Come for the Peace; Stay for the Gun Sales

Q: When does peacekeeping become a gold-plated gun store?

A: When it's a UN mission to Africa:

Pakistani UN peacekeeping troops traded in gold and sold weapons to Congolese militia groups they were meant to disarm, the BBC has learnt.

These militia groups were guilty of some of the worst human rights abuses during the Democratic Republic of Congo's long civil war.

The trading went on in 2005. A UN investigative team sent to gather evidence was obstructed and threatened.

The team's report was buried by the UN itself to "avoid political fallout."¹

Witnesses claimed "Pakistani officers supplied weapons to notorious militia commanders in return for gold." According to a Congolese officer present:

[T]he arms surrendered by ex-combatants were secretly returned to them by Major Zanfar thereby compromising the work they had collectively done earlier.

"Repeatedly he saw militia who had been disarmed one day, but the next day would become re-armed again. The information he could obtain was always the same, that it would be the Pakistani battalion giving arms back to the militia."

Why so Progressives still pine for multinational peace-keeping in in the Middle East? Perhaps Turtle Bay should peg salaries at World Bank levels, to discourage such blue-helmeted black-markets.
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¹ A UN official connected with the inquiry told the BBC the cover-up "seems to have been a plan to bury it, to avoid alienating Pakistan -- the largest contributor of troops to the UN."

(via RedState)