Price of peace: Belgian soldiers roasted Somali child

Both children survived but in a further case, which may come to court later, a boy accused of being a thief is said to have died after being kept for two days without water in a metal box left in the sun.

As in similar cases of atrocities involving Canadian and Italian soldiers attached to the force, damning photographic evidence has compromised the military establishment.

Pictures taken by a soldier from the paratroop unit will be used in evidence before the Belgian military court. ( The photographs were published on June 22 for the first time in the United Kingdom by the Observer.)

Other photographs may form the basis of later prosecutions. One shows a soldier — said to have been killed later by fellow brigade members — urinating on the body of a presumably dead Somali.

Another is of a soldier’s foot pressed into the head of a Somali sprawled on the ground.

Belgium sent 1,000 troops to the Somalia force. In 1995, a Brussels military court acquitted nine soldiers of mistreating Somalis and gave a suspended sentence to an officer who admitted carrying out mock executions of children.

The current investigation centres on 10 paratroopers stationed in southern Belgium.

But the soldiers who have gone on trial will, if convicted, face light sentences. The two who allegedly roasted the child are charged with `threat by physical action’. The third is charged with `beating and wounding.’

The Belgian cases are not isolated incidents. The photographs are similar to the `trophy’ pictures taken by Canadian soldiers in Somalia. The most infamous pictures show Canadian Airborne Regiment soldiers posing beside a captured Somali teenager, Shidane Arone, his face swollen and bloodied.

Arone died from the beating the soldiers inflicted, setting in motion the events that led to the Canadian government’s Somalia inquiry, which concluded its public hearings earlier this year and is due to report at the end of the month.

The Italian government this month set up a commission to investigate new evidence about alleged Italian peacekeeping atrocities. Two senior officers who led the Italian contigent have resigned. Prime Minister Romano Prodi announced that General Bruno Loi and General Carmine Fiore were standing down to `facilitate investigations.’

Loi, who had headed the military academy in Modena, denounced the `defamatory campaign’ that was being waged against the Folgore Paratroop Regiment.

The scandal reupted with the publication of allegations in the magazine Panorama together with pictures showing an Italian peacekeeping officer applying electrodes to the hands and genitals of a naked Somali while another Italian soldier stood on his wrist to keep him down.

Michele Patruno, a former Italian soldier in Somalia who took the picture, said other locals were denied food and water, had the soles of their feet burnt, and were hurled against razor wire, as well as being electrocuted and sexually abused.

Patruno alleged that at least five Somalis died under Italian torture. Other soldiers claimed Italian peacekeepers had gang-raped Somali women. Locals had been killed `for fun’ and `target practice’ and live ammunition had been fired into crowds.

“In Somalia it was anything but a peace mission,” one paratrooper, Benedetto Bertini, said on television. “False news reached Italy, which was what they wanted people to hear. I went to Somalia with so much enthusiasm, and instead the reality was just disgusting.” He added: “On one occasion we fired for 24 hours non-stop. Officially, they said there were 60 dead, when instead there were more than 1,000. Women and children were unscrupulously fired on.”

Ettore Gallo, the former president of Italy’s Constitutional Court, is chairing the commission of inquiry. Another investigation has begun inside the Defence Ministry. Its job is to interview officials with the Somalia mission, which involved 12,000 Italian troops between December 1992 and March 1994. The various contingents in Somalia were under US and not UN command as part of the 1993 peacekeeping operation. But the case highlights problems of discipline and control that have led to UN to draw up new rules governing international forces.

Incidents on recent operations include murder and torture. Women and children are said to have been the victims of sexual exploitation, harassment and discrimination. UN representatives have also sexually harassed their female colleagues and have been accused of smuggling drugs and arms. In addition, brothels have sprouted near — and in one case allegedly inside — UN compounds. In the latter case, prostitutes were allegedly employed by the UN and were even said to have been shipped on UN planes to fornicate with a UN staff member in hotels paid for by the UN. Although a UN civilian official is in charge of UN soldiers in each peacekeeping operation, that person does not bear disciplinary responsibility for the actions of his soldiers.

“Governments lend us troops, but they retain the right to discipline their soldiers,” said Fred Eckhard, UN spokesman for the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who was head of UN peacekeeping operations at the time of the reported atrocities. The Somali operation badly damaged the concept of international peacekeeping, senior UN sources now believe. But they acknowledge that other operations have thrown up problems.

In future, the UN will insist that the provisions of the Geneva Convention should apply to all national forces attached to peacekeeping operations. Hitherto they have not done so because the UN is not a country. Officials point out that the quality of troops supplied has not always been of the highest. In some cultures prostitution is an accepted part of military life.

The French routinely provide brothels for overseas troops, and in the Netherlands prostitution is legal.Bulgaria’s first foray into the world of peacekeeping was to empty a prison and send the inmates to Cambodia as UN soldiers.The unruly contingent, which became known as the `Vulgarians’, destroyed the inside of the Boeing 747 charter that brought them home at the end of the mission.

If UN peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia were also bedevilled by corruption, that was largely out of the hands of UN headquarters. The Russian commander in Eastern Slavonia was running a brothel and a black market operation on the side. The UN tried to sack him, and when he was eventually taken out of uniform he stayed on as a civilian. The peacekeeping operations in Somalia were also plagued by strings of allegations of corruption and outright theft — such as the $2.9 million stolen from a UN filing cabinet. Intelligence reports indicate some of the money ended up with the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A Canadian UN official in Somalia, Doug Manson, was fired after the theft. Manson appealed, and won. The UN then hired him to be a `consultant on administrative and security matters’ for the UN development programme in Liberia, said a UN official who refused to be named.

Last February the UN’s own Office of Internal Oversight reported gross “mismanagement in almost all areas” of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The UN spent $26.7m on the tribunal in 1995 and 1996. The projected budget estimate for 1997 is $41.5m. Yet, the report states, “not a single administrative area functioned effectively. Finance had no accounting system….Rules and regulations were widely disregarded.” The tribunal, established in 1994, has yet to convict anyone.

(By special arrangement with Observer News Service)