Exposing UN Abuse: LFM Reviews The Whistleblower @ The Newport Beach Film Festival

By Patricia Ducey. If Satan were to come to Earth today, he would need a cover. I would suggest he consider that of a bureaucrat – the stony-eyed glare of the city guy who cites you for running your sprinklers half an hour early, or the DMV clerk who reduces all who cross her path to beaten dogs – those suggest a certain affinity to the Devil. But these small-timers can be fired; after all, their bosses are elected (or un-elected) by the people, and up the chain of command there remains an element of accountability. By contrast, a UN bureaucrat might be just the ticket. No accountability at all, and a steady stream of money from the gullible U.S. government and the myriad side “businesses” of its minions. Potential witnesses may fall down elevator shafts – terrible accident, that – humanitarian aid may be diverted to tyrants and their democratic enablers, but you can’t change the world overnight and think of all the good the UN does!

Larysa Kondracki’s brutal and riveting film, The Whistleblower, tells the true story of Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac, who signed on for six months as a highly paid UN peacekeeper in the 1990s and found herself in the hell on Earth that was Bosnia. Officer Bolkovac soon finds that “monitoring” human rights abuses means something less than actually “investigating” crimes or “arresting” anyone, and “peacekeeping” means mostly keeping a bribe-fed lid on the quiet barbarities that sputter-on well after the big guns stop.

After Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) wins a criminal conviction, the first of its kind there, against a Muslim husband for beating his wife nearly to death, impressed Human Rights Commission chief Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave) promotes her to head of the gender affairs office, where she encounters even more red tape and bureaucratic futility. We thus are not quite sure if Rees and her aide, Internal Affairs Officer Peter Ward (David Strathairn) are on her side or not, effectively upping the suspense of the story. Bolkovac soon realizes, though, that the criminal exploitation of women in post-war Bosnia reaches into the more sinister and organized depths of the human sexual trafficking trade.

The girls she comes across, wandering the roads in desperate hope of escape – or servicing perverted goons at a local bar – are not all mere “war whores,” as her UN head terms them, but are actual slaves, kidnapped from their homes in Eastern Europe and held as prisoner until they are no longer useful. Local police, peacekeepers, border guards, and UN diplomats all participate in the trade and the huge profits, she finds. She and a few loyal helpers endure threats, beatings and firings as they gather more damning evidence. Finally, after she sends an email blast to all UN personnel with her findings, Bolkovac wrings at least lip service from the UN and State Department against the blue helmet abusers. However, she loses her job and reputation in the process, at least until she wins her suit against her employer years later. Many of the trafficked girls, of course, meet a worse fate than that.

Like Erin Brockovich or Silkwood, the film spotlights one ordinary woman who stumbles upon a devastating scandal and finds, almost against her better judgment, that she cannot let it go. Rachel Weisz as Kathryn Bolkovac doesn’t quite master her Midwestern accent, but she delivers a fine performance as the unwitting outsider hero. The European actors all deliver finely modulated performances without any theatrics that would dull the impact of actual events – which are hellish enough. Thus The Whistleblower succeeds as a political thriller and polemic, and, disturbing as it is, deserves a slot in mainstream distribution.

Posted on May 9th, 2011 at 11:55am.