A Message to George Clooney: When ‘Peacekeeping’ Equals Rape
Suki Falconberg Ph.D.
November 13, 2006
The actor wants to send UN Peacekeepers to Darfur, or so Clooney said in a recent speech in front of the UN Security Council. Be careful. Wherever they go, these ‘Peace-Keepers’ are ‘Violence-Bringers’ to the bodies of women. The head of the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia requested that a girl from the Serbian rape camps be delivered to him for his pleasure. On the streets of Zagreb, peacekeeping forces were asking women how much they charged for sex.
The litany of this sex horror goes on. Refugees International reports that in Liberia peacekeepers patronize a club called Little Lagos, where they have sex with girls as young as 12 and also take porn photos of them. The poor children do all this for a few bucks, or food. Sex with the vulnerable and the exploited is routine for these men all over Africa, and the world. An article in the UK Independent recounts how UN Peacekeepers in the Congo offered food to women and girls in exchange for sex. It was a pathetic picture. Already raped by warring factions, refugee women with children to support would visit the men at night for food. So would young refugee girls—gratefully, some of them, because they were so hungry. One girl reports the soldiers being kind to her and not hurting her, the way the other soldiers did. I guess that gentle ‘prostitution rape’ is preferable to war-time gang rape, but ‘kindness’ cannot exonerate peacekeepers from taking advantage of damaged, financially desperate women. (I have always held that in wartime, soldiers should simply give starving girls food, instead of making them lay down on their backs for it. Would it be possible to train soldiers to think this way? The old saw—“it could be your mother or sister exchanging sex for food”—doesn’t seem to be working.)
Refugees International details a number of Danish peacekeepers having sex with a 13-year-old Eritrean girl, an Irish soldier making a porn movie of an Eritrean woman, and several Irish men using girls as young as 15 in that country.
Their report on Cambodia is especially disturbing. A UN Peacekeeping force of 100,000 invaded Cambodia in the early 1990’s, causing the sex trade to skyrocket. Brothels, massage parlours, the sale of girls from rural areas into these torture ‘palaces of pleasure,’ a massive increase in child prostitution, and AIDS—this rosy picture accompanied the advent of these misnamed ‘peacekeepers’—they need to be called what they are--UN Rapists, or, if you want a fancier title, UN Emissaries for Rape. Maybe we need a UN High Commission on How to More Effectively Rape the Women of the World.
In Cambodia, the peacekeepers were reported as being “drunk and disorderly.” As an ex-prostitute, this conjures up awful pictures in my mind of how rough drunk men can be during sex, and of those pathetic, tiny, underage Cambodian girls having to withstand this brutality. The response of Yasushi Akashi, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General at the UN, to all this ‘fuss’ about sex and ‘fun’ in Cambodia was “boys will be boys.” I guess he has a fancy title and a high salary, and I guess it does not occur to him that his own wife, daughter, sister, could be in brothel bed, under a ‘peacekeeper.’ (Peacekeeper Rape. A catchy oxymoron, no?) I guess the doctrine of the “band-of-brothers gang bang” still rules. I am reminded of how, during WWII, US, British, and Australian troops raped side by side, particularly in the Pacific. That glorious bonding ritual of everyone climbing on the same body as a symbol of International Sanctioned Rape by Warriors has now taken a new form in that so many more nationalities--Danish, French, German, Irish, Moroccan, etc.—can band and bond, be “boys,” get their entitled act of sex upon the destitute, under the auspices of the UN. Was ever rape so sanctioned as now, when we label its perpetrators ‘peacekeepers.’ But then ‘violence’ upon women’s bodies has never held any sway or court in international affairs. Why not just set up a UN Commission for Sanctioned Rape and be done with it?
Kosovo. The ‘fun’ continues in this hot sex spot “littered with brothels,” in the words of Human Right Watch. “Littered” as a result of the presence of 40,000 of those gallant rapists (both UN and NATO forces, as well as civilian military contractors from the US) who have transformed the place into their own special whorehouse. Trafficking and its attendant horrors—the drugging, “breaking in” (read rape), and imprisonment of girls as young as 11, girls “forced to service international soldiers and police” (in the words of one UN/NATO whore who escaped)—has increased enormously due to high demand. Eighty percent of the customers of these trafficked girls are these multinational forces. One trafficked girl reported begging US military men to help her escape from her brothel, but they used her anyway. Some soldiers are themselves involved in the trafficking and selling of the girls. US Military police are in the pay of brothel owners, and they take ‘freebies’ off the already heavily raped bodies of the girls. (Source for Kosovo material: Amnesty International.)
