By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 5/6/19]

On the United Nations official website, under the label of “What We Do,” the Organisation claims to be committed to four major objectives on this globe, the second of which is proudly described thus:

PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS
The term “human rights” was mentioned seven times in the UN's founding Charter, making the promotion and protection of human rights a key purpose and guiding principle of the Organization.  In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights brought human rights into the realm of international law.  Since then, the Organization has diligently protected human rights through legal instruments and on-the-ground activities.

In 2004, after hearing about 72 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse between May and September of that year alone by members of the peacekeeping forces, the late Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, sent an investigator to the Congo to see what was happening on-the-ground of that mission.  Aeid Raad Al Hussein, a top UN special advisor, wrote a damning report criticising the United Nation’s own investigations into the abuse. He said that the UN as a body had no criminal jurisdiction over their many peacekeepers,  the most it could do was to fire an offender; criminal accountability was up to the individual governments of member nations to carry out.

That is an astonishing loophole.  The 193 member states are responsible for instigating criminal prosecutions, yet their ability to have a process to go by in order to collect the evidence required for prosecutions is disgracefully inadequate.

From Cambodia, to Mozambique, Bosnia to the Congo, South Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Central Africa and Haiti, horrific abuses have been committed by both uniformed and civilian peacekeepers towards the vulnerable that they are employed to protect, since 1992 to the present day.

Valerie, a fourteen year-old girl selling bananas in the Congo was lured to a hotel by a French civilian peacekeeper earning $7k per month, Didier Bourget. He paid Valerie for sex, sometimes giving her as little as $2. Valerie did not report the abuse.

Bourget exploited and sexually abused between 20 - 25 young girls.  Eventually, he was arrested by French authorities, but was charged with only two counts of abuse.  He went to prison for nine years and has been the only civilian peacekeeper ever brought to justice for such a case, despite the UN declaring it would stamp out all forms of abuse.

Ten year-old Daniella was raped by two French peacekeepers.  She did not report it.

Fifteen year-old Alexi, and other boys around his age, were given left-over rations in exchange for performing oral sex on peacekeepers. A human rights investigator compiled a report on 20 abusive peacekeepers, which was ignored by the UN before it was leaked to the media.  An internal inquiry was launched which concluded that the complacency of the UN on this issue was itself an abuse of authority at the top levels of the Organisation.  Only one official lost their job.

A full criminal inquiry was then launched by the French, but prosecutors threw the case out as they said that testimony from the abused children was inconsistent, but other officials involved were sure that the evidence was clearly there.  An appeal was made to prosecute.  The request was denied. 

As vicious fighting became more intense in the Central African Republic, the UN stationed 800 Congolese troops to oversee and protect the people of Bambari, yet the Congolese army had already been accused by the UN of rape and shocking sexual violence against their own people.  This mission in Bambari resulted in a slew of new abuses, including an eleven year-old school girl, Amanda, who was raped and left pregnant by a Congolese peacekeeping soldier.

UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, created the new role of Victims Rights Advocate to address the issues of helping young victims like Amanda, Valerie, Daniella and Alexi, but the only help just one of them received was some counselling.

Peacekeeping forces now have to go through “sexual abuse and exploitation training” before they are deployed and are forbidden from socialising with the people they’re protecting. 

Out of the 193 member states of the UN, none have been persuaded to adopt the recommendations highlighted in the original report compiled by Al Hussein.

The Frontline award-winning documentary titled UN Sex Abuse Scandal, on which this article is based, saw its correspondent, Ramita Navai, reach out to the UN member states asking to interview their delegates about why they have not implemented the recommendations of the report, but none agreed to be interviewed. 

Since 2003, 1700 allegations of sexual abuse have been made resulting in only 53 perpetrators going to prison. 32 new allegations were made in 2018 alone.

French civilian ex-peacekeeper and sexual-abuser, Didier Bourget, is now a free man.  He is homeless and lives in the South of France.

The claim on the United Nation’s website, that the Organisation has “diligently protected human rights through legal instruments and on-the-ground activities” has been shown to be demonstrably false. 

