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Source: The New American
Beasts in Blue Berets
by William
Norman Grigg
"We are not going to achieve a new world
order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and
money," warned Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the July/August 1995 issue
of Foreign Affairs. Schlesinger had taken to the pages of
the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations to vindicate
the dubious proposition that the United Nations military represents the
thin blue line dividing peaceful civilization from savagery -- in short,
our planetary police. But what happens when the planetary police run
amok and become the agents of bloodshed? When local police abuse their
power, the abused have avenues of redress. From what body can those
abused by the planetary police seek justice? The escalating scandal of
unpunished atrocities committed by UN "peacekeepers"
illustrates that the planetary police are beyond accountability.
"Perhaps our leaders should put the question
to the people: what do we want the United Nations to be?"
Schlesinger wrote. "Do we want it to avert more killing fields
around the planet? Or do we want it to dwindle into impotence, leaving
the world to the anarchy of nation-states?" Critics of the UN
should eagerly embrace such a debate -- provided that a copy of the
above photograph is made available to all participants. First published
in the United States on the cover of the June 24th issue of the
left-wing weekly Village Voice, the photograph depicts two
Belgian paladins of the new world order giddily holding a Somali child
over an open flame. Other series of photographs depict UN soldiers
kicking and stabbing a Somali, and another soldier apparently urinating
on the Somali's dead body; yet another shows a Somali child being forced
to drink salt water, vomit, and worms. A second group of photos
published in the July 15th Village Voice shows the dead
bodies of bound Somalis -- what appears to be the work of a death squad.
One atrocity not caught on camera involved the
"punishment" of a Somali child by placing him in a metal
container and withholding water from him for two days; predictably, the
relentless African heat killed the child. One Belgian UN soldier
testified that it was a regular practice to use metal boxes as prison
cells, and that other Somalis probably died similarly gruesome deaths.
Strangely Silent
One might expect the photographs and first-person
accounts of such atrocities to arouse public indignation against the
UN's "planetary police," just as the endlessly replayed
videotape of the Rodney King arrest turned public opinion against the
Los Angeles Police Department. Perhaps this is why the photographs have
been all but invisible in the United States, and precious little media
attention has been devoted to an examination of UN atrocities.
Village Voice reporter Jennifer
Gould came across the accounts of the Belgian atrocities while doing an
earlier story about sexual harassment of female employees at UN
headquarters. "When I spoke with people at the UN, time after time
I was told, 'If you think it's bad here, you ought to see what happens
in peacekeeping operations,'" Gould told THE NEW
AMERICAN. "I started looking into that issue and
found that the abuses I reported were well-known and easily documented.
They were all over the media abroad, and I was really surprised it
hadn't been written about over here."
Belgian military authorities launched an
investigation into the atrocities following publication of a front-page
story by Belgium's Het Laatste Nieuws. In early July,
Privates Claude Baert and Kurt Coelus, the two paratroopers photographed
dangling the Somali child over a flame, were acquitted by a military
court, which ruled that the incident -- described by Baert and Coelus as
a punishment for stealing -- was "a form of playing without
violence," according to prosecutor Luc Walleyn. And what of
discipline from the UN, whose "Code of Personal Conduct for Blue
Helmets" requires that peacekeepers "respect and regard the
human rights of all"? Gould reports that a UN spokesman dismissed
the acquittal of Baert and Coelus by insisting that "the UN is not
in the habit of embarrassing governments that contribute peacekeeping
troops."
For its diligence in reporting unwelcome news, Het
Laatste Nieuws was rewarded with a bomb threat. Reporter Lieve
Van Bastelaere informed THE NEW AMERICAN
that the man arrested for making the threat owned a local bar that is
frequented by many people in the military, including veterans of
"peacekeeping" missions. "He apparently had been angered
by what he had read," Bastelaere observed dryly. "We've
enhanced our security here at the paper, and the police took the threat
seriously, even though he may have been drunk when he made it. He
claimed not to remember phoning in the threat when he was
arrested."
In September, another military tribunal will be
held to investigate the actions of Sergeant Dirk Nassel, the soldier
photographed forcing a Somali boy to ingest worms and vomit. However,
the Belgian military system -- which is deeply entwined with the UN
"peacekeeping" apparatus -- has yet to inflict substantive
penalties for abuses committed in the service of the UN. Several years
ago, according to Gould, "Belgian soldiers were also accused of
holding mock executions for Somali children and forcing them to dig
their own graves; though their officer was given a suspended sentence,
the soldiers were acquitted." It is thus firmly established in
Belgian military jurisprudence that service in the new world army is a
license to commit barbarities with impunity.