(I remember seeing a sugar-coated National Geographic picture of a German peacekeeper in Kosovo—presented in the text as all noble and courageous--looking at a picture of his girlfriend, misty, romantic, longing to be home with her. If his behavior was typical of that of his cohorts, I wonder if he raped any of the enslaved girls in the local brothels set up for him after this picture gazing?)
The response of the UN? Well, troops are immune from prosecution in Kosovo and nothing has been done to even reprimand them in their home countries. (Not that a “reprimand” will mean much to the raped bodies of their victims. What amounts to a few minutes of sexual pleasure, for the soldier, on top of a prostitute, means a life sentence of misery for her.)
According to Refugees International, in 2001, the UN “effectively halted an investigation into allegations that UN peacekeepers in Bosnia were recruiting and enslaving women in brothels.” Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to Bosnia, says that focusing on the customers of the brothel-enslaved is “inappropriate.” (I wonder if he would use such cold, stiff words as ‘inappropriate’ if it were his body being raped all day in a brothel? Or that of his wife, daughter, sister?) Instead, he says, we need to concentrate on the procurers, corrupt officials, etc. Well, of course, there is some truth in that. But this attitude is a cover up, and a continuation of the “boys will be boys” caveat. After all, if the man takes out his rapestick in a brothel, well, he is a rapist. And needs to be labeled as such, tried as such, castrated as such, etc. Otherwise, “boys will be boys” and “man must have his sex fix” will reign and flourish, as they do now. No matter what the misery of the body he ‘occupies,’ as an occupying military force, somehow, this rule has been sacred to the soldier—“man must have his quickie, his lay.” Well, as a rape survivor and ex-prostitute, I’m sick of “man must have his sex fix,” no matter what the pain to my body.
An A & E Investigates’ show on trafficking followed a very old Tel Aviv street whore into an alley littered with garbage and piles of used condoms. “This is where the man comes to have his orgasm,” she said succinctly. I saw ectoplasmic ghosts hovering in that alley—the dead bodies of all the women upon whom man “took his sex fix.”
No more.
George Clooney, I’m sure your intentions are humanitarian. And if you want to go to Darfur and stop the UN Peacekeepers from their usual rape rituals, and the AIDS and misery they bring, fine. But don’t recommend sending in these sorry, rapist excuses for human beings on their own, free to buy exploited brown bodies, free to force them to exchange sex for food. Please go over and supervise them. Better yet, visit their haunts all over the world and take the suffering girls (brown and white) out of the brothel beds these men have created. You have enough money to set up a Whore Sanctuary for these raped, miserable, suffering girls. And realize, also, Mr. Clooney, that Sudanese women are ‘genitally mutilated.’ What sexual misery your projected force of 20,000 UN Sanctioned Peacekeeping Rapists will inflict on these already terribly damaged women is unimaginable. These poor mutilated women can barely withstand ‘normal’ intercourse, with their shredded vaginas and ragged, chopped- off sex organs, let along prostitution rape by a bunch of drunk ‘peacekeepers.’
Afternotes: I did not even touch on the thousands upon thousands of children fathered and abandoned by these multinational forces. I have yet to see one word in the media about this issue.
I shuddered when I heard a proposed force of 15,000 peacekeepers, mostly from the EU, was destined for Lebanon. The EU forces have money, pimps cultivate them, young girls serve them. Will Lebanese women have any protection from them?
A word on terminology: As an ex-prostitute, I use the word ‘whore’ freely, to refer to myself and others forced to sell sex, in an effort to defuse the heavy, negative, male-generated burden of ‘shame’ and ‘filth’ the word carries. I would never use the word ‘sex worker’ since prostitution is not work in any meaningful sense. Probably the most offensive application of it I’ve seen was by a female Western journalist who applied it to a four-year-old girl, in heavy harlot make-up, in a Bombay brothel. Was the women simply being ‘fashionable’ with her terminology, or did she actually think that this child was engaged in work? Was a cushy 401K in the tiny whore's future, and maybe a job as a barista at Starbuck’s, after she finishes up her ‘fun’ stint as a ‘sex worker’ in Bombay?
