What is coming out of the UN camp these days is increasingly reading like a typical African leadership story, at least by western standards. And it is alarming.
The British Broadcasting Corporation recently published an article to the effect that a Pakistani UN peacekeeping mission in Mongbwalu in north-eastern DRC, got too carried away by avarice and traded back the guns they had got from disarming Congolese militias for gold. Worse still, this mission established regular business partners, and even mutinously held brother UN forces at gunpoint.
Why ever would any UN-led mission get embroiled in such scandalous behaviour? But it has become the norm with this organization set up by well-meaning world leaders to execute noble objectives. Corruption scandals, abuse of office, criminal negligence as in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide case, and a host of negatives, are no longer the exclusive preserve of African leaders. Their big brothers have also arrived, and are doing it with aplomb.
Whereas before there would be an immediate deluge of resignations over such an embarrassment, the game of cover-ups and denials has to be played, as ‘tribal chiefs’ would. Else, why do we not see the commander of the UN forces in Congo for example, taking some responsibility?
To some of us in Africa, the UN and its major handlers are supposed to be paragons of virtue, and therefore supposed to behave as such. Even a mere whiff of impropriety should be waved away vigorously, lest they lose the moral high ground to lecture a president of an African country about corruption, or another about rigging elections, or rapping yet another one over the knuckles over helping themselves to state funds coming from UN coffers, they and their wives or girlfriends.
