U.N. SEX SCANDAL UPDATE
By Michelle Malkin
Six U.N. peacekeepers from Morocco have been arrested for
alleged sex crimes in the Congo. The BBC report is here. The head of the Moroccan contingent of UN peacekeepers and his
deputy have also been canned.
Now, let's move on to U.N. headquarters. Kofi? Sunday,
February 13, 2005
WHO IS DIDIER BOURGUET?
By Michelle Malkin
Source: ABC News
This is Didier Bourguet. He's a United Nations senior official from
France accused of running an Internet pedophile ring in the Congo, where the
U.N. was supposed to be protecting vulnerable people.
Last night on ABC's 20/20, one of the MSM's best investigative
reporters, Brian Ross, broadcast a damning segment on
Bourguet and the festering U.N. sex scandal. The L.A. Times followed up on Ross's report
today:
A
scandal about the sexual abuse of Congolese women and children by U.N.
officials and peacekeepers intensified Friday with the broadcast of explicit
pictures of a French U.N. worker and Congolese girls and his claim that there
was a network of pedophiles at the U.N. mission in Congo.
ABC
News' "20/20" program showed pictures taken from the computer of a
French U.N. transport worker. The hard drive reportedly contained thousands of
photos of him with hundreds of girls. In one frame, a tear can be seen rolling
down the cheek of a victim...
...Bourguet,
41, is facing charges of sexual abuse and rape in France. His lawyer, Claude de
Boosere- Lepidi, said in court last week that there was a network of U.N.
personnel who had sex with underage girls and that Bourguet had engaged in
similar activity in a previous U.N. posting in the Central African Republic.
Bourguet's
case is the only one that has been prosecuted among 150 allegations against
about 50 soldiers and U.N. civilian officials who have served in the Congo
peacekeeping mission. At least seven cases of sexual exploitation and abuse
have been documented against peacekeepers based in Bunia, a northeastern town.
One civilian has been suspended until the investigation is complete, and
another has resigned. The U.N. is conducting further investigations and expects
to find more cases.
Wizbang
points to this investigative report on
the U.N. sex trade scandal in Bosnia:
Scandals
involving the UN, the US military, and the coterie of defense contractors hired
by the Defense Department are not rare. But rarely are the stories as
well-documented, with so many high-profile advocates going on record, as the
child prostitution and trafficking scandal which drew a dark curtain over the
closing days of the United Nations policing force in Bosnia.
To
date, not a single person has been charged for engaging in pedophilia with
child prostitutes in Bosnia - and among the accused are several Americans.
Kudos to Brian Ross for digging into yet another U.N. atrocity.
Didier Bourguet is the tip of a scandalous iceberg. For the sake of young girls
and women in U.N. peacekeeping regions around the world, let's hope the rest of
the American MSM do a better job of jumping on the story than they did with
Darfur, Oil for Food, and Rwanda.
Other coverage:
The Belmont Club
from November 2004.
The UK Times Online
reported in December 2004 on videos of Congolese girls being raped:
The
prospect of the pornographic videos and photographs — now on sale in Congo —
becoming public worries senior UN officials, who fear a UN version of the
scandal at the American-run Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. “It would be a pretty big
problem for the UN if these pictures come out,” one senior official said.
Investigations
have already turned up 150 allegations of sexual misconduct by peacekeepers and
UN staff despite the UN’s official policy of “zero-tolerance”. One found 68
allegations of misconduct in the town of Bunia alone.
UN
insiders told The Times that two Russian pilots based in Mbandaka paid young
girls with jars of mayonnaise and jam to have sex with them.
They
filmed the sessions and sent the tapes to Russia. But the men were tipped off
and left the area before UN investigators arrived.
The
Moroccan peacekeeping contingent based in Kisangani — a town on the Congo River
with no road links to the outside world — had one of the worst reputations. A
soldier accused of rape was apparently hidden in the barracks for a year.
In
July 2002 the rebel commander Major-General Jean Pierre Ondekane, who
subsequently became Minister of Defence in a postwar transitional government,
told a top UN official that all that Monuc (the United Nations Mission in the
Democratic Republic of Congo) would be remembered for in Kisangani was “for
running after little girls”.
An
international organisation examining the sex trade between Monuc and local
women found that in March there were 82 women and girls who had been made
pregnant by Moroccan men and 59 more by Uruguayan men.
According
to UN insiders, at least two UN officials — a Ukrainian and a Canadian — have
had to leave the country after getting local women pregnant.
Jordan’s
Prince Zeid Raad Al Hussein, a special adviser to the UN Secretary-General, who
led one investigative team, said in a confidential report obtained by The
Times: “The situation appears to be one of ‘zero-compliance with zero-
tolerance’ throughout the mission.”
Joseph Loconte's investigative piece in the Weekly Standard last
month:
Kofi
Annan has insisted on "zero tolerance" of sexual exploitation by
peacekeepers, but U.N. rules apply only to U.N. employees; military personnel
fall under the jurisdiction of their own governments. Only a few peacekeepers
have been deported, and no U.N. staff have been charged with criminal activity.
That's
prompting tough talk from some U.S. officials about American assistance for
U.N. peacekeeping missions. The United States will give $490 million next year
to support about 62,000 military personnel and civilian police serving in 16
U.N. operations around the world. "Until the U.N. is willing to take
decisive action and take responsibility for these acts, we should look
seriously at the funding portion of the peace-keeping operations," says a
foreign policy aide to Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who serves on the
Senate Appropriations Committee. "I don't know any other way to force
Annan to pay attention."
This
latest U.N. episode, piled on top of the ongoing Oil for Food scandal in Iraq,
may help focus the mind. The sexual abuses committed, or ignored, by U.N.
personnel violate the institution's Convention on the Rights of the Child, the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and
the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A 2002
U.N. report characterized the sexual exploitation issue as "a betrayal of
trust as well as a catastrophic failure of protection."
Peacekeepers
as predators? It's difficult to see how another U.N. probe, proclamation, or
committee report could reverse that perception anytime soon.
McQ is
following the story. Ace sez:
"The UN: We're Not Just About Billion-Dollar Corruption Schemes. We Also
Rape Children." Hennessy teaches a college undergrad about the United Nations of Evil. Mostly Africa
blogged on reports of sexual abuse in December 2003. Saturday,
February 12, 2005
LETTER GUIDANCE
FROM THE U.N.
A basic assumption of American liberalism is that the United
Nations occupies a higher moral plane than the United States. Thus, actions
taken under the U.N.'s auspices are automatically vested with more moral
authority than those taken unilaterally by the U.S. And liberals take seriously
hectoring of the U.S. by lightweights like Kofi Annan.
Like so much of the liberal catechism, this belief rests on no
evident empirical foundation. As we were reminded again by Tim Blair,
who noted this Reuters
story:
UN
peacekeepers have been banned from all sex with the local population in Congo
because of widespread, continuing abuse of women and girls. In the past year
the UN investigated 150 allegations against 50 soldiers of sexual exploitation
of women and girls.
Children
as young as 12 or 13 were bribed with eggs, milk or a few dollars in exchange
for sex, UN reports said.
UN
regulations for soldiers usually forbid sex with anyone under 18 and forced
prostitution. But often officials found there was a fine line between forced
and willing sex.
In most parts of the world, people do consider that line a fine
one. What I don't understand is why we should be taking moral instruction from
them. Saturday, February 12, 2005
*