Toni Oyry, Reuters AlertNet, 5 July 2007
The United Nations is supposed to play global policeman, but what happens when its own peacekeepers break the law?
That’s a question raised by a string of incidents allegedly involving Pakistani and Bangladeshi peacekeeping troops in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo in 2005.
In a debate this week at the Chatham House foreign policy think tank in London, BBC Africa Editor Martin Plaut presented some of the evidence against the troops, aired in a BBC report in May.
The U.N. mission in Congo, MONUC, which began in 1999, is to date the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation in the world body’s history. Although it has been viewed as a relative success following the end of a conflict described as the World War of Africa, the deployment has also been plagued by allegations of misconduct.
These include sexual abuse of minors, killing of Congolese prisoners and the trading of weapons confiscated from local militias for gold.