This comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone paying the slightest attention to UN peacekeeping scandals over the last several years, but the BBC sounds a little shocked in their report on the latest war crimes allegations involving the blue helmets in Africa. The UN covered up allegations of gun running and smuggling in ivory and gold from their peacekeeping mission in DR Congo. Investigators claim that high-ranking UN officials obstructed their efforts to get to the bottom of corruption and war crimes (via Instapundit):

The UN has covered up claims that its troops in Democratic Republic of Congo gave arms to militias and smuggled gold and ivory, the BBC has learned.

The allegations, based on confidential UN sources, involve Pakistani and Indian troops working as peacekeepers.

The UN investigated some of the claims in 2007, but said it could not substantiate claims of arms dealing.

UN insiders told the BBC’s Panorama they had been prevented from pursuing their inquiries for political reasons.

In fact, the so-called peacekeepers did everything they could to both exploit DR Congo and ensure that the conflict continued. They re-armed the FNI militia that had been disarmed to stop the violence. Why? The Pakistanis in Mongbwalu had a gold mine in their control and needed guards while they stole the gold. Indians in another part of the country established ties to another militia, the same one that conducted the horrific Rwanda genocide, from whom they traded gold, ivory, and drugs — using UN helicopters for their efforts.

In 2006, peacekeepers in DR Congo faced widespread allegations of sexual abuse, much the same as many other UN deployments. Those charges also resulted in little action by the UN. Their response has become routine, assigning investigators who reliably come up with little evidence, allowing Turtle Bay leadership to escape any real consequences for their abject failure to impose discipline in their own missions. Now it appears that the investigators have had enough of the interference that keeps them from making clear cases of criminality against UN peacekeepers and want to reveal the duplicity of UN leadership in these crimes.

The UN and its peacekeeping missions had long ago lost all credibility with their sexual exploitation of women and children. Now they not only abuse the locals for their own amusement, they have turned into an arms distributorship. That doesn’t keep the peace — it ensures war and misery for years to come. The UN has transformed from a benign anachronism to a malignant mechanism for destruction. The time has long since passed for Western nations to demand either significant reform or an outright dissolution of the United Nations.