Who will keep us safe from the peacekeepers?(United Nations)

ITEM: The United Nations 'official website asks the question, "What is peacekeeping?" then answers in part as follows: "Peacekeeping is a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace. U.N. peacekeepers--soldiers and military officers, civilian police officers and civilian personnel from many countries--monitor and observe peace processes that emerge in post-conflict situations and assist ex-combatants to implement the peace agreements they have signed. Such assistance comes in many forms including confidence-building measures, power-sharing arrangements, electoral support, strengthening the rule of law, and economic and social development."

CORRECTION: The activities of UN peacekeepers do come in many forms--unfortunately, these often include rape, forced prostitution, pedophilia, and other sexual abuses, all of which have been recently brought to light among UN troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, involving girls as young as 11. After media exposes of the lurid practices, the UN was forced to initiate its own investigation--though it took another six months before its results were released.

The United Nations has tolerated such behavior for years, say human-rights groups. According to a Danish film documentary, for example, UN troops had a large hand in spreading the AIDS virus in Cambodia in the early 1990s, with peacekeepers having sex with locals--children and prostitutes. Asked for his reaction, a UN official shown in the film answers, "Boys will be boys."

One UN publication, Africa Renewal, noted in April of 2005: "As recently as 2002 allegations surfaced that UN personnel and humanitarian workers at UN-administered camps in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea were forcing refugee women and young children to provide sexual favours in exchange for desperately needed food, medicines and other relief supplies." Those reports are "strikingly similar to those made in the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo]" this past year.

The Congo scandal, it seems certain, is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. At least one senior UN official involved in the Bunia refugee camp in the DRC has been implicated in the sexual abuse, according to published accounts--which also have noted that after the scandal broke, investigators were threatened with retaliation by peacekeepers. The Times of London reported about Russian pilots among the peacekeepers, who "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 U.N. investigators arrived."

The Congo outrage is "the latest in a string of scandals that have hit U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world," testified Dr. Nile Gardiner, a fellow in Anglo-American Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation, before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations on March 1. "Indeed, it appears that U.N. peacekeeping missions frequently create a predatory sexual culture, with refugees the victims of U.N. staff who demand sexual favors in exchange for food, and U.N. troops who rape women at gunpoint. Allegations of sexual abuse stretch back at least a decade, to operations in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Despite previous U.N. investigations--and Kofi Annan's declaration of a policy of 'zero tolerance' toward such conduct--little appears to have changed in the field."

There are some 80,000 peacekeeping troops from about 100 nations in 17 countries, a number that keeps rising. American taxpayers ...