former officer Kathryn
Bolkovac contends that other task-force officers frequented brothels
staffed by women forced into prostitution.

The scope of the problem is stunning, says Martina Vandenberg, a
women's rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, and in a 1999 tour
of Bosnia, she saw little effort to stop it. "I found that Bosnia was
absolutely littered with brothels and those brothels were full of
trafficked women," she said. "We're talking about women sold as
chattel for $600 to $700, with all the rights of ownership
attaching."...

<http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/26/bosnia/>   *****

*****   Crime without punishment

Investigators knew employees for U.S. military contractors in Bosnia
bought women as sex slaves. But because of legal loopholes and
bureaucratic confusion, no one was prosecuted.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Robert Capps

June 27, 2002  |  In early 2000, the U.S. Army received information
that private contractors working at a base near Tuzla, Bosnia, were
purchasing women from local brothels. Some of the women may have been
as young as 12, and some were being held as sex slaves, the sources
alleged.

Investigations by the Bosnian police and the U.S. Army confirmed the
gist of those reports, turning up significant evidence of wrongdoing
by at least seven men -- including at least one supervisor --
employed by Reston, Va.-based DynCorp. Despite those findings, no one
ever faced criminal charges or prosecution in either Bosnia or the
United States.

The investigation at Camp Comanche in Bosnia is at the heart of a
lawsuit filed by former DynCorp mechanic Ben Johnston, who says
DynCorp wrongfully fired him for assisting the Army Criminal
Investigation Command in its probe of the camp. The investigation and
its results, along with allegations made in a similar whistleblower
lawsuit against DynCorp in the U.K., have brought to light a critical
loophole in efforts to police the shadowy world of private military
firms, a booming industry that's now worth almost $100 billion a year.

Thanks to a combination of factors -- the jurisdictional conflicts of
American law, the immunity provided to these contractors by
international treaties, and the underdeveloped police agencies in
host countries -- many crimes committed by private military personnel
while based overseas will likely go unpunished, just as they did in
Bosnia.

"You have a situation where employees of these companies can commit
serious crimes and the only enforcement we have against them is the
law of the marketplace," says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow at the
Brookings Institution, who has studied the companies for seven years.
"That's proven to be insufficient."

These private military firms were thrust into the international
spotlight in April 2001, when Aviation Development Corp. was involved
in the accidental downing of a missionary plane in Peru. Aviation
Development, on contract with the CIA to look for drug traffickers,
may have misidentified the missionary's plane as a drug transport,
which was then shot down by the Peruvian military. According to media
reports, the United States has paid an undisclosed sum to the family
of Veronica and Charity Bowers, who were killed in the incident, and
to the Baptist missionary group they belonged to, but stopped short
of admitting culpability. Aviation Development has never publicly
accepted responsibility, and the U.S. government has never publicly
accused the company of wrongdoing.

Another incident, covered in great detail last March in the Los
Angeles Times, implicates the private military company AirScan in
planning and executing a 1998 attack by Colombian military forces
against local rebels, which may have resulted in the accidental
bombing of a small Colombian town. At the time, AirScan was under
contract to Oxy Petroleum to track rebels who might threaten Oxy's
pipeline. Eleven adults and seven children were killed when a bomb
exploded in the town of Santo Domingo, and according to the Times no
one has been held accountable for their deaths. The Colombian
military denies it bombed the town during the attack. AirScan denied
involvement, according to the Times.

Critics say those cases and others show how private companies are in
effect being used to distance the U.S. government from messy
international conflicts. Although no Americans were directly accused
of criminal wrongdoing in Peru or Colombia, the incidents underscore
the troubling lack of accountability applied to the companies, they
say.

The Peru incident helped provoke one of those critics, U.S. Rep. Jan
Schakowsky, D-Ill., to introduce a bill in April 2001 that would have
stopped government funding for private military companies in the
Andean region. But no action has been taken on the bill. Ed Soyster,
a spokesman for military contractor MPRI, says such critics are
wrong. As the U.S. military shrinks its forces, he says, private
companies will be needed to fill the gap with an array of support
services -- from providing mechanical services and building military
bases to training foreign armies. "The idea that somehow there's no
accountability because the government paid a company" to do a job,
instead of doing that job itself, doesn't hold up, Soyster says. "It
won't hold up with the media. It won't hold up with the courts."
Employees of MPRI are held accountable by the local laws of whatever
country they're in, he says. If there is a breakdown in prosecuting
criminal behavior, that breakdown is the problem of that government.
After all, Soyster says, a company doesn't have the power to arrest
people, try them or send them to jail....

<http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/27/military/>   *****
--
Yoshie

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