Column: Real U.N. Reform
Real U.N. Reform
Rep. Boozman's Column for the Week of June 25, 2005
Washington, Jun 25 - The United Nations (UN) is in desperate need of reform. News reports on the Oil-for-Food scandal and the widespread sexual abuse of woman and young girls by UN peacekeepers give show us how badly reform is needed, but how many people really know the full depth of these outrages?
In the Congo, there have been reports of girls as young as thirteen being raped every night by UN peacekeepers. Sometimes the girls are forced into "survival sex" just so they can have food to eat; sometimes they're just forced to have sex under threat of beatings. A senior UN official from France has even been prosecuted for running a pedophilia and child pornography ring in Congo, going so far as to send pictures of himself raping those children to his friends.
And sexual abuses by men of many nations wearing blue helmets are not unique to the mission in Congo. In Sierra Leone, it has been alleged that peacekeepers systematically rape women. In 2001, there were sex trafficking allegations against the UN police mission in Bosia, but the U.N. quashed the investigation before it could be determined whether UN personnel were selling Eastern European women into slavery in Bosnian brothels. There have also been allegations of sexual misconduct during a UN peacekeeping mission in Burundi, and there have been investigations of UN civilians in Haiti, East Timor and Kosovo over the last few years.
Somehow, the words "sexual abuse" are not strong enough to capture the awful depravity of these brutal sexual crimes against the women and children UN peacekeepers were sent to protect.
My colleagues and I have been addressing these outrages in the House International Relations Africa and Human Rights Subcommittee. The recruitment and discipline of UN peacekeepers are just two of the ways the UN needs serious reform. And a serious reform bill is just what we have in H.R. 2745, the Henry J. Hyde United Nations Reform Act of 2005. The bill, which I voted for when it was recently passed by the House of Representatives, gives the United States the power to force serious change at the UN by withholding half of our annual financial contribution until changes are certified.
We supply $438 million, or almost one quarter of the total annual UN budget. Threatening to withhold half of our contribution will be a powerful incentive for the UN to purge itself of the corruption and outrages that we see in daily news reports.
The bill includes a number of reforms the UN must undertake before it can receive the American people's full financial contribution, including the creation of independent oversight board that will address issues like the Oil-for-Food scandal and peacekeeper sex crimes.
A number of UN programs that have seen millions of dollars skimmed off into the pockets of UN officials must be made voluntarily funded programs. Well-functioning programs such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme are voluntarily funded programs, and as such have higher levels of accountability and efficiency that prevent accounting abuses. Scandal-ridden programs will face clear accountability when their funding is derived from the voluntary contributions of member states.
Another key component of the bill will force the UN to reform its membership standards for the Commission on Human Rights, so that human rights abusers such as Cuba and Sudan will not be able to hold seats on it in complete mockery of its purpose.
There is much good the UN could accomplish if it were purged of corruption. And there are many decent soldiers from all around the world serving honorably in difficult peacekeeping missions, though the unpunished outrages of a few have shamed their work. This bill will insist that the UN implement serious reforms if it is to receive the full contribution of the American taxpayers. It is the right approach and I hope my colleagues in the Senate will pass this necessary reform immediately.
http://www.boozman.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=29866