The litany of this sex horror goes on. Refugees International reports that in Liberia peacekeepers patronize a club called Little Lagos, where they have sex with girls as young as 12 and also take porn photos of them. The poor children do all this for a few bucks, or food. Sex with the vulnerable and the exploited is routine for these men all over Africa, and the world. An article in the UK Independent recounts how UN Peacekeepers in the Congo offered food to women and girls in exchange for sex. It was a pathetic picture. Already raped by warring factions, refugee women with children to support would visit the men at night for food. So would young refugee girls—gratefully, some of them, because they were so hungry. One girl reports the soldiers being kind to her and not hurting her, the way the other soldiers did. I guess that gentle ‘prostitution rape’ is preferable to war-time gang rape, but ‘kindness’ cannot exonerate peacekeepers from taking advantage of damaged, financially desperate women. (I have always held that in wartime, soldiers should simply give starving girls food, instead of making them lay down on their backs for it. Would it be possible to train soldiers to think this way? The old saw—“it could be your mother or sister exchanging sex for food”—doesn’t seem to be working.)
Refugees International details a number of Danish peacekeepers having sex with a 13-year-old Eritrean girl, an Irish soldier making a porn movie of an Eritrean woman, and several Irish men using girls as young as 15 in that country.
Their report on Cambodia is especially disturbing. A UN Peacekeeping force of 100,000 invaded Cambodia in the early 1990’s, causing the sex trade to skyrocket. Brothels, massage parlours, the sale of girls from rural areas into these torture ‘palaces of pleasure,’ a massive increase in child prostitution, and AIDS—this rosy picture accompanied the advent of these misnamed ‘peacekeepers’—they need to be called what they are--UN Rapists, or, if you want a fancier title, UN Emissaries for Rape. Maybe we need a UN High Commission on How to More Effectively Rape the Women of the World.
In Cambodia, the peacekeepers were reported as being “drunk and disorderly.” As an ex-prostitute, this conjures up awful pictures in my mind of how rough drunk men can be during sex, and of those pathetic, tiny, underage Cambodian girls having to withstand this brutality. The response of Yasushi Akashi, the Special Representative to the Secretary-General at the UN, to all this ‘fuss’ about sex and ‘fun’ in Cambodia was “boys will be boys.” I guess he has a fancy title and a high salary, and I guess it does not occur to him that his own wife, daughter, sister, could be in brothel bed, under a ‘peacekeeper.’ (Peacekeeper Rape. A catchy oxymoron, no?) I guess the doctrine of the “band-of-brothers gang bang” still rules. I am reminded of how, during WWII, US, British, and Australian troops raped side by side, particularly in the Pacific. That glorious bonding ritual of everyone climbing on the same body as a symbol of International Sanctioned Rape by Warriors has now taken a new form in that so many more nationalities--Danish, French, German, Irish, Moroccan, etc.—can band and bond, be “boys,” get their entitled act of sex upon the destitute, under the auspices of the UN. Was ever rape so sanctioned as now, when we label its perpetrators ‘peacekeepers.’ But then ‘violence’ upon women’s bodies has never held any sway or court in international affairs. Why not just set up a UN Commission for Sanctioned Rape and be done with it?
Kosovo. The ‘fun’ continues in this hot sex spot “littered with brothels,” in the words of Human Right Watch. “Littered” as a result of the presence of 40,000 of those gallant rapists (both UN and NATO forces, as well as civilian military contractors from the US) who have transformed the place into their own special whorehouse. Trafficking and its attendant horrors—the drugging, “breaking in” (read rape), and imprisonment of girls as young as 11, girls “forced to service international soldiers and police” (in the words of one UN/NATO whore who escaped)—has increased enormously due to high demand. Eighty percent of the customers of these trafficked girls are these multinational forces. One trafficked girl reported begging US military men to help her escape from her brothel, but they used her anyway. Some soldiers are themselves involved in the trafficking and selling of the girls. US Military police are in the pay of brothel owners, and they take ‘freebies’ off the already heavily raped bodies of the girls. (Source for Kosovo material: Amnesty International.)
