Free Republic

(Reuters) - United Nations peacekeeping missions routinely avoid using force to protect civilians who are under attack, intervening in only 20 percent of cases despite being authorized to do so by the U.N. Security Council, an internal U.N. study found. "There is a persistent pattern of peacekeeping operations not intervening with force when civilians are under attack," the report by the Office of Internal Oversight Services said. "Peacekeepers are absent from many locations when civilians come under attack, and when they are present, are unable or unwilling to prevent serious physical harm from being inflicted," the 26-page report said. :snip:...

The video is profoundly disturbing. It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (Minustah), seemingly in the act of raping an 18-year-old Haitian youth. Two have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move. Perhaps the most unnerving part of the video is the constant chorus of laughter from the alleged perpetrators; to them, apparently, it's just a drunken party.

<p>ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — United Nations peacekeepers in Ivory Coast enticed underage girls in a poor part of the West African nation to exchange sex for food, according to a United States Embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.</p> <p>The cable written in January 2010 focuses on the behavior of Beninese peacekeepers stationed in the western town of Toulepleu, an area that has been at the crosshairs of the nation's 10-year-long conflict.</p>

United Nation's Chief Kofi Annan's Legacy of Failure by Nile Gardiner (December 16, 2006) http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4867 United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his swan song last week at the Truman Presidential Library in Missouri.[1] It was a thinly veiled parting shot at U.S. foreign policy delivered by an embittered U.N. leader seething with self-righteous indignation and resentment. Annan's Missouri speech will go down in history as one of the most blatant assaults on a U.S. administration by a serving U.N. official. In his condescending remarks, Annan warned, with Washington clearly in his sights, that "no nation can make itself secure...

US Ambassador John Bolton strongly rebuked remarks by a senior UN official criticizing Washington's stance on key UN issues, demanding that they be repudiated to avoid doing serious damage to the world body. In a speech delivered Tuesday at a New York conference on global leadership, UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown slammed what he called the prevailing US "practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics." "To acknowledge an America reliant on international institutions is not perceived to be good politics...

After listening to Hurricane Katrina victims and disaster relief workers for several hours Friday, as well as touring parts of New Orleans, United Nations expert on human rights Arjun K. Sengupta, called America's response to the disaster "shocking." "Something went wrong and it appears to be a gross violation of human rights," said Sengupta, United Nations independent expert on human rights and extreme poverty. He said the federal government has responded slowly and with poor communications to help some of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens. "The people in New Orleans and the worst affected areas were very poor and...