DynCorp, which trains Afghan police officers, was, according to an American cable, involved in the "recruitment" of Afghan boys aged eight to 15 (so-called Bacha boys) to perform a pre-Islamic traditional game (bacha bazi) that they otherwise the Taliban had forbidden it. As described by the British newspaper City States Times, during the game, the boys would put on make-up, wear women's clothes, tie bells on their feet and then sing sad vocals to whiny music and dance seductively in smoky rooms full of voluptuous older people.
After the dance, the men would auction off the boys and, it is believed, sexually exploit them. That practice is described as "a widely accepted form of male rape".
In dispatch ID 09KABUL1651 dated June 23, 2009, it is mentioned that such a case occurred on April 11 at the Regional Training Center in Kunduz. Afghan President Karzai reprimanded the interior minister for that incident and another in which members of the Blackwater agency killed several civilians and asked him: "Where is the justice?"
The Guardian, which publishes that document, writes that as part of the investigation into that incident, two policemen and nine Afghans were arrested. The Afghan Minister of Interior, Hanif Atmar, in a conversation with the assistant of the American ambassador, requested that the incident be covered up in the press to prevent the circulation of the video that testifies to it, because publishing the story about it would endanger many lives.
An American diplomat told him that it would be counterproductive to prevent the press from writing, but the cable expresses the hope that the case will not be overblown and that an investigation has been opened and disciplinary measures have been taken against the heads of Dincorp in Afghanistan, that there are proposals for new procedures and that action has been taken in consideration and stationing of military officers in training centers.
The Guardian writes that the cover-up strategy appeared to be working when a July 2009 article in the Washington Post said only that foreign DynCorp workers had hired teenagers to perform tribal dances at a farewell party.
At the beginning of the year, Karzai issued a decree in which he called for the dissolution of all private security companies by the end of this year, but even that edict, writes the Guardian, has been watered down a bit.
By the way, in an article about private armies in "Vremen", we once wrote that the case that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999, when several members of the American private military company DynCorp were accused of participating in the trade in white slaves, attracted a lot of attention. They were tried in the USA. A similar scandal happened in Sierra Leone, with the British company Sunline.
