« Symposium Question Refugee Obligations
February 24, 2005
Worse and Worse at the UN
The situation at the United Nations just goes from bad to worse. While Oil-for-Food is perhaps the best reported scandal, it is only the tip of the iceberg. There are several sex scandals that are almost unbelieveale.
On of the worst UN horror stories took place in the Congo. The allegations are that UN peacekeeping troops raped literally hundreds of women.
Steve Harrigan is currently leading a Fox News team in the Congo:
Our team here in the Congo found another group of girls who say they have been raped by U.N. peacekeepers. We've been interviewing four or five a day. It is easy to get hardened or callous after three of four days of it. The first girl, age 11, sat down and told her story. It was mesmerizing. She said she was going downn to the lake to wsh cloghes when she was taken. She sat in the chair and spoke Swahili in a soft voice. After 10 or 12 girls it was hard to take in.I'll bet. It's hard enough to read about it.
It's your tax dollars at work, too. Since 2000, the U.S. has contribued some $759 million to MUNOC (U.N. Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Michelle Malkin is all over the story. In a Feb 16 column, she tells us that
Fifty U.N. peacekeepers and U.N. civilian officers face an estimated 150 allegations of sexual exploitation and rape in the Congo alone. Last Friday, ABC's 20/20 program aired a devastating expose by investigative reporter Brian Ross highlighting some of the worst alleged crimes.
The accused include Didier Bourguet, a United Nations senior official from France charged with running an Internet pedophile ring in the Congo. According to ABC News and others, pictures taken from his personal computer contained thousands of photos of him with hundreds of girls. Police say Bourguet had turned his bedroom, plastered with mirrors and rigged with remote-control cameras, into a stealth porn studio. He was caught in a sting operation while allegedly preparing to rape a 12-year-old girl.
But UN General Secretary Kofi Annan is aggressively investigating and punishing those responsible, right? Well, not exactly.
Annan's spinners would have us believe that the problem of U.N. sex predators is confined to a tiny band of rogues and locals beyond the control of headquarters. But according to Bourguet's lawyer, there was an entire network of U.N. personnel who had sex with underage girls in Congo and the Central African Republic. Investigators are now digging into claims of U.N. infiltration by organized pedophilesStrategypage has some excellent background and a timeline of events. Check it out.
ABC News has done some great investigative journalism, and deserve much credit for their reporting.
Unfortunately, this sort of behavior from UN officials is nothing new. We had this in Bosnia too
In 2001, American whistleblower Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska policewoman who worked for U.N. security in Bosnia, uncovered scores of sex crime allegations and prostitution rings in the Balkans involving her fellow U.N. employees. Girls were forced to dance in bars for U.N. personnel and beaten or raped, Bolkovac reported. After being fired from her job for "time sheet irregularities," she told a British tribunal that Mike Stiers, the international police task force's deputy commissioner, flippantly dismissed victims of human trafficking as "just prostitutes."
Then there's U.N. refugee chief Ruud Lubbers. Earlier this week he resigned over allegations of sexual harassment of a female employee.
.
Posted by Tom at February 24, 2005 9:39 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.theredhunter.com/mt/refer.cgi/277
