Thousands of Sex Abuse Claims Against UN “Peace” Troops

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United Nations “peacekeeping” troops have faced some 2,000 allegations of rape, pedophilia, and sexual abuse of civilians in a little over a decade, an explosive investigation by the Associated Press found. Many of the victims were just young children. And considering the fact that it is well known and even acknowledged by the UN that the atrocities perpetrated by its soldiers are drastically under-reported, the thousands of accusations likely represent just the tip of a gigantic iceberg of horror. Adding insult to injury is the impunity with which the soldiers act, victims say, with the UN’s “peace” forces virtually never held accountable for their savage crimes.

While the UN’s militarized predators inflict atrocities on civilians across the globe, Haiti has been especially hard hit, following many years of UN military occupation. The AP investigation reported on a child sex ring operated by 134 UN peace troops from Sri Lanka who gruesomely exploited at least nine children for years. Not a single UN child rapist was imprisoned for the ghastly crimes. Many of the victims were very young. “I did not even have breasts,” said one girl, identified only as Victim Number 1 (V01). She said that between the ages of 12 and 15, she was raped by almost 50 UN peace troops, including a “Commandant” who gave her 75 cents.

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In a report, the UN admitted much of it. “The evidence shows that from late 2004 to mid-October 2007, at least 134 military members of the current and previous Sri Lankan contingents sexually exploited and abused at least nine Haitian children,” the UN report explained. “The sexual acts described by the nine victims are simply too many to be presented exhaustively in this report, especially since each claimed multiple sexual partners at various locations where the Sri Lankan contingents were deployed throughout Haiti over several years.”

In 2015, The New American reported on the widespread abuse, murder, and rape of Haitians, particularly children. Among other atrocities, a report by investigative journalist Kathie Klarreich outlined the grotesque sexual abuse of a mentally handicapped young boy — starting when he was just eight years old and lasting for five years — by UN troops from Pakistan. When it was reported to the Pakistani UN commander, rather than reporting it to the UN mission, the commander “decided to handle it himself.” Apparently the UN officer was hoping the case would disappear, “since he was also abusing the boy,” Klarreich reported. The UN force then reportedly hired a kidnapper to hide their victim from investigators. Another Haitian boy was raped by UN troops on video camera in an incident that sparked a global outcry.

The UN has interviewed some victims. One 15-year-old boy, V09, for example, was raped by over 100 UN peace troops, according to investigators. V04, a 14-year-old girl, was raped every day by a UN soldier. V02 was repeatedly raped by a UN commander. Another victim, 16 at the time, was lured to a UN compound by a UN soldier using bread with peanut butter. Once there, the UN soldier raped her at gunpoint, leaving her pregnant. “Some days, I imagine strangling my daughter to death,” the girl, who is constantly in tears, said in an interview quoted by the AP. Like countless other victims, the girl never reported the rape, fearing the thought of having to see the rapist again or even being blamed for the savage crime.

The majority of victims — likely the overwhelming majority of them — never even report the abuse, the evidence suggests. And in fact, even UN investigators and reports have documented that fact. A 2015 report by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), for instance, found that sexual abuse by UN peace troops was “significantly under-reported.” Out of 225 victims, the report found, just seven even knew about the UN’s policy ostensibly prohibiting sexual exploitation and abuse, and not a single victim was aware that the UN mission had a hotline to report it, “thus demonstrating significant under-reporting.”

Former UN OIOS investigator Peter Gallo, who was pushed out of the UN for doing his job too well, is among those blowing the whistle on it all. “Under-reporting is a massive, massive problem,” he explained in a recent Al Jazeera program examining the issue. “I think there’s essentially two aspects to that. One is that the nature of the assault, the nature of the attack is deeply embarrassing and so it’s difficult for victims to come forward and admit this has happened to them. But secondly and more importantly, those that do face a system which is basically geared up to dismissing their cases, and dismissing them, and does not want to know.”

“In the first instance, you have to understand that the economic disparity is such that it’s very easy to bribe people,” continued Gallo, who has become an increasingly prominent voice in the effort to expose such problems within the UN. “I mean, $50 doesn’t get you very far in Washington. It will get you an extreme change of life situation — that kind of money is more than most people in Haiti can actually aspire to in months or years of work. But more sinister than that, when the UN does receive a complaint, the first thing they will do is assess it and try to dismiss it. And there are many, many cases of that happening, and women basically being told there’s no evidence and so no case to answer, with the UN basically dismissing it at that point and taking no further action.”

