Nov. 23 - Michelle Malkin calls it The U.N.'s Abu Ghraib, citing an item from Reuters: U.N.: 150 sex abuse charges in Congo peacekeeping.

The United Nations is investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. civilian staff and soldiers in the Congo, some of them recorded on videotape, a senior U.N. official said on Monday.

The accusations include pedophilia, rape and prostitution, said Jane Holl Lute, an assistant secretary-general in the peacekeeping department.

Lute, an American, said there was photographic and video evidence for some of the allegations and most of the charges came to light since the spring.

[...]

In May the United Nations reported some 30 cases of abuse among peacekeepers in the northeastern town of Bunia, where half of the more than 10,000 soldiers are stationed.

Last month, one French soldier and two Tunisian soldiers were sent home, U.N. officials said. Three U.N. civilian staff were suspended.

Needless to say Kofi Annan is shocked and outraged, but as the article notes,

The United Nations has jurisdiction over its civilian staff but troops are contributed by individual nations. Consequently, the world body has only the power to demand a specific country repatriate an accused soldier and punish him or her at home.

It will be easy to blame Kofi Annan for the growing pile of scandals that are plaguing the U.N. from Oil-to-Food, to possible attempts by IAEA head Mohammed El Baradei to influence the U.S. election, to the reports of misbehaviour at best and criminal behaviour at worst by the very troops sent to protect innocent people but which in fact victimize them. It will, in fact, be too easy to place the lion's share of blame onto one person and a few flunkies and then, feeling absolved, quickly move on.

But the problem isn't just Kofi Annan. The problem is the U.N. itself, which is composed of unelected, unscritinized, and unaccountable people. They presume to usurp moral authority from legally elected governments, pander to dictators and statists, and are as corruptible as all humans - and in that last all-important detail we find that dangerous flaw to which we are all subject (you know, the one about the inevitability of power corrupting mere mortals.)

I hope I'm not breaking any, er, blogiquette by posting a link to a May 2 Telegraph article UN threatens authors of 'racy' expose take from one of the Captain's commenters on the May post. The article says:

The United Nations has threatened to fire two officials who wrote an expose of sleaze and corruption during its peacekeeping missions of the 1990s.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, is understood to have favoured an attempt to block publication of the memoir, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, a True Story from Hell on Earth, due to be published next month.

Still reeling from the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, officials in the upper echelons of the UN are alarmed by the promised revelations of wild sex parties, petty corruption, and drug use - diversions that helped the peacekeepers to cope with alternating states of terror and boredom.

[...]

The co-authors, who met in Cambodia in 1993 and later worked in Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia and Somalia, claim that petty corruption over expense accounts and living allowances was rife.

Ms Postlewait was in her early thirties when she went on her first trip abroad for the UN, supervising elections in Cambodia. There, she soon worked out that she could save enough money from her expense account to set herself up nicely back in New York. In other frauds, UN staff were said to quote blackmarket currency exchange rates to pad out their expenses.

The authors also complain that they encountered "bureaucratic betrayal" on missions, as the UN allegedly struck cynical deals with corrupt local officials.

(Via Michelle Malkin and following the trackback to Captain's Quarters.)

14:09 From this post at Friends of Saddam's, it seems AP has picked up the story with some notable additions:

The United Nations mission in Congo has about 10,500 soldiers and police as well as 1,000 international staff from 50 countries. It began in 1999. Investigators are now checking the 15 other U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world to see how widespread the problem is, Lute said.

Allegations of sex abuse and other crimes have dogged U.N. peacekeeping missions almost since their inception in 1948. It's been difficult to clamp down because the United Nations doesn't want to offend the relatively small number of nations who provide most of its peacekeeping troops.

[...]

In recent years, the United Nations has tried to clear up sex abuse problems by putting more emphasis on training peacekeepers - known as "blue helmets" for their distinctive headgear - and re-emphasizing codes of conduct.

But Lute said those efforts have not kept pace with the massive growth in peacekeeping missions, and their complexity - where soldiers often are deployed in highly volatile, lawless areas rather than manning clearly defined truce lines.

Lute said U.N. leaders were now determined to get tougher. On Friday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "absolutely outraged" by the allegations.

So-called "personnel conduct officers" have been sent to the missions in Congo, Burundi, Ivory Coast and Haiti. (Bolding added.)

Posted by: Debbye at 12:45 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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