When Kathryn Bolkovac signed up to join the United Nations' peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1999, she was a recently divorced police officer from Nebraska seeking a change of scene and a new way to earn a living. Never did she imagine then that a little more than a decade later, she would be attending a star-studded gala premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, watching her story of those Balkan years brought to life on screen, with the Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz playing herself.
But The Whistleblower means much more to Bolkovac than a brush with fame and glamour. Rather than just a story of her struggle to adapt to a new calling, it's a troubling indictment of how peacekeepers exploited and abused the people they should have been protecting, and the way these crimes were concealed from public knowledge through the collusion of the UN, Western governments and the private corporations which ran the policing operations in Bosnia.
The title speaks of Bolkovac's role in all of this: a year after she landed in Sarajevo, she was demoted and then sacked after she reported to her employers, private security firm DynCorp, her findings about fellow peacekeepers' involvement in cross-border sex trafficking in Bosnia.
'I was overwhelmed with emotion as it brought back all the adrenaline and feelings that I have really tried to bury for so many years,' she says, recalling the screening of The Whistleblower in Toronto last September. 'I had also written a book [The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors and One Woman's Fight for Justice] over the years, which acted as my therapy, but after seeing the film I knew the therapy was not over and the real fight was just beginning.'
Her fight for justice for herself ended in 2002, when she won a suit against DynCorp in the British courts for wrongful dismissal (the company claimed it dismissed Bolkovac for rigging her time-keeping records). She was vindicated when the corporation admitted during the tribunals that they had dismissed several officers for visiting prostitutes, and quite a few more were sent home because of what they did in Bosnia - horrifying, criminal transgressions which Bolkovac's report described in great detail.
'The psychological trauma, rape, sexual assault, forced imprisonment, kidnapping and murders that these girls went through are capital or felony offences,' says Bolkovac, who is of Croatian heritage and now lives in Amsterdam. 'Some colleagues and civilian employees were committing these crimes, and many were also facilitating human trafficking by visiting brothels and seemingly using these girls as what they described as 'just prostitutes'.'