Another UN whistleblower, Miranda Brown, a former senior official with the UN “Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,” testified about the problem in Congress. She noted that the problem of sexual abuse by UN forces is “vastly under-reported, with bottlenecks for reporting at various stages inside and outside the UN.” In other words, the horrors that the public knows about represent just a fraction of the total number of such UN abuses perpetrated against civilians.

The former UN official also told lawmakers that those in charge of investigating the abuses fear for their own job security and even their physical safety. Brown lost her job at the UN office after supporting Anders Kompass, the UN human-rights official who first blew the whistle on child-raping UN troops in the Central African Republic. Despite a global outcry over the scandals and persecution of whistle-blowers, including involvement by the U.S. Congress, Brown has still not been reinstated at her job. She said the persecution of Kompass and other whistle-blowers “is having and will continue to have a serious chilling effect on the reporting of abuses in peacekeeping missions.” Perhaps that was the point.

As for Kompass, when he tried to stop the rape of children by “peace” troops in Africa, he was escorted from his office under armed guard, investigated, humiliated, and more by top UN officials. Citing impunity for UN bosses and officials amid the ongoing child-rape plague among UN troops, Kompass finally decided to resign. In a statement explaining the situation, he said he was skeptical that ethics could ever return to the UN and slammed the “impunity” that permeates the global body. The high-profile resignation sent shock waves around the world, but UN troops continue to rape children around the world with impunity.

While the worldwide attention is new, the horrifying abuse of civilians and children by the UN and its disgraced “peace” military goes back to the earliest UN “peace” missions. Indeed, in one of the earliest UN “peace” missions, UN troops brutalized and slaughtered aid workers and the civilian population of Katanga when the province refused to submit to a mass-murdering communist dictator backed by the Soviet Union and the UN. Even young children were bayoneted to death by UN troops as UN planes bombed hospitals.

More recently, a decade-old survey by the non-profit group Save the Children revealed that in one town in Ivory Coast, eight out of 10 underage girls admitted to being raped and sexually exploited by UN forces occupying the nation. Across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and even the Balkans in Europe, UN troops have been exposed being involved in systematic abuses of women and children, ranging from rape of children and killing protesters to sex-slavery and human trafficking. Virtually nobody, top to bottom, has been held accountable for the ghastly atrocities.

And it is not just “peace” troops. In 1987, for example, the New York Times reported that UN committee members were arrested for operating a studio producing child pornography in the basement of the UNICEF building in Brussels. It was not clear where the UN “children” agency procured the children it exploited, many of whom were of North African origin. More than a thousand child-porn photographs were seized in the case. And analysts said that was just the tip of the iceberg.

More recently, in 2015, multiple UN staffers were again caught distributing child pornography using UN computers. And that same year, then-UN boss Ban Ki-moon, in celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court’s illegal homosexual “marriage” ruling, openly praised a homosexual child rapist for sparking “America’s gay rights revolution,” even as UN troops around the world were under fire for raping children. Some of the victims of the child rapist praised by Ban went on to commit suicide.

As they have for decades, the UN’s chief bureaucrats continue claiming that something is being done to rein in the swarms of barbaric child predators wearing the UN’s infamous blue helmets. “We believe we are advancing in the right direction, especially with the secretary-general’s new approach,” claimed Atul Khare, who runs the UN department ostensibly charged with disciplining the UN’s scandal-plagued military forces. “Improving the assistance provided to victims, who are at the heart of our response, is fundamental.”

The situation has become so extreme and so well known that even high-ranking pro-UN members of Congress have been forced to speak out. U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), for example, said that if UN troops were on their way to America, he would be on the first flight home to protect his family. Indeed, even the rabidly pro-UN globalists at the Council on Foreign Relations have acknowledged the enormity of the problem. But in typical establishment globalist fashion, CFR “Global Governance” Director Stewart Patrick grotesquely proposed giving the UN even more power as a solution to the crisis.

Congress has threatened to cut off funding over the growing scandal. And President Trump is also reportedly working to slash funding for the UN. But rather than trying to reform a UN that is corrupt to the core, a better solution would be to “Get U.S. Out of the UN.” The American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 193) would do precisely that. All that is needed is a sufficiently large outcry by the American people. And with the UN’s predatory peace troops back in the global headlines for systematically raping children, the time for that is now.

Photo of UN troops: Marie-Lan Nguyen

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].