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Apparently those closest to the front lines of the UN operation know without question how thoroughly corrupt and incompetent the organization truly is, despite its lofty rhetoric and noble goals.
Kathryn Bolkovac was a former Lincoln, Nebraska, policewoman who worked for UN security in Bosnia as an employee of the American security company DynCorp. As part of her job, Bolkovac uncovered massive sex corruption, human trafficking, and prostitution rings in which UN officials and policemen were active participants. Girls as young as fifteen were sold into sex slavery to bar owners, where they were forced to dance naked and perform sex acts for their owners and bar customers. If they refused, they were locked up, starved, beaten, and raped.
In 2000, having failed to get any satisfactory investigative action by informing her immediate superiors, Bolkovac sent an e-mail to Jacques Paul Klein, the head of the UN mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In it she described the role of UN officials in exploiting the women they were supposed to be protecting from the sex trade.
Soon after sending the e-mail, Bolkovac was demoted and removed from front-line investigative police work. In 2001, she was summarily fired, allegedly over “time sheet irregularities.” She denies that charge and says she was fired for exposing the corruption of the UN mission in Bosnia. Bolkovac told a court in England that Mike Stiers, the deputy commissioner of the international police task force, had been flippant in dismissing the victims of the sex trade as “just prostitutes.”
Years before in Bosnia, UN soldiers stood by passively and did nothing while more than eight thousand Muslim men whom the UN had promised to protect were systematically slaughtered in the “safe area” of Srebrenica. There as elsewhere, the UN’s corruption and incompetence were endemic, as eyewitnesses have testified repeatedly.
Dr. Andrew Thomson, a liberal and a former UN employee, has coauthored a book entitled Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth, which criticizes the organization’s dismal record of failure at peacekeeping. He was fired by the UN for writing the following line of advice to the people of the world: “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.”15 Dr. Thompson’s coauthor, former UN human-rights lawyer Kenneth Cain, once worked as a human-rights observer in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Liberia. Cain has written a searing critique of both the UN organization and Kofi Annan’s leadership of it, in which he observes that “while the media and conservative politicians and pundits have suddenly discovered that the UN has been catastrophically incompetent, this is very old news to anyone with the mud—or blood—of a UN peacekeeping mission on his boots.”
Cain sums up the matter in two sentences: “When the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.” How many people? According to Cain, at least a quarter of a million in Liberia, and almost four times that many in Rwanda. “But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, what is?” he wants to know. “If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organization’s ideals. . . . The bodies burn today in Darfur—and the women are raped—amid the sound of silence from Annan. How many genocides, the prevention of which is the UN’s very raison d’etre, will we endure before the left is moved to criticize Annan?”
Perhaps the blackest blight on the record of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa is the 1994 massacre in Rwanda, in which an estimated one million of the minority Tutsi tribesmen were brutally murdered by their rivals, the majority Hutu tribe.
A powerful movie, Hotel Rwanda (MGM, 2004), graphically chronicles the many cold-blooded atrocities that were committed by the rampaging Hutus as the Belgian and UN troops stood by powerless to intervene. But to understand this act of wanton genocide properly, a little background is needed.
In 1990, Boutros Boutros-Ghali was Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs. Part of his job was to sell weapons, and in that capacity he approved an initial $5.8 million arms deal with Rwanda. That sale opened the door to others, so that between 1990 and 1992, Cairo shipped $26 million worth of ammunition, grenades, rocket launchers, and mortar bombs to Rwanda. It was those arms that the Hutus later used to crush the Tutsis.18 When the wholesale slaughter began in 1994, Boutros-Ghali had moved up in the world—he was now the Secretary-General of the United Nations. The head of the UN’s peacekeeping operations at that time was none other than Kofi Annan.
The UN Force Commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, sent an urgent fax to Annan requesting permission to defend the helpless Tutsi refugees who were flooding into UN compounds seeking safety and protection. Annan’s fax back to Dallaire ordered him to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality and forbade him to protect the desperate Tutsis. Boutros-Ghali refused to intervene. Later the UN troops were withdrawn completely from the scene of the carnage, leaving behind up to 800,000 hapless Tutsis, many of them bludgeoned to death with clubs or hacked into pieces with machetes by the bloodthirsty rampaging Hutus. The world watched for weeks as the bloodbath continued unchecked.
Finally, when the massacre was complete, the UN sent in more soldiers. “You are all late—weeks and weeks late!” Dallaire said with disgust.
At a State of the World Forum panel discussion held in New York City in 2000, films of the Rwanda massacre were shown and the failures of the UN were discussed. Dallaire and others chose to lay the blame for the UN’s fatal paralysis on the nations of the Security Council, who could not agree to act. “Every sovereign state that puts self-interest before humanity,” Dallaire charged, “that’s the dogma of the global market.”20 But some may question whether the fact that Boutros-Ghali had been instrumental in arming the Hutus had anything to do with his refusal to defend the Tutsis, when he easily could have done so with the UN troops he already had in place.
Kofi Annan went right along with the program in 1994 and was rewarded two years later with his own promotion to Secretary-General. Since then, his record of success in UN peacekeeping missions has been just as dismal as Boutros-Ghali’s was before him. Is all of this mere coincidence, or is there a pattern emerging here?