Canadian, Italian Atrocities
Nor was the Belgian component of the UN's
"Operation Restore Hope" uniquely barbarous. Three members of
a now-disbanded elite Canadian paratroop regiment were tried and
convicted of criminal charges in the beating death of a 16-year-old
Somali boy named Shidane Arone; the three "peacekeepers" had
been photographed smiling beside the bloody corpse of the boy, whose
hands had been bound. The incident prompted the creation of a Canadian
government commission to review that nation's military and its
involvement in "peacekeeping" missions; however, the inquiry
foundered on the obstructionism of political and military bodies and
produced what Canadian critics call an incomplete and inadequate report.
On August 8th, Italian military officials admitted
that Italian soldiers assigned to UN duty in Somalia had also tortured
and otherwise abused Somali civilians. According to the Washington
Post, "Two generals who led the Italian forces to Somalia
resigned in June following publication of graphic reports of sexual
violence against a Somali woman, electric torture of a young man and
allegations that an officer had murdered a young boy." Drugs and
prostitutes also were allowed to circulate freely among Italian UN
troops.
The Italian government assembled a five-member
commission of inquiry, which interviewed 145 people and traveled to
Africa to interview Somalis who had been tormented by UN troops or
witnessed the bestial acts firsthand. The panel's 46-page report
documented that "the criminal events were not just the result of
'rotten apples' that you may find in any structure, but were rather the
consequence of a stretched line of command and amused compliance toward
such high jinks by some junior officers."
"Shocking as it is, the UN scandal in Somalia
is no anomaly," wrote Gould in the Village Voice.
"[An analysis] of documents and reports relating to recent UN
peacekeeping operations has uncovered incidents ranging from murder and
torture to sexual exploitation, harassment of and discrimination against
local women and children."
The January 18th New York Times reported
that 47 Canadian UN troops who served in Bosnia were accused of
"drunkenness, sex, black marketeering and patient abuse at a mental
hospital they were guarding." The soldiers had been assigned the
"humanitarian" chore of guarding a mental hospital at Bakovici
in order to secure it for the staff's return. "The hospital instead
became the setting for heavy drinking; sex between soldiers, nurses and
interpreters that violated regulations; black-market sales; and
harassment of the patients...."
During the "frenzy of looting" that
broke out in Liberia in the spring of 1996, peacekeepers used UN
vehicles to make off with pilfered goods, according to the April 12,
1996 issue of USA Today. UN vehicles -- and the troops
responsible for them -- have also been a boon to Balkan drug smugglers.
The August 9, 1996 Washington Times reported that
"U.S. and Bosnian officials suspect that high-ranking UN officials
from Jordan based in the central Bosnian towns of Bugojno and Travnik
have routinely provided UN vehicles to help smugglers get contraband
past checkpoints. The officers appear to have received money and the
services of prostitutes from the smugglers, led by Islamic foreigners
who entered Bosnia with U.S. approval to defend the Muslim
government."
Significantly, the Bosnian narco-ring apparently
received critical support from UN police monitors, who were stationed in
the Balkans in order to facilitate the creation of a civilian police
force dedicated to upholding "world law." A Pentagon official
told the Washington Times that such problems are
predictable, given that "the international police task force [in
Bosnia] is a compendium of people from diverse countries with different
degrees of professionalism and training and different backgrounds in
operations and ethics" -- a fairly compelling explanation of why
UN-style "world law" cannot work.
The UN's "nation-building" mission in
Cambodia -- long touted as among the world body's proudest achievements
-- added to that unfortunate land's abundant history of lawlessness. In
1993, 170 residents of Cambodia protested the abusive behavior of blue
helmet troops in a letter to Yasushi Akashi, who served as
then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's representative in
Cambodia. Prominent among the complaints was the mistreatment of women,
who were treated to abuse and harassment by UN officials "regularly
in public restaurants, hotels and bars, banks, markets, and shops."
New York Times correspondent Barbara
Crossette, whose primary beat is the UN, elaborated: "The bad
behavior [of UN forces in Cambodia] was not limited to abuse of women.
There were bar fights, brawls, and shootouts and a proliferation of
brothels, stolen vehicles and general drunken boorishness. Geographical
origins were no indicator of what to expect. While some Asian and
African troops got out of line, it was the soldiers of a Bulgarian
battalion who had the worst reputation. They went down in local legend
as 'the Vulgarians.'" Cambodia has descended again into murderous
chaos, and Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch,
believes that "the mess that Cambodia finds itself in today is in
large part a product of the UN's failure to uphold the rule of law"
in the course of its "nation-building" mission.
Nightmare in Rwanda
The same lawlessness infected the UN mission to
Rwanda, which suffered a Cambodia-style genocide earlier this decade.
Crossette noted that Rwandans accused UN troops "of illicit
trading, hit-and-run driving, sexual harassment and criminal abuse of
diplomatic immunity they have bestowed on themselves. The disruptive
personal behavior of some troops has been a factor in Rwanda's demand
that all peacekeepers be withdrawn from the country...."
