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Peacekeeping and civilian staff based in Juba are accused of picking up young children and forcing them to have sex. (telegraph.co.uk)

By Kate Holt in Juba and Sarah Hughes
telegraph.co.uk
January 2007

The UN said today that it would launch an investigation after the Daily Telegraph reported allegations that UN personnel have abused children in southern Sudan.

Members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12, The Daily Telegraph reported today.

The abuse allegedly began two years ago when the UN mission in southern Sudan (UNMIS) moved in to help rebuild the region after a 23-year civil war. The UN has up to 10,000 military personnel in the region, of all nationalities and the allegations involve peacekeepers, military police and civilian staff.

The first indications of possible sexual exploitation emerged within months of the UN force’s arrival and The Daily Telegraph has seen a draft of an internal report compiled by the UN children’s agency Unicef in July 2005 referring to the problem.

This paper has learnt of more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

“I was sitting by the river the first time it happened,” said Jonas, 14, one of more than 20 children who claimed they had been abused this way.

“A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left.”

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The New American
by William Norman Grigg
June 28, 2004

During the Senate’s debate over ratifying the League of Nations Covenant in 1919, Senator William Borah (R-Idaho) sought to disabuse his colleagues of the idea that a world “peace force” would be a blessing to mankind. An international “peacekeeping” army, warned Borah, 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.”

Nearly a century later, Borah’s prophetic words were echoed by former UN civilian “peacekeeper” Andrew Thomson, a coauthor of the new book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures. Thomson, a physician who presently works as a medical officer at UN Headquarters in New York, has served as an aid worker in UN missions to Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Bosnia and Haiti. On the basis of his experience, Thomson offers a trenchant warning to readers: “If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.”

The world body’s self-portrait as guardian of human rights is belied by the fact that “almost a million civilians [whom] our peacekeepers were supposed to protect died in two genocides,” Thomson observes in the book, which was coauthored by Kenneth Cain and Heidi Postlewait. (In fact, this estimate is much too low, given that Rwandan sources estimate that as many as 1.1 million people were slaughtered in that nation’s 1994 genocide.) When the Blue Helmets aren’t passively abetting genocide, or actively facilitating it by disarming targeted populations, they find other ways of inflicting misery in the name of “world peace.”

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