un peacekeepers continue pattern of sexual abuse (UPDATED)
A year goes by and the more things stay the same, as the saying goes.
In this post from February 2005, I told you about UN peacekeepers in the Congo who were trading food to girls as young as eleven for sexual favors. Others were seen getting drunk at the local watering holes and then filling UN vehicles with prostitutes. These peacekeepers were, as the original story noted, immune from prosecution for their crimes.
It appears not much has changed:
Allegations of sexual abuse against U.N. peacekeepers remain unacceptably high and a ban on using prostitutes is meeting opposition from some troops and staff, senior U.N. officials said Thursday.
Despite the U.N.’s policy of zero tolerance for peacekeepers, much more must be done to implement a recently revised code of conduct, the officials said.
The U.N. peacekeeping department instituted the new policy last year following an investigation that found that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money. Cases of sexual abuse have also been reported in other peacekeeping missions from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor and West Africa.
Jordan’s U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein, the advisor to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on sexual abuse and exploitation, told an open meeting of the U.N. Security Council that while there has been “some measure of success” in trying to combat the problem, “allegations being lodged against U.N. peacekeeping personnel remain high and unacceptably so…”
…Last year, Guehenno said, 296 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse against U.N. peacekeeping personnel were investigated—191 against troops, 84 against civilians and 21 against international police. So far, 17 civilians, 16 police and 137 military personnel have been dismissed or repatriated including six commanders, he said.
In combatting sexual exploitation, Zeid stressed “how hard it is to change a culture of dismissiveness, long developed within ourselves, in our own countries and in the mission areas.”
Zeid and Guehenno said the United Nations is acting on many fronts—but they told reporters after the meeting it will take three or four years to change the culture and end sexual exploitation.
Ridiculous. Were I in charge of the UN, I could end this within a week by simply declaring that anyone who commits these crimes while donning the blue helmet will be turned over to legitimate local authorities where they exist, and that civil proceedings will be filed in the offender’s home country in cases where such authorities do not exist.
The Newsviner who posted this story also said that last year, Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN’s head of peacekeeping operations, said that allegations of sexual abuse by blue-helmeted troops cropped up in every single place they were deployed.
I think this highlights in microcosm what is wrong at the UN and with the culture at large: the carrying of the arbitrary notion of “tolerance” to its furthest — and most predictable — extremes. In a place where tin-pot dictators get to stand equal with free nations, one should expect no less.
UPDATE: What I said above should not be construed to preclude the offender’s home country from proactively taking action against him. Most Western countries (I say that because I’m not as familiar with common laws and customs in other places), I assume, would probably do just that.
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