The Geneva-based organisation Hear Their Cries exists for the sole reason of dealing with UN sexual abuse, claiming there to be 60,000 victims per decade, a figure they consider to be on the conservative side. Their website homepage displays this quote:

“First, sexual exploitation and abuse is not a problem of peacekeeping, it is a problem of the entire United Nations. Contrary to the information spreading that this is a question related to our peacekeeping operations, it is necessary to say that the majority of the cases of sexual exploitation and abuse are done by the civilian organizations of the United Nations, and not in peacekeeping operations.” 
[18 September 2017 Secretary-General's address to High-Level Meeting on the United Nations Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.]

The United Nations extends ridiculous amounts of time, energy and finances to have shit-hole countries morally lecture highly developed, democratic Western countries, like New Zealand, when it consistently fails to protect Earth’s most vulnerable women and children in said shit-hole countries.  What a farce.

It's high time for individual Western countries to stop funding the United Nations. The Organisation is now a mere facilitator of the worst human rights abusers in the world as it rapaciously exists on the lucrative dime of charity and global government funding.  This is pure wickedness.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​ ​​​​​​
​

By Olivia Pierson

The other day, I found myself in a discussion about parenting with a woman who styles her thinking along the lines of Eastern mysticism - yes, to many that is still fashionable.  It yielded an interesting difference in our view toward our adult children - and it’s one that I encounter from time to time.

Said succinctly, the difference is that I say that I view my children as mine, whereas my acquaintance says she does not view her son as hers.  Ownership is an egocentric, therefore erroneous, attitude toward parenting, she concluded. She took her opinion from the words of Lebanese/American poet Kahlil Gibran in his little book The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far. 
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Now, I admit that these words are poetic - profound even - and they certainly contain some wisdom.  Many would say that they are hard to argue with for they ring with rhapsodic beauty. 

Yet, I’m a realist.  Gibran’s words seem to come from someone in the autumn years of a life (though he didn’t make it into his own), where usually a person’s scale of perspective toward their children has been seasoned with a natural detachment before life’s final curtain inevitably falls. 

My contention with this take on parenting lies in the firm belief that when children are young and in the process of developing, they need adults who unashamedly claim them as their own.  Why so?  Because “the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself” (evolution/natural selection) are brought into existence by, to and for parents to call their own. Ownership is exactly the right concept to apply to one’s young, since the young who belong to no-one among us are known as orphans, and orphans desire more than anything else in the world to be claimed; to belong. 

Literature is laden with stories and themes about children whose overwhelming desire is to be claimed as somebody’s, from street-wise Gavroche in Les Miserables (who has parents that neither want nor love him) to precocious, red-headed, “romantical” Anne, the orphaned protagonist in Anne of Green Gables.  

A powerful theme in Herman Melville’s great, sea-faring epic, Moby Dick, with its famous opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” provides nothing short of a morality study on how human beings relate to nature, including other human beings, through a crew of orphans, exiles and social-outcasts who make up the central characters on the ship.  Melville penned these sensitive words which, in my view, are more poetically eloquent than Gibran’s:

Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm… Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

Aside from giving children the incomparable gift of belonging and with that an identity bound into a family name, the most far-reaching gift to be bestowed upon a young mind is a strong value system - i.e your thoughts, your views of right and wrong, your judgements about how things are and ought to be.  It’s not to say that it will all be correct, let alone be adopted by your children, but it has the benefit of serving the young as a solid reference point to compare all other new thoughts and values against.  

Children who are not given this kind of conscious gift end up being sponges who absorb every whim and impulse of a pervading, impersonal culture which doesn’t give a fig about their well-being - whereas parents do. Providing they are not psychopaths, it’s much wiser for parents to consciously and confidently instil their own thoughts and values into the minds of their children than it is to leave them wide open and susceptible to the fads and fancies of a wider culture’s unaccountable grip.

So, contrary to what my acquaintance likes to say, and what Gibran’s poem advises, while my children were children, they were my children and I confidently gave them my thoughts to ponder, as did their father.  Now they are very much their own people, with their own thoughts and values, which are frequently measured against the contemplations of both their parents. But they are still our children and by blood and kin still belong to us, and always will.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​ ​​​​​​