As global outrage grows over the escalating child-rape scandals surrounding United Nations “peacekeeping” troops in Africa and beyond, the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Obama administration have a plan: more power, more money, more military equipment, and more troops for the UN. Seriously.
The White House appears to be fully on board with the agenda to super-size and empower the UN’s “peace” forces amid the grotesque scandals. Later this month, Obama himself will even lead a global summit on UN peacekeeping where he is expected to announce huge new commitments of U.S. taxpayer resources and personnel to the global outfit’s scandal-plagued “peace” enforcement operations.
Of course, the Obama administration — like virtually every U.S. administration for generations, whether Democrat or Republican — is packed with CFR members and apparatchiks from top to bottom. So it is not surprising to see senior Obama officials and even the president himself pushing the CFR agenda, whether on UN peacekeeping or anything else.
What is perhaps surprising, though, is how the global government-promoting CFR has turned the systematic and ongoing savage rape of women and children by UN “peace” forces — a scandal that could no longer be contained amid unprecedented media scrutiny and a worldwide outcry — into an argument for handing the UN even more money and power. Yet that is precisely what is happening.
Writing in Newsweek and on the CFR’s website, Stewart Patrick, the CFR director of International Institutions and Global Governance, acknowledged that UN peacekeeping efforts “have long had a dark side: a history of sexual exploitation and abuse against civilians by U.N. Personnel.” He also pointed out that, despite lip service about stopping the horrors over the decades, “a recent internal review reveals the still-alarming scope of these crimes — and the failure of the international community to hold perpetrators to account.”
All of that is, of course, true. “Sexual violence by peacekeepers is by now disturbingly familiar,” Patrick continued. “Reports of such crimes date back at least to the 1990s, in U.N. missions in Mozambique, Bosnia, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Abuses ran the gamut from sex trafficking to prostitution in exchange for money, food or medical supplies.” In fact, they go back even further than that.
The CFR figure also pointed out, correctly, that “peacekeeping personnel enjoy a staggering level of impunity” and that “business as usual continues” — raping, pillaging, murdering, and more. Indeed, The New American magazine has reported for years on the scandalous abuse of “immunity” by UN troops, police, and officials to avoid accountability for brazenly criminal behavior — ranging from the killing of unarmed protesters in Mali this year to sodomizing a mentally disabled Haitian boy, beginning when the boy was eight years old and continuing for five years and then having him kidnapped when the scandal surfaced.
The ongoing UN “peace” occupation of Haiti, for instance, features so many examples of shielding UN criminals, rapists, pedophiles, and killers that entire books could be written on the subject. Whistle-blowers have tried, without much success, to sound the alarm. Across the Central African Republic, meanwhile, new charges of child rape and exploitation by occupying UN forces are becoming a regular occurrence.
In just one Ivorian town occupied by UN “peace” forces, a survey revealed that 80 percent of underage girls admitted to being regularly raped and forced into sexual acts by UN forces. “They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me,” recounted one of the victims, age 13 at the time, to the BBC. “I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing…. I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.” Even though the atrocity, unlike most, drew some media attention, no action was taken against the UN troops.
But instead of disbanding the UN’s global child-raping force and prosecuting its ringleaders, Patrick and other CFR figures argue that what is really needed is more power and funding for the UN. “True progress on this issue would entail,” among other actions, “some form of U.N. enforcement capability to deal with states that refuse to comply,” he argued.
As always, the calls for giving the UN more power to “enforce” its will on states came with demands for more taxpayer funding for the global outfit. “True change will require three ingredients: greater transparency, generous funding and high-level political pressure,” Patrick said. Unsurprisingly, he wants the CFR-dominated Obama administration to “lead” on the UN empowerment agenda — and Obama has only been more than happy to comply.
New UN powers, less national sovereignty, and new global institutions are also needed, Patrick claimed. “The U.N. needs to establish some mechanism to hold U.N. troops and civilian personnel to account for sexual crimes committed during peace operations, so that they cannot be shielded behind national sovereignty,” he wrote, a reference to the fact that the national governments that contribute the UN troops are supposed to prosecute perpetrators, but rarely do, especially since the UN appears not to care either way.
In other words, to deal with criminals in UN blue helmets under UN command, rather than simply getting rid of their “immunity” or disbanding the whole force, governments around the world must surrender even more sovereignty to the UN. Indeed, Patrick’s reference to “some mechanism” — presumably some sort of international tribunal or court with the power to hand out punishments — has been high on the CFR agenda for decades.
And with the International Criminal Court increasingly the subject of global ridicule as it battles to put a journalist in prison, and with the U.S. Senate refusing to ratify the kangaroo “court” or give it any authority over Americans, the push is on to give the UN judicial powers using any pretext. Under the scheme advocated by Patrick and the CFR, American troops could find themselves before a UN court packed with representatives of brutal UN member dictatorships — and with none of the protections guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.
