The left's beloved UN

[MO]

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

U.N. troops buy sex
from teen refugees
Mothers as young as 13 need food for their babies


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted: May 25, 2004

United Nations peacekeeping troops are sexually exploiting teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to an investigation by the The Independent newspaper of London.

Many of the girls, as young as 13, are mothers who give up their bodies to the U.N. soldiers in exchange for food to feed their hungry children.

The girls, who live in the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, northeastern Congo, already are victims of multiple rape by militiamen.

The British paper interviewed girls and aid workers who said every night girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining U.N. compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers.

In exchange, they receive a banana or a cake.

The U.N. has pledged a "zero tolerance" attitude to cases of sexual misconduct by its respresentatives and has announced an inquiry into the allegations. But the London paper says doubts remain about the effectiveness of the probe and the ability of the U.N. to bring the perpetrators to justice.

A 13-year-old girl, Faela, told The Independent her infant son is the result of rape by militiamen in her village. Consequently, she is ostracized in the camp and has no one to take care of her.

"It is easy for us to get to the U.N. soldiers," she told the paper. "We climb through the fence when it is dark, sometimes once a night, sometimes more."

The Independent said it spoke to more than 30 girls over five days, and half said they made the journey under the fence to the compound run by MONUC, the U.N. mission in Congo.

A worker with the aid group that manages the camp, Atlas, said staff knew about the sex trade but were afraid to address it.

"There is nothing to stop them and the girls need food," he told the paper. "It is best to keep quiet, though. I am frightened that if I say something I may lose my job, and I have children of my own to feed."

The head of the U.N. in Bunia, Dominique McAdams, said she she saw no evidence of sexual violence in the camp, although she believe it was taking place.
www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38649

[MO]

[MO]

Come on now! We have more liberals on this board than conservatives! It's such an open board that my conservative friends won't post here because of all the obnoxious hit and run liberals. They outnumber the regular conservatives so much that it may as well be a liberal board. None of you have a thing to say about this? You just want to pretend it isn't so?

[Nick]

Looking for a fight for the sake of it, then?

The only thing I would say is that presumably these troops are not functioning in a vacuum. They are not purely UN troops, they belong to a country. Which country? Why is that countries discipline so lax?

I agree it is abhorrent, but I don't think it is necessarily unique to the UN. I mean, I have heard rumours that American soldiers have behaved with less perfect respect for the local community on occasion. Polish soldiers are doing the same, it seems.

I would suggest it is a matter for the management of the UN to investigate and root out, wouldn't you?
I think this is a very bad time for a patriotic American to suggest that any army has a perfect track record on abusing locals, though.

The UN was an American idea, by the way.

Nick

[MO]

What ever, hun.
I'll wait for a better excuse.
Yours was lame.
Why isn't this front page for weeks?

[ANNA]

why is this so suprising[shadow=red,left,300]TEXT
I just wanna know why and how this bull shit goes on AND... WYH WE KNOW AND OR DO NOTHING ABOUT IT
.THIS makes me sad having to sell your body to eat. and to think about how much we have...

[Nick]

MO said:

What ever, hun.
I'll wait for a better excuse.
Yours was lame.
Why isn't this front page for weeks?

It wasn't an excuse. There is no excuse for this sort of behaviour. I just don't think it is inherently a failing of the UN in the way implied.

Nick

[frankiegoestostoke]

Firstly to the title of this thread "The left's beloved UN". By juxtaposing this title, alongside the article, you seem to be trying to link left wing politics with the rape of teenage girls, which of course is completely ridiculous, and verging on propganda.

Secondly I agree with Nick, although these acts are disgusting, and of course there is no excuse for them to be taking place, they could be taking place in any given military institution under the right (or rather the wrong) circumstances. This obviously has nothing to do with the UN as an institution, rather it is to do the circumstances of these particular soldiers in this particular country. Thus to use these terrible events as some kind of thesis to an argument as to why the UN shouldn't exist is illogical.

By the posting of this article MO, are you advocating the UN peacekeeping force pulls out of D.R. Congo?

[MO]

you seem to be trying to link left wing politics with the rape of teenage girls, which of course is completely ridiculous, and verging on propganda.

That would be ridiculous if that is what I was trying to do. If you guys come away with that notion, you must not have a flair for the obvious. I was simply trying to make the point that the UN is not the benevolent and wonderful that can solve the world's problems. They are corrupt to the core and should not be handed our national sovereignty. My other point was that this news was not page one for three weeks, as it would be if it were something that reflected badly on US troops.

Maybe you guys could try again without the knee jerk.

[rush22]

First of all, you are definitely trying to link the notion that "the right" does not like the UN, which is not the case. It's ignorant and childish. You are assuming that "the left" believes the UN to be "benevolent and wonderful," which is a gross, and inaccurate generalization of attitudes of "the left," to say nothing about any attitudes members of the right might have.

Furthermore, to speculate that the UN is "corrupt to the core" from the actions of UN soldiers running a prostitution ring, is pure nonsense. If this is, in fact, indicative in some way of systemic corruption in the highest levels, please provide reasoning behind your speculation. If, as I believe, this is merely a form of character assassination, an ad hominem attack, against the United Nations, then you have done the political party you say you stand behind a disservice by painting the UN with a false brush, brandishing it with no respect for the intellect of your fellow republicans. UN soldiers were running a prosititution ring, and the UN, with a zero-tolerance policy, has said that they will deal with the problem. The fact that somehow, and somewhere, "doubts" remain, should indeed be cause for followup and investigation, but it still remains to be seen whether those doubts are justifiable. You will find no apologists for the actions of those UN soldiers amongst liberals, conservatives, or inside the UN. Their actions have shamed the UN as an institution, and the UN has properly shown that it in no way does it endorse this behavior.

