Bacha Bazi

I was disgusted today to read this article in the Houston Press Blog about one of the recent Wikileaks:

Another international conflict, another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police.

While the company is officially based in the DC area, most of its business is managed on a satellite campus at Alliance Airport north of Fort Worth. And if one of the diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks archive is to be believed, boy howdy, are their doings in Afghanistan shady.

The Afghanistan cable (dated June 24, 2009) discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.

The party was allegedly a Bacha Bazi.  Frontline did a story on Bacha Bazi and you can watch that documentary in its entirety here.  Basically, Bacha Bazi is a way for corrupt, powerful, wealthy, nasty, perverted old men in Afghanistan to purchase young boys for sex.  The boys are taught how to sing and dance at a young age, they are dressed up (sometimes in women’s clothing and make up) and made to perform at “parties” for adult men, where they are frequently auctioned off for sex, or just purchased outright.

 

If it’s true that DynCorp participated in that sort of activity as a recruiting method, then the responsible parties should be prosecuted criminally.  Furthermore, DynCorp should be made to repay all the taxpayer funding it’s received (plus interest and penalties) and their government contract should be immediately cancelled.

 

This is not only another waste of taxpayer dollars, but it’s not ensuring our safety in the war on terror and it’s actively funding not only human trafficking but child rape!  This is disgusting, people need to be imprisoned and my tax dollars need to stop funding it!