Also contributing to that demand is the fact that
UN forces in Rwanda actually abetted the worst bloodletting in
recent memory -- the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which a half-million
Tutsis were annihilated in approximately 100 days. "Many of the
mass murderers were employees of the international relief
agencies," testified Peter Hammond of Frontline Fellowship in Holocaust
in Rwanda. In one incident recounted by Hammond, Belgian UN
troops stationed in a heavily fortified compound in Kigali
"deceived the [Tutsi] refugees by assembling them for a meal in the
dining hall and then [they] evacuated the base while the refugees were
eating. Literally two minutes after the Belgians had driven out of their
base, the Presidential Guard poured into the buildings annihilating the
defenceless Tutsi refugees."
When the Tutsi-organized Rwandan Patriotic Front
drove many of the worst Hutu murderers from Rwanda into the Congo (then
called Zaire), the UN intervened militarily -- on the side of the
murderers. One year after the genocide, wrote Peter Beinart in the
October 30, 1995 issue of The New Republic, "former
[Rwandan] government militias, often armed and sometimes in uniform,
control many UN refugee camps, terrorizing civilians and plotting to
reinvade." Janet Fleischmann of Human Rights Watch-Africa reported,
"The UN clearly took the lead in assisting these refugees who were
in uniform and armed ... and that helped them establish control over the
refugee camps." This development provoked the renowned French
humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres and several other
charitable organizations to withdraw from militia-controlled UN refugee
camps.
When the UN "peacekeeping" mission to
Rwanda finally furled its blue banner in March 1996, the reaction on the
part of Rwandans was one of unalloyed relief. "Hundreds of genocide
survivors protesting outside the UN headquarters in Kigali cheered ...
as the UN flag was lowered to mark the end of the United Nations'
peacekeeping mandate," reported a March 3, 1996 Reuters wire
service report. Apparently, Rwandans would rather face the prospect of
bloody anarchy than submit to the variety of "peace"
administered by UN troops.
Follow the Brothels
The market in prostitution -- including child
prostitution -- thrives wherever blue berets decamp. According to Gould,
records of UN peacekeeping missions document that "brothels have
sprouted nearby -- and in one case allegedly inside -- UN compounds. In
the latter case, prostitutes were allegedly employed by the UN and were
reportedly even shipped on UN planes to fornicate with a UN staff member
in hotels paid for by the UN."
Last December a UN study on children in war
reported that blue berets had been involved in child prostitution in six
of the 12 countries which had been studied. In country after country
unfortunate enough to attract the UN's "humanitarian"
intervention, "the arrival of peacekeeping troops has been
accompanied with a rapid rise in child prostitution," the document
reported. Following the signing of a peace treaty in Mozambique in 1992,
for example, "soldiers of the United Nations operation ...
recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution."
However, as Jennifer Gould learned, the
mistreatment of women is something of a UN tradition -- the world body's
enthusiastic support for radical feminism notwithstanding. In a report
published in the May 20th Village Voice, Gould described
the plight of Catherine Claxon, a UN employee who filed the first-ever
sexual harassment complaint against the UN in 1991. After Claxon filed
her complaint, "Someone fired a shot through the glass window of a
coffee shop by the United Nations" -- just above Claxon's head.
"Another bullet shattered Claxon's windshield as she drove home
from her job at the UN one night on the Long Island Expressway." On
three other occasions, Claxon was nearly run off the road -- at the same
spot where she was nearly killed by the gunshot. According to Gould,
"UN women describe a godfather-like institution" -- a network
of cronyism and corruption. "This is compounded by the fact that in
some UN member countries, women are treated as chattel instead of as
equals."
Haunting Prophecy
Gould described the UN as "a bizarre universe
of intrigue and outrage, where diplomats from 185 countries -- stuffed
suits simmering with regional, religious, and class-bred hatreds -- try
to promote world peace." Such is the character of the institution
whose masters crave the power to enforce "world law." The
essence of that abstraction is captured in the photograph of
"peacekeepers" Baert and Coelus playfully swinging a Somali
child over a fire: Unaccountable power employed mercilessly against the
helpless.
More than seven decades ago, while the U.S. Senate
was debating ratification of the League of Nations Covenant, Senator
William Borah (R-ID) sought to cool the ardor of the League's supporters
by dousing it with a bracing shower of cold reality. Those who believed
that a world army would consist of stainless champions of "world
peace" were ignoring the unyielding facts about human nature. A
world army, Borah declared, would consist of "the gathered scum of
the nations organized into a conglomerate international police force
ordered hither and thither by the most heterogeneous and irresponsible
body or court that ever confused or confounded the natural instincts and
noble passions of a people." Can there be any doubt that the UN has
vindicated Borah's dismal prophecy?
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