This is a bad way to begin any writing project. From a place of anger, deep hurt, and a sense of helplessness.
I have been intending for months to write a blog about films, something of a passion of mine, and have been storing up several quickly dashed off essays on my favorite films, even though many are largely forgotten now, their moment having passed.
But I hadn’t started any of it yet, because I was just too busy.
I wonder if that’s the excuse that U.S. State Department and other high-level international agencies use when they choose to do nothing about the types of atrocities depicted in this film.
Today, in an upper west side indie movie theater, I sat down to enjoy a movie that I understood to be a political conspiracy thriller starring such powerhouse stars as Monica Bellucci, and Oscar winners Rachel Weisz and the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave. We’d all lunched at nearby oh-so-Manhattan eateries or were planning our dinner for afterwards and, in our typical New York intellectual fashion, were looking forward to our moral indignation at some political scandal about which we were to learn.
That was not remotely what happened.
The Whistleblower describes the story of real life Nebraska police officer, Kathryn Bolkovac, who finds herself, as much to her own surprise as anyone else’s, working as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia. Though Bolkovac may not have expected it, the audience, I think, remains unsurprised if un-amused by the stereotypical infighting between the officers of a variety of nationalities, the condescension to the new American girl on the scene by those who have been there longer, and the irritating though seemingly harmless chauvinism that Bolkovac receives from her co-workers.
Then the extent of human indecency is revealed layer by layer, like pulling up endless sections of rotted sub-flooring, as Bolkovac becomes aware of the plight of a 15-year-old Ukrainian girl called Raya. Raya begins the film as a slightly rebellious know-it-all teen desperate, like most teenagers, to divorce herself from the boringness and seeming inertia of the safety her parents have provided her. Egged on by a less than intelligent friend, she runs away. It was not long before Raya and her friend find themselves as victims of human sex trafficking.
Raya and an endless stream of similar girls wind up taken like hostages over the border into Bosnia, where they are sold like cattle to men who run their trade under the guise of respectable if shabby bars. The girls are then brought out to be the sexual playthings of the clientele, suffering public humiliation, rape, and other unspeakable violence.
The girls stay in the filthy cages of rooms squirreled away in the back of the bars, living little better than Buffalo Bill’s victims in Silence of the Lambs, for one of two reasons. Some stay laboring under the lies told by their captors, believe that once they have paid off their debt, they will be freed and aided in their transition into their new country. Those who have been around longer and know better stay because they are terrified of what will happen if they run or attempt to seek help.
Raya, sensing this, resisted Bolkovac’s help but ultimately and rightly came to trust the American police officer. Bolkovac made her promise to keep Raya safe in good faith, not really knowing at the time the extent of what she would face to do so. To attempt to describe what Raya suffers once back in the hands of traffickers violates the bound of decency and would be too sickening a picture to paint. Suffice it to say, she learns the value of silence.
Here, it behooves me to note that this film is based on and remains in very large part faithful to actual events that took place in Bosnia in 1999. I tell you that now because what the audience learns next is rather difficult to believe.
The primary clientele of these “bars” are the local, national, and UN law enforcement officials and diplomats sworn and paid to protect the very people they are hurting. Many of them are directly involved in the trade at all levels, from driving vans full of frightened girls across the border into Bosnia to overseeing the cover-up.
International law enforcement is protected from prosecution for such crimes, having been granted complete and total immunity in the course of their tenure as peacekeepers. That is how most got away with it. But the corruption goes much further.
After cracking the case and the extensive violations of every legal and ethical code known to man committed by many of her co-workers, Bolkovac is fired from her post.
How is that possible?
The company who contracts the peacekeepers, called DynCorp, is a private sector corporation that sees profits in the hundreds of millions on these contracts. They refuse to see a loss in these extensive profits.
Lacking any other way to fight these injustices, Bolkovac takes the story public to the BBC where these events received attention on a world stage.
Twelve years after the events of this film transpired, Bolkovac remains unable to get work in the international law enforcement community, the U.S. and other nations still contract with DynCorp, and none of the officials and officers who were party to and involved in these crimes have been tried.
Now, I could talk to you about how the performances were, whether the film was good or bad, the importance of art in keeping is responsibility to create awareness. Frankly, that is all completely beside the point.
I publically sobbed watching these events on the screen. And it’s criminal that that is all I had the power to do. Tears in such cases are utterly meaningless. Some people left satisfied in their scoff and returning to the making of dinner plans that had occupied their thoughts before the film began.
I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox and preach morals. But I’m afraid that I can’t just go to dinner either.
It doesn’t matter if the movie is good, bad, shocking, moving, or any other adjective applied too liberally to works of art. The Whistleblower is an important film, perhaps one of the most important made yet in this century.
See it. Tell everyone you know to see it. Yes, it is an extremely difficult watch (I nearly had to leave myself), but it is important that everyone who can possibly sit through it and admit to themselves what over 2.5 million people world wide have to call everyday life. I hope it makes everyone as angry and hurt as it made me, not because I want anyone to feel badly, but because only then will anything be done about it. Only when someone is this full of rage can they sit down and write or call your Senator, your State Rep., whoever you can think of to communicate this too.
I have no illusions of grandeur and don’t think that my blogosphere activism will stop human trafficking, corruption of officials, or any other atrocity that occurs in the world. But I desperately hope that we can at least force our own nation, the self-titled beacon of light in the world, to stop being party to it.
