United Nations “peacekeeping” troops deployed on a UN “peace” mission in the Central African Republic were systematically raping and sexually exploiting starving young children, according to a leaked internal report that the global organization was seeking to conceal. Because UN leadership failed to take action against their soldiers’ widespread sexual abuse of children — some of whom were less than 10 years old — an aid worker with the organization in the war-torn African nation handed the document to French authorities. As has become the norm when UN military forces are exposed raping, abusing, and murdering the populations they are ostensibly supposed to “protect,” the UN responded to the leak by suspending the whistleblower from his post and trying to cover it all up rather than dealing with the savagery.
On April 29, though, despite the ham-handed effort to quash the news, the explosive UN report documenting the organization’s crimes was making headlines around the world after first being reported by the U.K. Guardian. According to the British newspaper, which cited sources close to the case and other information, the whistleblower who first alerted French authorities about the problem was Anders Kompass. The Geneva-based director of field operations for UN programs, a Swede working in humanitarian missions for three decades, was reportedly suspended from his post and is now being investigated by the UN Office for Internal Oversight Service (OIOS). He could be fired for leaking the material, and the official inquiry of his case is “severely restricted,” according to reports.
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The Guardian also reportedly obtained a copy of the internal report from the Obama-backed MINUSCA mission in the African nation. Entitled “Sexual Abuse on Children by International Armed Forces,” every page of the document was stamped “Confidential.” According to media reports, the investigation documented “rape and sodomy” of “starving and homeless young boys” by UN troops from France. Some of the victims interviewed for the report were as young as nine years old. The abuse documented in the investigation reportedly took place at a UN-run center for internally displaced people in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital city Bangui, which has suffered from years of war as Islamist militants sought to take over the nation. Top UN officials, including the self-styled “High Commissioner for Human Rights,” are fully aware of the grotesque crimes and the retaliation against the man who exposed them.
Interviews with the child victims raped and abused by UN troops were conducted last year by various bureaucrats from different agencies, according to news reports. “The children identified represent just a snapshot of the numbers potentially being abused,” reported Sandra Laville at the Guardian on April 29. “The boys, some of whom were orphans, disclosed sexual exploitation, including rape and sodomy,… at M’Poko airport in Bangui. The children described how they were sexually exploited in return for food and money.”
“One 11-year-old boy said he was abused when he went out looking for food,” the explosive Guardian report continued. “A nine-year-old described being sexually abused with his friend by two French soldiers at the IDP camp when they went to a checkpoint to look for something to eat. The child described how the soldiers forced him and his friend to carry out a sex act. The report describes how distressed the child was when disclosing the abuse and how he fled the camp in terror after the assault. Some of the children were able to give good descriptions of the soldiers involved.”
Unsurprisingly, as the latest scandal surrounding predatory UN “peace” troops and retaliation against the whistleblower was unfolding in headlines around the world, the UN sought to justify its persecution of the aid worker, its lack of action, and the attempted cover-up. “The unedited version was, by a staff member’s own admission, provided unofficially by that staff member to the French authorities in late July, prior to even providing it to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) senior management,” a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said in a statement quoted by Reuters after the scandal broke. “This constitutes a serious breach of protocol, which, as is well known to all UN OHCHR officials, requires redaction of any information that could endanger victims, witnesses and investigators.”
It was unclear whether the UN actually believed that allowing French prosecutors to have access to the documents would be likely to “endanger” anyone or anything — except perhaps the UN, its lawless military campaigns, its already soiled reputation, and the ongoing rape of children by UN troops. Top UN officials, though, ignored warnings from Swedish authorities not to retaliate against the whistleblower, who risked his career to expose and halt the brutal abuse of children by UN forces. Sweden’s ambassador to the UN was quoted as warning senior UN leaders that “it would not be a good thing if the high commissioner for human rights forced” Kompass, the whistleblower, to resign his post. In fact, the Swedish ambassador even threatened to make the scandal public if the UN retaliated, and to engage in what media reports described as “a potentially ugly and harmful debate.” The UN did it anyway and is now facing additional scrutiny.
