Not Keeping the Peace

UN peacekeepers have once again come under scrutiny for their actions. Once again, peacekeepers are alleged to have committed rape and sexual assault on children as young as 12.

The newspaper, in a story posted on its Web site, said it had gathered accounts from more than 20 young victims in the town of Juba of U.N. civilian and peacekeeping staff forcing them to have sex.

The U.N. Peacekeeping Department in New York declined to comment. The report appeared on the first day of work for U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon of
South Korea, who this week became the world body's eighth secretary-general, succeeding
Kofi Annan of Ghana.

There are more than 11,000 U.N. peacekeepers and police from some 70 countries in southern Sudan, enforcing a January 2005 peace agreement that ended a 21-year civil war.

The Telegraph said the first signs of sexual exploitation of local youths in southern Sudan emerged within months of the peacekeepers' arrival in March 2005. The U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF drafted an internal report detailing the problem, it said.

The newspaper said Sudan's government had gathered evidence including video footage of U.N. workers having sex with young girls. But the United Nations has yet to publicly acknowledge there was a problem or even investigate, the newspaper said.

The United Nations, working with the African Union, is now pressing the Sudanese government to admit thousands more peacekeepers to its western Darfur region, where a separate civil war has raged for three years.

The government has been resisting letting the reinforcements into Darfur, calling it an attempt to recolonize the vast northern African nation.

This isn't the first time that peacekeepers have been caught raping and sexually assaulting the people they're supposed to be protecting. The same thing happened in UN peacekeeping operations in Haiti and Congo and only began prosecuting the perpetrators in earnest when the numbers became too large to ignore.

Kofi Annan turned a blind eye to the violence against the people they're supposed to be protecting. Will Ban Ki-moon?

Is it any wonder that people are weary of the UN when it doesn't hold its own to the highest moral and ethical standards?