If you would like me to contrast this with the actions of the US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and the response of the Bush administration I will. The reason for my not mentioning it (though the comparison would be quite relevant) is so I may deal foremost with the issue that you have presented.

[scummybear]

Conspiracy, Not Democracy

The UN was born in treason and conspiracy. The revered UN Charter, recall, was drafted at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference under the direction of one of our nation’s most infamous traitors: Alger Hiss. One of the top Soviet agents in our State Department, Hiss was really working for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, one of the most ruthless, genocidal megalomaniacs in world history. Working side by side with Hiss on the Charter were Russia’s top diplomat-agents V. M. Molotov, Andrei Vyshinsky, and Andrei Gromyko. Also assisting in this plot were 15 key State and Treasury Department officials (including Victor Perlo, Nathan Silvermaster, Lauchlin Curie, and Noel Field) who, like Hiss, were later exposed by official investigations as members of secret Communist cells in Washington.

Following the Dumbarton Oaks conference, Hiss served as top adviser to the ailing President Roosevelt at the Yalta summit with Stalin, where he worked in favor of the Communists to arrange more concessions on the UN Charter. Finally, Hiss helped put the finishing touches on the Charter at the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco, where he served as acting secretary-general. And it was Hiss who personally carried the Charter to Washington for Senate ratification at the conclusion of the conference.

Equally important as the San Francisco conference was the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which established the UN system’s economic arms: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Heading up this effort were Hiss’ fellow Soviet agents Harry Dexter White (the first to head the IMF) and Virginius Frank Coe, assisted by the famous British socialist economist John Maynard Keynes. White and Coe placed other Communists in these institutions, which became the means for siphoning billions of dollars from American taxpayers to finance socialist, communist, and fascist programs and regimes. At the UN itself, Hiss picked for key posts U.S. citizens who were Communist agents. Many more foreign Communists were also brought in to serve in the UN bureaucracy, where they joined still more Soviet agents in the diplomatic corps of the various countries. In 1952, Senator James O. Eastland stated in a Senate Judiciary Committee report, that "there is today in the UN among the American employees there, the greatest concentration of Communists that this Committee has ever encountered."
(William F. Jasper)

Thomas Jefferson warned: "When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." The CFR’s one-world engineers know that this iron principle applies with even greater force to their monstrous creation, the UN. They urge us further into the trap with calls for greater engagement and participation. Separation, not participation, is the only option for Americans who value liberty.

A small group of misguided people can no way compare to an organization that has engaged in crimminal activities for half a century. So, have at it. . .

www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-253.html

[rush22]

Well, there's no Soviet communists there anymore, and whatever perceived conspiracy it was that the former Soviet Union was trying to accomplish obviously failed miserably, considering that the Soviet Union no longer even exists. It is quite interesting historically, but irrelevant today as far as I can tell. The second last paragraph seems hypocritical. Maybe when Thomas Jefferson was talking about concentration of power, he was warning about the current position of the United States, and not the UN, within the world. The last line is most hypocritical, and I don't know why you included it. Do you not feel the same way about the criminal actions of the US?

[scummybear]

Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib. Yes, It wasn't a good thing. Aright already. You keep dragging this around with you like some tattered penalty flag, throwing it out at any opportunity. Because its all you have to hold onto. Lets compare apples to apples. In the grand scheme of things, we are doing what we set out to accomplish; for ourselves and the Iraqi people. The thread started as a topic about the U.N., and you flew in with your "scandal" badge.

The point of the post was to illustrate how the U.N.'s past relates to to the U.N. today. And yes, The Soviet Union is no more (thanks to the U.S.), but how does that detract from the same type of mindset and people that we are facing today?

And how is the last line hypocritical?
Something has been done about the offenses that were commited with regard to the prison. People are being punished, fired, etc. . . but it will never be good enough for the left.

Hypocritical? Go do some research on your U.N.

[MO]

First of all, you are definitely trying to link the notion that "the right" does not like the UN, which is not the case. It's ignorant and childish.

You did the same thing Frankie did. You're trying to critique not what I have said, but what you mistakenly think I have inferred. What a master baiter. Nice try, but stop putting words in my mouth. I don't care for the personal insults based on your screwed up, amateur attempts at mind reading.

[rush22]

I only "drag out" Abu Ghraib because MO's argument, as implied, is that because the UN soldiers were running a prostitution ring, this is good evidence that the UN is corrupt. By that logic, the fact that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib beating and torturing and raping prisoners to death is good evidence that the Bush administration is corrupt. Get your heads out of your asses. The United States government is not "benevolent and wonderful either," and a prostitution ring for food, while horrible, is no comparison to beating innocent, YES INNOCENT, people to death and playing with their genitals after they have died. And the audacity of the Bush administration for trying to cover this up and not giving two craps about what state those soldiers are in?!! These are reservists, they don't even know what they're doing. "Rough 'em up a bit for the private contractors boys!" F***ing amazing.

Second of all, the last line is hypocritical because you are condemning an institution based on its having "engaged in crimminal(sic) activities for half a century". Why don't you condemn the United States government for having "engaged in crimminal(sic) activities for half a century"? What's the difference?!!