Just when I give the UN a little credit, I see a story like this one which more than cancels it out. Sadly, this is not news: Peacekeepers ‘abusing children’. It’s a well-established pattern.
A 13-year-old girl described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home, and left her bleeding, trembling and vomiting on the ground.
No action has been taken against the soldiers.
The report also found that aid workers have been sexually abusing boys and girls.
When U.S. troops do something illegal, immoral, and/or patently wrong, the media leads the whole world to rise up to condemn them. Which is fine, if only they were a bit more evenhanded about it. I certainly don’t want American soldiers getting a pass for committing crimes, and in any group that large, you’re inevitably going to have some bad apples. And that’s obviously true of the Peacekeepers as well; in spite of these ongoing reports, they’re really not all sexual predators. But I’m sick and tired of the UN, aided and abetted by a compliant media, sweeping this stuff under the rug and getting away with it.
How many days was Abu Ghraib on the front page of the New York Times? How many days was it a top story in many newspapers all over the world?
I give the BBC credit for reporting the story at all, but it’s not going to get any traction. In fact, the BBC is going to drop it pretty quickly too; just as they have in the past. As usual, the kind of worldwide outrage that the media consistently stirs up against American troops is simply not going to happen no matter how much it is deserved.
