From: The New American
Vol. 13, No. 20
September 29, 1997
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?