Democrat left-winger Ilhan Omar wants the United Nations to take control of the U.S.-Mexico border to handle migrants “humanely” — despite its long record of child abuse scandals.
“We should do what any other country does, by dealing with this situation in a serious way,” Rep. Omar insisted at a public meeting in Minnesota– but the Somalia-born ‘Squad’ member was not advocating building a wall or adopting a robust policy of turning illegal migrants away, as sovereignist governments in Hungary and Italy have done, drastically reducing not only migrant numbers, but also migrant deaths.
Instead, she demanded an outside entity take control of the situation, demanding: “[W]e have to bring in the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees – an agency that has the expertise and the training to handle massive flows of refugees humanely.”
The current UN High Commissioner for Refugees is Filippo Grandi, an unelected career bureaucrat who has previously claimed “There is no migration/refugee crisis in Europe” and issued thinly-veiled attacks on President Trump’s border policy, saying “Let’s stop shouting about invasion, crisis, threats and walls”.
However, despite Grandi’s permissive attitude towards illegal immigration — shared by the leadership of sister UN agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IoM), which believes mass migration is “inevitable, necessary, and desirable” — Rep. Omar’s apparent belief in the UN’s ability to handle crises more “humanely” than American agencies is undercut by its long and troubling history of abuse scandals in areas falling under its purview, with the sexual exploitation of children standing out as a particular problem.
As long ago as 2007, UN officials admitted that over 300 civilians, police, and military personnel on UN peacekeeping duties had been investigated for sexual misconduct over a three-year period, with an internal report revealing that an additional 91 of the UN’s own staffers had been accused of rape, sexual assault, having sex with minors, offering jobs in exchange for sex, and other malfeasances.
This admission followed a separate BBC investigation which had unveiled systematic abuse by UN peacekeepers in Liberia, who had been demanding sex from teenage refugees in exchange for food, and cases in the Congo and South Sudan involving a UN logistics expert who was making pornographic videos and caught on the verge of raping a 12-year-old during a police raid, and UN peacekeepers from Bangladesh regularly exploiting children despite complaints to superior officers, among other scandals.
Even earlier, in the 1990s, mainstream media reports lamented that “The history of the UN peacekeeping operation in Bosnia is replete with stories of rape, vandalism and other abuses of the war-weary local population.”
Unfortunately, scandals of this nature involving the United Nations are not confined to previous decades — despite the U.S. government’s efforts to have offenders prosecuted, which have been resisted by the so-called international community.
For example, Breitbart News reported on allegations of rape by UN peacekeepers in South Sudan in April 2018, just months after the publication of a report on how “the United Nations ha[d] allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish in its offices around the world, with accusers ignored and perpetrators free to act with impunity” in January.
In July 2017, Breitbart News reported at length on “child rape crimes committed by UN staff and peacekeepers over at least the last two decades” — and how the international organisation was using “legal and sovereign immunity claims to prevent prosecution”.
The same year, the Associated Press reported that the Congo, home to the UN’s largest peackeeping force, held the “record for rape [and] child abuse” — with approximately 700 complaints against its personnel over twelve years — and that “victims of car accidents involving UN vehicles are more likely to receive compensation than victims of rape.”
And in 2016, Breitbart News reported on “a mass rape of women and girls in a United Nations camp for the displaced… in full view of UN peacekeepers, who did nothing to prevent the attacks” — suggesting that even where UN personnel may not be actively involved in abuse scandals, they are often unwilling (or, at best, unable) to combat them.
It is unclear why Rep. Omar believes children on the U.S.-Mexico border — who are occasionally separated from those claiming to be their parents in large part to ensure they are not being trafficked for sexual exploitation — would be safer in UN hands, given this track record.