Free In Defence of the Terror by Sophie Wahnich Page B

‘civility’. It is seen as a perturbation of the normal, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as being subjective violence. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence. Let us take a quick look at some of the cases of this invisible violence.
    The story of Kathryn Bolkovac, 3 recently made into a film ( The Whistleblower , dir. Larysa Kondracki, 2010), cannot but terrify any honest observer. In 1998 Bolkovac, a US police officer, successfully applied for a place in the UN’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina – under the auspices of a prominent defence contractor, DynCorp – and upon arrival, was assigned to a task force that targeted violence against women. Still new to this position, Bolkovac began to follow up leads which exposed a local sex-trafficking ring, apparently run by the Serbian mafia and dealing in very young girls from former communist-bloc countries – some of these girls were no older than twelve. But another link quickly surfaced: the girls’ johns seemed to include UN contractors in Bosnia, and possibly some of Bolkovac’s colleagues. Moreover, there were strong indications that UN personnel colluded with or even helped operate sex-trafficking rings in the region, and saw a profit from it.
    Shocked by her findings, Bolkovac filed a series of reports with her superiors, but they were all either shelved or returned to her as ‘solved’. Nothing was done, and nothing changed – until Bolkovac was demoted and then sacked for ‘gross misconduct’, well before her contract was up. Finally warned that her life was in danger, she was reduced to flight and left Bosnia with her investigative files and little else.
    Bolkovac proceeded to sue DynCorp for ‘wrongful termination’, and the suit was decided in her favour. As a result, DynCorp dismissed seven of its contractors in Bosnia for ‘unacceptable behavior’ and publicized changes to its screening protocols. But this sex-trafficking scandal does not seem to have tarnished the company. DynCorp has continued to net massive State Department contracts, despite accusations of criminal misconduct in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks cites DynCorp personnel who were seen taking drugs and hiring ‘dancing boys’, a polite name for underage male prostitutes (and DynCorp is in Afghanistan, we should note, to train the new Afghan police corps).
    The New York Times reviewer granted that ‘ The Whistleblower tells a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief.’ However, in an incredible ideological tour de force , the same reviewer went on to denounce the film’s very truthfulness as the cause of its aesthetic failure: ‘ The Whistleblower ultimately fizzles by withholding any cathartic sense that justice was done, or ever will be done, once Kathryn spills the beans to the British news media.’ 4 It is true, I suppose, that in real life we are far from the ‘cathartic sense’ of films like All the President’s Men or The Pelican Brief , in which the final disclosure of political crimes brings a kind of emotional relief and satisfaction . . .
    And is not the lesson of Libya after Gaddafi’s fall a similar one? Now we have learned that Gaddafi’s secret services fully collaborated with their Western counterparts, including participating in programs of rendition. We can perhaps discern this kind of