Peacekeepers recalled from Haiti after accusations of sexual abuse, humanitarian workers jailed in Chad, accused of attempting to kidnap African children to Europe -- what's going on? Is this any way for foreigners to conduct themselves in poor countries? The seemingly disconnected events find their common bond in... impunity.
Impunity - that sense of being able to escape punishment for one's actions - sometimes seems to infect ostensible do-gooders when in extraordinary situations. Just because Haiti is known as a perennial "failed state," or Darfur is in a state of civil war, outsiders - be they humanitarian volunteers or UN peacekeepers - may come to believe that there is no local authority. Last week's turn of events should show otherwise.
The Haiti sexual abuse case is sadly not the first time that men-with-guns have trained them on the very women they are supposed to be protecting. Liberia, Ivory Coast, Congo - it's happened before. But the Arche de Zoe episode in Chad is getting curiouser and curiouser every day. Yesterday French TV showed clips by one of the just-released journalists, where Zoe's Ark people applied fake dressings and "blood" on the supposed refugee children, their "wounds" helping to lend credibility to the cover story of an emergency evacuation. The story is still unfolding, and will undoubtedly entail more twists and turns, but what appears to be clear is that the Arche de Zoe leadership felt that it could wrap itself in the humanitarian flag of intervention and pay scant attention to where they were operating: not war zone Darfur, with elements of a no-man's land, but sovereign Chad next door, with a functioning government.
Now the Iraq connection: impunity on a macro scale has been the business model from Day One, and the post-invasion occupation viceroy, Paul Bremer, certainly felt no constraints when he issued a series of edicts, finishing up his yearlong tenure with a blanket grant of immunity to, among others, security contractors who might wind up killing Iraqi civilians.
Immunity, impunity - it's just another war zone in a failed state, right? Stuff happens. Well, last week the sometimes sovereign Iraqi government voted to end Bremer's parting gift of a get-out-of-jail card for security firms. No, it's not the End of Impunity by any means, but it should be yet another reminder, along with Chad and Haiti, that the international community cannot always assume just because a country is poor, dysfunctional, or war-torn, that it will just roll over because the foreigners with the money and guns say so. Sovereignty sometimes is invoked as a cover for other less noble reasons, but it is something of a trump card, and is ignored at the outsider's peril.