The terrorist-appeasing United Nations has another scandal on its hands.
From Reuters:
The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, hit by several recent sex scandals, has said it is investigating yet another one - a suspected child-sex ring involving its peacekeepers and government soldiers.
Among the accusations being investigated is that pimps are using the presence of UN peacekeepers to lure girls to work as prostitutes in South Kivu, the mission said in a statement on Thursday.
The UN's 17,000-strong mission, known as Monuc, which is backing a string of peace deals in the vast African nation following a 1998-2003 war and helping to run elections, last year banned sex with locals.
Monuc's statement said: "Although the majority of their patrons are Congolese soldiers and civilians, some of the girls involved mentioned that elements of Monuc contingents based in the region were also among their clients.
"Monuc takes these allegations very seriously and has expressed extreme shock at the testimonies of the victims."
The UN mission said it had launched an investigation into the allegations and stressed that there would be zero tolerance of sexual abuses.
Zero tolerance?
The UN has been promising to clean up its act regarding its peacekeeper predators for well over a year.
Read just a little about the human rights abuses, the corruption, and the incompetence of the United Nations and its peacekeepers.
UN Peacekeepers Gun Down Congo Civilians
UN Sexual Predators
Oil-for-Food
Food-for-Sex
For UN officials to claim that they will not tolerate their peacekeepers' involvement in this child-sex ring is a joke.
They keep expressing outrage over the shocking behavior of their peacekeepers, yet the abuses keep piling up.
Nevertheless, Kofi Annan and UN officials are so quick to condemn the United States for its supposed torture practices.
In May of this year, a UN panel called on the U.S. to close the facility at Guantánamo Bay.
In the report release in Geneva, the panel, the Committee on Torture, said that the United States should clearly ban interrogation techniques like "water boarding," in which an inmate is held under water to create the fear of drowning; sexual humiliation, and the use of dogs to induce fear. It said that detainees had died during interrogation involving improper techniques.
The panel said it was "concerned" that prisoners were held for indefinite periods without sufficient legal safeguards in the Guantánamo Bay detention center,
The United States "should cease to detain any person at Guantánamo Bay and close this detention facility, permit access by the detainees to the judicial process or release them as soon as possible," the report said.
The hypocrisy of the UN is stunning.
They accuse the U.S. of treating prisoners, bad guys, inappropriately while their so-called peacekeepers are sexually exploiting innocent children.
The UN's exploitation of children is a practice that continues unabated, in spite of all its promises and claims of having a zero tolerance policy for such wrongdoing.
The peacekeepers are there to protect the Congolese, not abuse them.
Last year, the UN barred peacekeepers in Congo from fraternising with locals after investigations found some soldiers and civilian staff were guilty of rape and paedophilia including enticing hungry children with food or money for sex.
But earlier this year, a UN diplomat responsible for monitoring how the world body was tackling the problem said sexual abuse charges remained unacceptably high due to a persistent "culture of dismissiveness" in field missions.
The UN said on Thursday: "Monuc will work in close collaboration with its local partners to fully investigate the matter, contribute to the eradication of this prostitution ring and to the arrest of its backers by the Congolese authorities."
Clearly, the UN is incapable of policing its peacekeepers. It has failed to resolve the problem of its many human rights abuses.
There is no end in sight, just empty rhetoric.
Like so many UN resolutions, it's all just broken promises.
2 comments:
Even very liberal clients of mine have expressed frustrations at how beyond useless the UN has turned out, from what it was first heralded out to be.
As much as I criticize the UN, I do see a need for it, in theory.
I'm not bashing the ideals on which it was modeled. I'm bashing Kofi Annan and the corrupt, incompetent, impotent organization that the UN has become.
These peacekeeper abuses are not isolated incidents.
Post a Comment