My new column today focuses on the United Nations’ continuing rape scandal. In addition to the crisis in the Congo, I remind readers of the rampant sex crimes uncovered in Bosnia:

In 2001, American whistleblower Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska policewoman who worked for U.N. security in Bosnia, uncovered scores of sex crime allegations and prostitution rings in the Balkans involving her fellow U.N. employees. Girls were forced to dance in bars for U.N. personnel and beaten or raped, Bolkovac reported. After being fired from her job for “time sheet irregularities,” she told a British tribunal that Mike Stiers, the international police task force’s deputy commissioner, flippantly dismissed victims of human trafficking as “just prostitutes.”

The column concludes:

This mother of all humanitarian abuse scandals at the U.N. is only just beginning to pierce the world’s conscience. Annan has trotted out a refurbished zero-tolerance policy and is trumpeting a few arrests in Morocco. But such faint-hearted damage control measures are not enough.

It’s time to rethink the nearly half-billion dollars in aid we send to U.N. peace-keeping operations. How much more aid must we squander on holier-than-thou wolves in do-gooders’ clothing? For the sake of the innocents raped and pillaged in the name of humanitarianism, let’s get stingy.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) has expressed the same sentiment:

“Until the U.N. is willing to take decisive action and take responsibility for these acts, we should look seriously at the funding portion of the peace-keeping operations,” says a foreign policy aide to Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I don’t know any other way to force Annan to pay attention.”

E-mail Sen. Brownback here.

Update: Meanwhile, in Iraq, U.N. inspectors spent their days boozing…

Update II: More Congo coverage at Strategy Page.

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