(I remember seeing a sugar-coated National Geographic picture of a German peacekeeper in Kosovo—presented in the text as all noble and courageous--looking at a picture of his girlfriend, misty, romantic, longing to be home with her. If his behavior was typical of that of his cohorts, I wonder if he raped any of the enslaved girls in the local brothels set up for him after this picture gazing?)
The response of the UN? Well, troops are immune from prosecution in Kosovo and nothing has been done to even reprimand them in their home countries. (Not that a “reprimand” will mean much to the raped bodies of their victims. What amounts to a few minutes of sexual pleasure, for the soldier, on top of a prostitute, means a life sentence of misery for her.)
According to Refugees International, in 2001, the UN “effectively halted an investigation into allegations that UN peacekeepers in Bosnia were recruiting and enslaving women in brothels.” Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy to Bosnia, says that focusing on the customers of the brothel-enslaved is “inappropriate.” (I wonder if he would use such cold, stiff words as ‘inappropriate’ if it were his body being raped all day in a brothel? Or that of his wife, daughter, sister?) Instead, he says, we need to concentrate on the procurers, corrupt officials, etc. Well, of course, there is some truth in that. But this attitude is a cover up, and a continuation of the “boys will be boys” caveat. After all, if the man takes out his rapestick in a brothel, well, he is a rapist. And needs to be labeled as such, tried as such, castrated as such, etc. Otherwise, “boys will be boys” and “man must have his sex fix” will reign and flourish, as they do now. No matter what the misery of the body he ‘occupies,’ as an occupying military force, somehow, this rule has been sacred to the soldier—“man must have his quickie, his lay.” Well, as a rape survivor and ex-prostitute, I’m sick of “man must have his sex fix,” no matter what the pain to my body.
An A & E Investigates’ show on trafficking followed a very old Tel Aviv street whore into an alley littered with garbage and piles of used condoms. “This is where the man comes to have his orgasm,” she said succinctly. I saw ectoplasmic ghosts hovering in that alley—the dead bodies of all the women upon whom man “took his sex fix.”
No more.
George Clooney, I’m sure your intentions are humanitarian. And if you want to go to Darfur and stop the UN Peacekeepers from their usual rape rituals, and the AIDS and misery they bring, fine. But don’t recommend sending in these sorry, rapist excuses for human beings on their own, free to buy exploited brown bodies, free to force them to exchange sex for food. Please go over and supervise them. Better yet, visit their haunts all over the world and take the suffering girls (brown and white) out of the brothel beds these men have created. You have enough money to set up a Whore Sanctuary for these raped, miserable, suffering girls. And realize, also, Mr. Clooney, that Sudanese women are ‘genitally mutilated.’ What sexual misery your projected force of 20,000 UN Sanctioned Peacekeeping Rapists will inflict on these already terribly damaged women is unimaginable. These poor mutilated women can barely withstand ‘normal’ intercourse, with their shredded vaginas and ragged, chopped- off sex organs, let along prostitution rape by a bunch of drunk ‘peacekeepers.’
Afternotes: I did not even touch on the thousands upon thousands of children fathered and abandoned by these multinational forces. I have yet to see one word in the media about this issue.
I shuddered when I heard a proposed force of 15,000 peacekeepers, mostly from the EU, was destined for Lebanon. The EU forces have money, pimps cultivate them, young girls serve them. Will Lebanese women have any protection from them?
A word on terminology: As an ex-prostitute, I use the word ‘whore’ freely, to refer to myself and others forced to sell sex, in an effort to defuse the heavy, negative, male-generated burden of ‘shame’ and ‘filth’ the word carries. I would never use the word ‘sex worker’ since prostitution is not work in any meaningful sense. Probably the most offensive application of it I’ve seen was by a female Western journalist who applied it to a four-year-old girl, in heavy harlot make-up, in a Bombay brothel. Was the women simply being ‘fashionable’ with her terminology, or did she actually think that this child was engaged in work? Was a cushy 401K in the tiny whore's future, and maybe a job as a barista at Starbuck’s, after she finishes up her ‘fun’ stint as a ‘sex worker’ in Bombay?
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