But Singer points out that the laws and enforcement capabilities of the host country can sometimes be inadequate -- and that contractors have no incentive to expose their employees to prosecution.

"Typically when someone commits a crime, the legal system of a state is responsible for prosecuting that crime," Singer says. "But these companies are operating in areas where the local legal system is either unable or unwilling to hold these guys accountable. So, what you have happening is that these guys are American, but they're not being held under American law because they're inside Bosnia or Kosovo or wherever. And then there's no capacity to carry out enforcement by the locals. And if the locals do attempt to do something, the company pulls them out [of the country] because they'd rather not see their own employees get prosecuted. "It's bad for business."

The scenario Singer describes is almost exactly what happened when Bosnians and Americans began to complain that DynCorp employees were involved in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia.

In the U.K. suit, former DynCorp employee Kathryn Bolkovac contends that she was laid off after reporting that her co-workers were complicit in the rampant forced-prostitution industry in the Balkans. Bolkovac was part of the American contingent of the U.N.'s International Police Task Force, which is contracted to the U.N. from DynCorp, and she claims other members of the task force were patronizing brothels where women were forced to work as prostitutes. Like the men accused of wrongdoing in Johnston's case, none of the accused police officers has faced prosecution.

"[IPTF] officers and ... [overseas] contractors share one major characteristic: impunity," Martina Vandenberg, a women's rights researcher for Human Rights Watch told a House International Relations Subcommittee in April.

One problem, as laid out by Singer, and reiterated by Vandenberg in a recent telephone interview, is that for various reasons the host country -- in this case Bosnia-Hercegovina -- can't or won't prosecute U.S. contractors.

Often, according to Singer, the local police forces don't have the resources to prosecute such crimes, or they're corrupt, or they're just not interested in pursuing crimes committed by U.S. contractors. But at Camp Comanche in Bosnia, two DynCorp employees escaped prosecution through a loophole created by a combination of bureaucratic confusion and corporate attempts to resolve the situation by immediately pulling accused workers out of Bosnia.

The investigation was opened when the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (known as CID) received allegations that DynCorp employees were buying women to use as sex slaves. When CID started the investigation, the Army's Office of the Staff Judge Advocate for Bosnia-Hercegovina said that the office did not have jurisdiction to prosecute civilian contractors. So the CID conducted its investigation and turned it over to the Zivinice, Bosnia, police.

But it wasn't clear whether the Bosnian police had jurisdiction, either. When the investigation began, according to CID's report, the judge advocate's office was under the impression that contractors were protected from Bosnian prosecution by the Dayton Peace Accords, which govern the relationship between Bosnia-Hercegovina and the international stabilization forces in the region. The issue was clarified somewhat when the Army CID found an "Interpretation of the Agreement Between NATO and the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina," which allowed for Bosnian prosecution of contractors. CID agents then handed the case over to the Bosnian police. But according to Vandenberg, who interviewed Zivinice's police chief during a Human Rights Watch investigation in March 2001 -- more than a year after the incident -- the Bosnian police never developed such a nuanced understanding of the Bosnian agreement with NATO. When she interviewed the chief, she says, he still believed that he did not have the ability to arrest DynCorp employees.

The police chief told her, "'We would have wanted to prosecute -- but we couldn't prosecute because we can't arrest them,'" she recalls. "As far as they're concerned, these are members of the international community with immunity."

The issue became moot, however, when the Army and DynCorp pulled the accused men out of the country. The act effectively ended all investigations and ensured that the men would never face criminal charges unless they returned to Bosnia-Hercegovina, and perhaps not even then.

When it comes to the DynCorp employees provided to the U.N., however -- subjects of the allegations raised in the Bolkovac case -- the issue of immunity is far less gray. Stefo Lehmann, the U.N. spokesman for Bosnia-Hercegovina, says officers of the U.N.-supplied International Police Task Force are not subject to Bosnian law, as part of the agreement between the U.N. and Bosnia-Hercegovina. If IPTF members are accused of a crime, Lehmann says, they are investigated by a U.N. internal investigations unit, and if evidence is found, those persons are repatriated to their home countries for punishment.

Lehmann confirmed that out of about 10,000 police officers who have served in the police force at one point or another, roughly 15 have been sent home for wrongdoing. The majority of them -- nine, according to Lehmann -- have been from the American contingent. Six of these, he confirmed, were sent home for problems related to the solicitation and prostitution, although none, he stresses, was charged with trafficking women. And Lehmann says he knows of none who have been charged with a crime upon returning to the United States.

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