Considering the UN’s 70-year failure to introduce even a semblance of accountability, even for brazen criminals within its ranks, would the UN actually hold child-raping troops accountable? Almost certainly not, if history — even recent history — is any guide.
For instance, when UN official and whistle-blower Anders Kompass found out that “peace” forces under a UN mandate were raping children in the Central African Republic, and realized that the UN was doing nothing, he passed the information along to French authorities. The UN’s top leadership responded by conspiring to destroy Kompass, having him escorted from his office under armed guard. Similar scandalous coverups are the norm at the UN, and have been from the start.
Just this summer in San Francisco, UN boss Ban Ki Moon (shown with President Barack Obama) showed the world how seriously he takes such matters, while praising a homosexual activist named Harvey Milk most infamous for raping underage boys — at least two of whom, including 16-year-old Jack Galen McKinley, went on to commit suicide. “The measures he advocated here — including new laws to protect people from discrimination — are the same measures that, today, we advocate to governments everywhere,” Ban said while celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s purported redefinition of marriage as a “great step forward for human rights.”
Patrick was not the only CFR operative demanding a much more powerful UN military — and more U.S. government involvement within it — amid the UN child-rape scandals. Writing in DefenseOne, CFR member and international affairs professor Paul Williams praised Obama’s agenda to further expand and empower the UN’s forces and called on him to lead by example by sending more U.S. troops to serve under the UN.
Deploying more U.S. troops on UN missions, Williams said, “could help improve standards and modernize systems within UN peacekeeping missions.” Williams also speculated that more nations might need to be invaded and occupied by UN troops, nations such as Libya, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen and Ukraine.
The Obama administration appears to be more than ready to follow the CFR’s agenda. As The New American reported on September 6, a major global plot to super-size and empower the UN’s military wing is well underway, and will likely culminate in a series of announcements to come later this month on the sidelines of the UN’s 70th annual General Assembly meeting in New York.
An unnamed official cited by the Wall Street Journal claimed that it was in U.S. interests to boost the UN’s peace military “to stop mass killings and refugee flows.” As regular readers of this magazine know well, though, the refugee flows and mass killings — from Iraq, Syria, Libya, and beyond — are directly attributable to actions taken by the UN, the Obama administration, and other globalist forces to begin with.
In Libya, for example, the Obama administration, citing the imagined authority of a UN resolution to defy the U.S. Constitution, allied itself with self-declared al-Qaeda leaders to overthrow the former U.S. terror-war ally and bomb the nation to smithereens. Now the nation is a terror-state mired in civil war as Libyans scramble across the Mediterranean to flee the bloody mess Obama, al-Qaeda, NATO, and the UN Security Council left behind. In Syria, similar globalist scheming is producing similar results. How further empowering the globalist warmongering would stem the damage done by previous globalist warmongering is never explained.
The history of UN “peacekeeping” abuses against civilians goes back to the very beginning in Katanga, where UN forces perpetrated widespread war crimes and brutalized African civilians merely for refusing to submit to a UN-approved communist dictator. Since then, nothing has improved, with UN forces in recent years, for example, backing Islamist militias in the Ivory Coast to overthrow the president. Those UN-backed forces went on to brutally slaughter thousands of innocent Christians. And the carnage continues.
The horrifying rape and sexual exploitation scandals, meanwhile, have occurred in virtually every nation occupied by UN forces for decades, as the CFR readily admits in its quest for a more powerful UN military force. The UN already has close to 150,000 troops and “police” deployed in scandal-plagued missions across more than 15 countries. Its track record is beyond dismal. And as recent headlines and leaks show clearly, the abuse continues to this day, with the UN more concerned with silencing and destroying whistle-blowers than bringing child-raping UN troops to justice.
Giving the UN dictator club‘s forces more power and money will only ensure that the horror show becomes more horrendous still. As such, the U.S. Congress, currently considering a bill to withdraw from the UN, should refuse to fund the global outfit, its “peacekeeping” military, or Obama’s agenda to drastically empower the UN’s global armies. The Constitution and common decency demand it.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].
Related articles:
Obama Plots Huge Boost to UN Military Amid Child-rape Scandals
UN Panics Amid Growing Scandal on Child Rape by “Peace” Troops
Sex Abuse by UN “Peace” Troops Becoming Global Scandal
Congressman Mike Rogers Introduces Bill to Get U.S. Out of UN
UN-backed Forces Slaughter Christians in Ivory Coast
UN Troops Accused of Sex Crimes Worldwide
United Nations Exploits Pseudo-“Human Rights” to Attack U.S.
UN Court Seeks Prison Term for Journalist
Ruthless Tyrants Win Seats on UN “Human Rights” Council
UN Boss: U.S. Gay Marriage Ruling a “Great Step for Human Rights”
