Halving UN Peacekeeper Rape by the Year 2015?

In the Ivory Coast, a 13-year-old girl is gang-raped in a field by 10 UN peacekeepers, and left on the ground, bleeding, trembling and vomiting — or so the BBC reports that the girl herself described the scene. This is part of a larger picture involving fresh allegations by a U.K.-based charity, Save the Children, of UN peacekeepers abusing children in the Ivory Coast, Haiti and Southern Sudan. As detailed by the BBC, “the UN has said it welcomes the report, which it will study closely.”

Oh, great. The UN can add this report to its research collection of previous reports on UN peacekeeper rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the Congo and so forth; and we can look forward to more UN statements on the issue, such as Kofi Annan’s “zero tolerance” policy of 2005, or his zero-zero tolerance policy of 2006 (when he “strengthened” the zero tolerance of 2005), and Assistant-Secretary-General Jane Holl Lute’s zero-zero-zero “zero tolerance” promises of 2007 … and it’s getting to where with all those zeroes the UN ought to just add these policies to its list of millennium development goals, with all those other target dates and enormous numbers. You know, something like: Goal #9: Halving UN peacekeeper rape by the year 2015.