I got to know Tanya Domi during the DADT debate. She has been a very strong LGBT activist and advocate for decades who got arrested in front of the White House for protesting DADT back in 1993. She writes regularly at The New Civil Rights Movement and has posted at Pam's House Blend. Last week, I found something else about Tanya. She played a key role in breaking the news about human sex trafficking in Bosnia, which had been discovered by Kathryn Bolkovac. That story about is now being told in a just-released movie titled, Whistleblower.
Tanya's post on "Whistleblower" is at the New Civil Rights Movement. Definitely worth a read:
Ten years ago, I broke the story of my life from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the riveting and courageous actions of American Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN human rights investigator who uncovered an extensive presence of human sex trafficking in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The trafficking was aided and abetted by UN police monitors, Bosnian police and government officials, high-level UN and State Department officials, including now retired U.S. Ambassador Jacques Paul Klein, who at the time was the highest ranking UN official in Bosnia and had the responsibility for overseeing the UN’s International Police Task Force.Tanya first got the story out there back in 2001. It's still a story most Americans don't know, but should:
My story was first published in Oslobodenje (“Liberation”), the oldest daily newspaper in the country, in June, 2001 and with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in July, 2001 — the first time human trafficking and prostitution graced the content of its important web pages.
This drama, inspired by events put in motion by Bolkovac’s penetrating investigations, will perhaps, once and for all, educate the U.S. public not only about the scourge of human trafficking, but an even more important message, according to Bolkovac, which she refers to as a “web of deceit” that was woven by a consortium of governments.
The UN, private companies and international actors that actively conspired and collaborated, as in the Bolkovac case, thwarting any effort to bring international contractors to justice for their criminal participation in trafficking the bodies of women and children for money and power.
Most of the men involved in these crimes, many of them Americans, if caught, were sent home, absent consequences and were not prosecuted for any crimes, despite the egregiously serious nature of the crimes, like enslavement, or selling women into illegal prostitution, which is a crime in Bosnia. That did not matter. What mattered was getting Bolkovac to shut-down her investigations, which UN officials conspired to create a ruse, declaring Bolkovac to be “stressed-out and needing a break” and accused her of submitting falsified times sheets (later disproved by a London labor tribunal which unanimously upheld Bolkovac’s complaint that she was wrongly terminated), as the reason to send her packing when she abruptly left the country in April 2001, fearing for her life and future career as a police officer.
