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In Canada, one soldier - out of nine charged - served two years of a five-year jail sentence after he and his friends photographed themselves smiling beside the blood-spattered, hands-bound corpse of a 16-year-old boy. Photographs - then published in the Village Voice - showed Italian, Canadian and Belgian soldiers engaged in torture, murder and sexual violence against children and adults. (This included putting Somali children in metal containers in the hot sun with no water until they died, according to the testimony of a former paratrooper.)
The United Nations has a responsibility to protect these children.
But its track record is abysmal.
Throughout Africa and Asia, refugee camps under U.N. control have been easy targets for roving militias to abduct, terrorize and train child recruits.
That's not all. Since the 1990s, U.N. peacekeepers and officials themselves have been involved in the torture, rape and sexual-trafficking of children and adults: in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia and Congo.
The United Nations, and the international community, has a moral responsibility to radically reform the refugee system before millions more children are put in harm's way.
What is most disturbing is that U.N. peacekeepers and officials accused of abusing children and adults have rarely been prosecuted or even punished.
The United Nations says it can only send "bad apples" back to their home countries to be prosecuted. They have never acknowledged that the problem is systemic and widespread.
What is worse, the people in charge of peacekeeping where abuse has occurred have not been held accountable for their underlings' actions. Where public outrage has demanded it, they have been removed from their country of responsibility. But instead of being demoted they have been promoted.
In 1997, two U.N. soldiers photographed holding a live Somali child above an open fire were acquitted by a Belgian military court. The fate of the child remains unknown.
In Canada, one soldier - out of nine charged - served two years of a five-year jail sentence after he and his friends photographed themselves smiling beside the blood-spattered, hands-bound corpse of a 16-year-old boy. Photographs - then published in the Village Voice - showed Italian, Canadian and Belgian soldiers engaged in torture, murder and sexual violence against children and adults. (This included putting Somali children in metal containers in the hot sun with no water until they died, according to the testimony of a former paratrooper.)
The photos, obtained by a 13-year-old Somali who stole a paratroopers' camera before fleeing, were obtained by the D.C.-based Somali Land mission, which helps Somalis obtain U.S. citizenship. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan - now at the center of the massive Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal - was head of U.N. peacekeeping operations when the incident occurred in 1993. At the time, the United Nations refused to denounce the incident or allegations of widespread torture and sexual abuse of children and adults.
Annan, of course, was promoted.
Flags were not raised, and the abuse continued.
In the Balkans, U.N. peacekeepers have been caught sexually trafficking women and children and keeping sex slaves, and accused of tipping off gangs that sexually traffic women and children before police raids. German troops were also accused of staging mock executions and rapes of civilians.
In Congo, at least 150 U.N. soldiers are alleged to have raped children and adults - in a population already violated by local militias and where rape is such a stigma that most victims remain silent. Similar scandals occurred in Cambodia and Bosnia.
And, of course, U.N. missions failed to stop genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. (Not only did the United Nations know beforehand of the Rwandan genocide, but officials on the ground were ordered only to "save" foreigners - not locals. In the Balkans, there was a clear bias toward the Serbs.)
That's not to mention the rampant drug-use and sex among U.N. employees, according to a recent memoir, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, published by U.N. whistleblowers.
And then of course there's the U.N.'s human-rights-abuse board, overseen by human-rights-abusing countries like China, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Libya.
The number of tsunami refugees is larger than anything the U.N. has overseen.
Now that the world is watching, reform must be immediate and widespread to protect the lives of tsunami survivors who are in the U.N.'s morally tainted hands.
Jennifer Gould Keil is a writer in New York.
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