However, as The New American has been documenting for many years, the abuses by UN “peace” troops in CAR are hardly an isolated phenomenon. “The regular sex abuse by peacekeeping personnel uncovered here and the United Nations’ appalling disregard for victims are stomach-turning, but the awful truth is that this isn’t uncommon,” explained co-director Paula Donovan with the advocacy group Aids Free World, which provided the UN Human Rights Commission report on the sexual abuse to the Guardian. “The UN’s instinctive response to sexual violence in its ranks — ignore, deny, cover up, dissemble — must be subjected to a truly independent commission of inquiry with total access, top to bottom, and full subpoena power.”
Indeed, the latest UN “peacekeeping” horror story follows a long and horrendous pattern of UN abuse and exploitation of civilian populations — and especially of children. As The New American reported in February, for example, rather than protecting local civilians in Haiti, UN troops were behaving as ruthless predators, systematically preying on the population, and raping and sexually abusing even young children with impunity. In one particularly monstrous series of crimes, an investigative report highlighted the brutal raping 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.” The UN force then reportedly hired a kidnapper to hide their victim from investigators.
Instead of dealing with the ghastly and systemic abuses perpetrated under its latest decade-long occupation of Haiti — as in CAR and other nations occupied by the ruthless peace armies — UN military officials sought to cover it up and even retaliate against whistleblowers there, too. On top of that, the global outfit’s “peace” armies have been spreading deadly diseases among the traumatized population. Cholera spread by UN forces has already killed almost 10,000 Haitians so far, with hundreds of thousands falling ill. All the while, the UN continues to avoid any semblance of accountability under the guise of “immunity.” Meanwhile, shortly after shooting at protesters in Haiti late last year, UN troops gunned down unarmed protesters in Mali early this year while occupying that country, killing several and wounding more.
As The New American and numerous other sources have documented based on official reports and other information, systematic sexual exploitation and abuses of civilians by UN forces is beyond common. Just in the Ivorian town Toulepleu, for example, a poll conducted by the non-profit Save the Children revealed that eight out of 10 minor girls admitted to regularly being raped and forced into sexual acts by UN soldiers. “They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me,” an Ivorian girl known as “Elizabeth,” just 13 years old when she was gang-raped by UN troops, recounted to the BBC in 2008. “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.”
Similar horror stories have emerged from virtually every nation occupied by the global body’s “peace” armies. Virtually no UN soldiers have been held accountable, let alone the UN itself.
Going further back, history is also replete with UN-sponsored atrocities. In Rwanda, for example, UN “disarmament” bureaucrats forcibly disarmed civilians, many of whom were later exterminated in the government-backed 1994 genocide. As far back as the early 1960s, the UN waged a ruthless war against the anti-communist people of Katanga (which had seceded from the Congo) in a bid to force them to submit to a bloodthirsty communist dictator. From Congo and Somalia to Haiti and Cambodia, UN troops have developed a reputation as terror squads there to victimize and abuse innocents rather than “protect civilians” or keep the “peace.”
Despite that track-record of murder, abuse, rape, pedophilia, human trafficking, and terror, the Obama administration has been a leading cheerleader of the UN military and its “peacekeeping” operations. In recent months, the UN, Obama, and governments around the world have launched various plans to further build up the UN military with more funding, troops, weapons, technology, and more. Obama was also a leading cheerleader for the UN’s military occupations of the Central African Republic, Mali, and other nations, even committing U.S. support without asking Congress.
While the UN’s brutality and raping of children, along with the cover-ups, is horrifying enough, it is beyond outrageous that the American people are the chief financiers of the planetary entity’s savagery. Rather than sending more U.S. tax dollars to UN “peacekeeping” schemes, Congress should defund the entire “dictators club” and prepare to have the U.S. government make a full and permanent withdrawal.
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]
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