Monday, March 14, 2005

Boys will be boys!

Having a hard time explaining the UN Sexual Abuses Pandemic? You know, the "peacekeepers" bothering every animate object they can find? Well, Opinipundit points to an interview with Kofi Annan's new butt boy, er, Chief of Staff, Malloch Brown that 'splains it all:
WALLACE: But why over the last few weeks? The fact is, in Cambodia (search), in the early 1990s, there were allegations of this, and a top U.N. official said at the time, "Boys will be boys."

This isn't a recent incident. This has been going on for more than a decade. Why are you sending officials out in recent weeks saying this will not be tolerated?

MALLOCH BROWN: Because it's happened in some missions, and when it happened in Cambodia, it was attacked there, and we tried to address it.

But I think the problem is, we are dealing with something which in some ways is as old as soldiering itself. And the difference is that the U.S. military or my own military, the British military, have in recent decades invested a huge amount of leadership and resources to break these old habits of occupying military groups, to make them realize that this abuse of women in the community is utterly unacceptable.

In our case, our very underfunded peacekeeping missions, with soldiers stitched together from Bangladesh, Jordan, many other different countries, all under their own different commands and without the resources to give them the other recreational options, that the standards of behavior have not been modernized in the same way that has happened with the American or the British military, and we've now got to tackle that.

And the governments who support us in the Security Council have to help us do it by improving the lines of command and putting the resources in it to give soldiers other options.
I guess he means we should dig deep to give these "peacekeepers" some knitting and crafts kits and other "recreational options". You ever notice how at the United Nations the answer is always to give them some more cash? They're funny that way, I guess.