Be careful what you wish for from the UN -- you may get it.
Linked in the past to sex crimes in East Timor, and prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo, U.N. peacekeepers have now been accused of sexually abusing the very population they were deployed to protect in Congo. And while the 150 allegations of rape, pedophelia and solicitation in Congo may be the United Nations' worst sex scandal in years, chronic problems almost guarantee that few of the suspects will face serious punishment.
The problem is simple: The United Nations often implores nations to discipline their peacekeepers, but it has little power to enforce the rules. And when nations are reluctant anyway to contribute soldiers for dangerous missions like Congo, it's tough to turn the tables and shame them publicly. "The U.N. goes around trying to cajole countries to provide peacekeepers," said Edward Luck, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "They're having a hard time getting any member states to respond, and that doesn't give the U.N. a great deal of leverage in these kinds of situations."
While thousands of U.N. peacekeepers have served without incident, some have been accused of smuggling weapons and exotic animals, selling fuel on the black market, vandalizing airplanes, and standing by while mobs looted storefronts — if they didn't join in the chaos themselves. Other times their inaction led to even more grievous crimes, as when Dutch peacekeepers under a U.N. mandate didn't stop Bosnian troops in the enclave of Srebrenica from loading Muslim men onto buses and taking them away to be killed. |