Review The Whistleblower | poetslandscape

IMDb listing -

http://www.Imdb.Com/identify/tt0896872/

Rober Ebert?S Review -

http://www.Rogerebert.Com/apps/%.Dll/article?AID=/20110810/REVIEWS/110819995

The Whistleblower (directed and co-written through Larysa Kondracki, co-written with the aid of Eilis Kirwan) is ready the actual-story of Kathryn Bolkovac (performed thru Rachel Weisz) an American policer officer who locating herself in a personal crossroads in her life (divorce, pastime going nowhere), decided to take worthwhile procedure ($100,000/year tax unfastened) working for DynCorp, a personal navy contractor, that have been contracted via the United Nations to do peacekeeping artwork in Bosnia in the years following the genocidal conflict there.

She finds herself in a wild-west, almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere where in a testosterone driven haze crimes against women were simply not taken seriously.  Indeed, to her (and progressively to the audience’s horror) it becomes clear that many of the male peacekeepers had become both accomplices and even perpetrators in some of the worst of these crimes.

Specifically, Bolkovac discovers that a sex-trafficking network had sprung-up in Bosnia, whose primary clientele proved to be the contracted UN peacekeepers themselves.  In a particularly powerful scene operator of a Sarajevo women’s shelter tells Bolkovac of absurdity of the situation: “This is a country where half its men were killed in the war, what possible reason would there be to smuggle women into Bosnia from abroad?”  The pictures on the walls of a seedy club in the hills outside Sarajevo raided by Bolkovac and her group provide an answer – the men frequenting these clubs were almost all wearing UN t-shirts and uniforms.

The rest of the film becomes a real-life de facto thriller: With some protection from the UN equivalent of “internal affairs,” Madeleine Rees (played by Vanessa Redgrave) and Peter Ward (played by David Strathaim), Bolkovac sets out to try to shut down the trafficking ring.  But again, the clients in these places are arguably Bolkovac’s own co-workers.

This all makes for a nightmare.  However, here Bolkovac’s American “cop on the street” and British BBC  “the truth is the truth” values do come through.  Those U.N. peacekeepers all had “immunity” and could not be prosecuted for what they did while serving in Bosnia.  But at least Bolkovac could document the cases and shame everyone via the BBC (and arguably through this film ...)

The movie ends up being an indictment of the ineffectualness / impotence of the U.N.  Even more so, it's an indictment of the entire “military contractor” model for staffing “peace keeping” or other “policing” operations.  In the past, “military contractors” were called _mercenaries_, and mercenaries didn’t have a good reputation.  Why?  Because mercenaries _aren’t_ in a mission “for peace, honor, justice.”  They’re in it, bottom line,  _for the money_.

Bolkovac herself took the job of working as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia through the contractor DynCorp in good part because of the money ($100,000 tax free/year).   The U.N. _is supposed to be_ an agency of “boy scouts.”  Instead, its services were being contracted out to modern-day mercenary groups which historically have had an ethic of “the dogs of war.”  Add to that the promise of _U.N. immunity_ ... and no wonder that these “contractors” in “U.N. blues” were soon dealing with essentially the Russian mob trafficking in young women from Russia, the Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe.

This is a tough movie to watch, but with any luck it's going to assist us to apprehend the want to ensure that _everyone_ is below _some_ jurisdiction and law.

ADDENDUM -

For greater approximately this unique case and different famous whistle-blowers' testimonies made into movie strive:

BBC - Correspondent - June 14, 2002 - 'Boys will be Boys'

           Women's Hour - Aug 6, 2002 - UN Whistleblower

PRI The World - June 16, 2011 - The Whistleblower: Military contractors, human rights and sex trafficking

New York Times - July 28, 2011 - Exposing Injustices, the Real-Life Kind

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