Crime without punishment

Investigators knew employees for U.S. military contractors in Bosnia bought women as sex slaves. But because of legal loopholes and bureaucratic confusion, no one was prosecuted.

Editor's note: Second of two parts. Read Part 1.

By Robert Capps

June 27, 2002 | In early 2000, the U.S. Army received information that private contractors working at a base near Tuzla, Bosnia, were purchasing women from local brothels. Some of the women may have been as young as 12, and some were being held as sex slaves, the sources alleged.

Investigations by the Bosnian police and the U.S. Army confirmed the gist of those reports, turning up significant evidence of wrongdoing by at least seven men -- including at least one supervisor -- employed by Reston, Va.-based DynCorp. Despite those findings, no one ever faced criminal charges or prosecution in either Bosnia or the United States.

The investigation at Camp Comanche in Bosnia is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by former DynCorp mechanic Ben Johnston, who says DynCorp wrongfully fired him for assisting the Army Criminal Investigation Command in its probe of the camp. The investigation and its results, along with allegations made in a similar whistleblower lawsuit against DynCorp in the U.K., have brought to light a critical loophole in efforts to police the shadowy world of private military firms, a booming industry that's now worth almost $100 billion a year.

Thanks to a combination of factors -- the jurisdictional conflicts of American law, the immunity provided to these contractors by international treaties, and the underdeveloped police agencies in host countries -- many crimes committed by private military personnel while based overseas will likely go unpunished, just as they did in Bosnia.

"You have a situation where employees of these companies can commit serious crimes and the only enforcement we have against them is the law of the marketplace," says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has studied the companies for seven years. "That's proven to be insufficient."

These private military firms were thrust into the international spotlight in April 2001, when Aviation Development Corp. was involved in the accidental downing of a missionary plane in Peru. Aviation Development, on contract with the CIA to look for drug traffickers, may have misidentified the missionary's plane as a drug transport, which was then shot down by the Peruvian military. According to media reports, the United States has paid an undisclosed sum to the family of Veronica and Charity Bowers, who were killed in the incident, and to the Baptist missionary group they belonged to, but stopped short of admitting culpability. Aviation Development has never publicly accepted responsibility, and the U.S. government has never publicly accused the company of wrongdoing.

Another incident, covered in great detail last March in the Los Angeles Times, implicates the private military company AirScan in planning and executing a 1998 attack by Colombian military forces against local rebels, which may have resulted in the accidental bombing of a small Colombian town. At the time, AirScan was under contract to Oxy Petroleum to track rebels who might threaten Oxy's pipeline. Eleven adults and seven children were killed when a bomb exploded in the town of Santo Domingo, and according to the Times no one has been held accountable for their deaths. The Colombian military denies it bombed the town during the attack. AirScan denied involvement, according to the Times.

Critics say those cases and others show how private companies are in effect being used to distance the U.S. government from messy international conflicts. Although no Americans were directly accused of criminal wrongdoing in Peru or Colombia, the incidents underscore the troubling lack of accountability applied to the companies, they say.

The Peru incident helped provoke one of those critics, U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to introduce a bill in April 2001 that would have stopped government funding for private military companies in the Andean region. But no action has been taken on the bill. Ed Soyster, a spokesman for military contractor MPRI, says such critics are wrong. As the U.S. military shrinks its forces, he says, private companies will be needed to fill the gap with an array of support services -- from providing mechanical services and building military bases to training foreign armies. "The idea that somehow there's no accountability because the government paid a company" to do a job, instead of doing that job itself, doesn't hold up, Soyster says. "It won't hold up with the media. It won't hold up with the courts." Employees of MPRI are held accountable by the local laws of whatever country they're in, he says. If there is a breakdown in prosecuting criminal behavior, that breakdown is the problem of that government. After all, Soyster says, a company doesn't have the power to arrest people, try them or send them to jail.

Next page: "It's bad for business"