An employment tribunal in the United Kingdom decided yesterday that former U.N. police officer in Bosnia Kathryn Bolkovac was unfairly fired from her job after reporting fellow staff members' involvement in the Bosnian sex trade, the London Times reports.

Bolkovac told her superiors in October 2000 that U.N. peacekeepers patronized nightclubs where girls as young as 15 were forced to dance nude and have sex with customers.  Peacekeepers in some instances did nothing to intervene when pimps beat and raped girls who refused to have sex.  Bolkovac also reported that one officer charged with investigating the sex industry paid more than $1,000 to a bar owner for a girl he held captive in his apartment to work as a prostitute. 

Bolkovac's employer, DynCorp, demoted her within days of her report and fired her six months later for allegedly falsifying timesheets.  She said DynCorp fired her because her allegations threatened the company's "lucrative contract" to supply officers to the U.N. mission.

"We have considered DynCorp's explanation of why they dismissed her and find it completely unbelievable," said Charles Twiss, the chairman of the employment tribunal.  Another hearing is planned to decide the amount of compensation to be paid to Bolkovac.

"Now I hope to gain more international exposure for this problem," Bolkovac said after yesterday's decision.

The head of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Bosnia, Madeleine Rees, said she believes the illegal sex trade came to the country after the arrival of international peacekeepers.  "When the civil war ended in 1992, there were curfews, and ordinary people didn't have cars or money," she said.  "Only the international community would have been able to get to the flats and bars being made available with foreign women."

Richard Monk, a former senior British policeman who headed Bosnia's U.N. police force until 1999, admitted that some officers had done "truly dreadful things" but denied that any British police had been involved.  Bolkovac, however, says "quite a few" of the U.N. officers involved in the sex trade came from the United Kingdom, the Times reports.  "When I told the supervisors, they didn't want to know," she said  (Daniel McGrory, London Times, Aug. 7).