Glenn Reynolds links to an article in the Times Online about the sexual abuse and exploitation of Congolese women and children.

HOME-MADE pornographic videos shot by a United Nations logistics expert in the Democratic Republic of Congo have sparked a sex scandal that threatens to become the UN’s Abu Ghraib. The expert was a Frenchman who worked at Goma airport as part of the UN’s $700 million-a-year effort to rebuild the war-shattered country. When police raided his home they discovered that he had turned his bedroom into a studio for videotaping and photographing sex sessions with young girls.

The bed was surrounded by large mirrors on three sides, according to a senior Congolese police officer. On the fourth side was a camera that he could operate from the bed with a remote control.

When the police arrived the man was allegedly about to rape a 12-year-old girl sent to him in a sting operation. Three home-made porn videos and more than 50 photographs were found.

The case has highlighted the apparently rampant sexual exploitation of Congolese girls and women by the UN’s 11,000 peacekeepers and 1,000 civilians at a time when the UN is facing many problems, including the Iraqi “oil-for-food” scandal and accusations of sexual harassment by senior UN staff in Geneva and New York.

It gets worse.

Investigations have already turned up 150 allegations of sexual misconduct by peacekeepers and UN staff despite the UN’s official policy of “zero-tolerance”. One found 68 allegations of misconduct in the town of Bunia alone.

UN insiders told The Times that two Russian pilots based in Mbandaka paid young girls with jars of mayonnaise and jam to have sex with them. They filmed the sessions and sent the tapes to Russia. But the men were tipped off and left the area before UN investigators arrived.

The Moroccan peacekeeping contingent based in Kisangani — a town on the Congo River with no road links to the outside world — had one of the worst reputations. A soldier accused of rape was apparently hidden in the barracks for a year.

In July 2002 the rebel commander Major-General Jean Pierre Ondekane, who subsequently became Minister of Defence in a postwar transitional government, told a top UN official that all that Monuc (the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo) would be remembered for in Kisangani was “for running after little girls”.

This story is absent from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, and a host of various news sources do not view the story of international soldiers, while wearing the U.N.'s baby blue berets, repeatedly raping and exploiting children as news worthy. Unlike Abu Ghraib, we will not be subject to the daily barrage of compromising photographs plastered on the front pages of French, Moroccan, Canadian, Russian, Ukrainian or Uruguayan peacekeepers raping children.

The New York Times does see one story from the Congo that is fit to print, however. This one casts the United Nations peacekeeping force in a favorable light, as U.N. troops actually used force against a local Congolese militia. Curiously enough, the rampant rape of women was one of the causes for concern.

Rape was a constant danger. One activist, Sofi Aromborac, has a list of 282 girls and women who have been raped over the past two years. "Even if you were an old woman like me, you could be raped," she said.

Concerned about the rising abuses, United Nations peacekeepers, most from Nepal, surrounded the militia base on the hill overlooking the town in early December and ordered the fighters to surrender. When they refused, the two sides exchanged fire, with the guerrillas eventually breaking through the soldiers' line and retreating.

In an extensive article on abuses in the Congo, which include rape, there is nary a mention of the abuses by United Nations peacekeepers. The story of U.N. troops exploiting and raping women and children in the Congo far exceeds the crimes committed in Abu Ghraib by American soldiers, but it will be buried like the United Nations Oil for Food scandal, which far exceeded the all of American cooperate scandals combined, or the sexual harassment at the United Nations headquarters.

Internationalism and its vehicle for propagation, the United Nations, must be shielded from criticism at all costs by the liberal elites. It is American abuses of terrorists that are important, after all. Nothing to see here. Move along.