The uselessness of UN peacekeepers is one of the worst kept secrets in international affairs. Like the rest of the UN, the one thing you can usually count on Peacekeepers to do is to keep the peace by letting whatever horrors are happening go on happening. Politicians love talking about dispatching UN peacekeepers. Here's how much good they actually do.
The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice.
"Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head," she remembers him saying.
She didn't really have a choice. By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers.
This was part of a series of assaults.
They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions, several witnesses told The Associated Press.
Luckily there were UN peacekeepers nearby.
For hours throughout the assault, the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help.
And under Obama, the US Embassy proved equally useless.
Neither did embassies, including the U.S. Embassy.
Smart power. It really, really does not work. And this is what non-intervention looks like now.
The accounts highlight, in raw detail, the failure of the U.N. peacekeeping force to uphold its core mandate of protecting civilians, notably those just a few minutes' drive away. U.N. peacekeepers in Juba have already been accused of not acting to stop the rapes of local women by soldiers outside the U.N.'s main camp and within their sight last month.
Of course they didn't. They're peacekeepers and Obama already has the answer. Send more peacekeepers.
The U.N. recently passed a U.S. resolution to send more peacekeeping troops to protect civilians.
If sending more useless people doesn't solve this, nothing will.
For about an hour, soldiers beat the American with belts and the butts of their guns and accused him of hiding rebels. They fired bullets at his feet and close to his head. Eventually, one soldier who appeared to be in charge told him to leave the compound. Soldiers at the gate looked at his U.S. passport and handed it back, with instructions.
"You tell your embassy how we treated you," they said. He made his way to the nearby U.N. compound and appealed for help.
Even the South Sudanese think that Obama is a worthless joke.
From the start of the attack, those inside the Terrain compound sent messages pleading for help by text and Facebook messages and emails.
"All of us were contacting whoever we could contact. The U.N., the U.S. embassy, contacting the specific battalions in the U.N., contacting specific departments," said the woman raped by 15 men.
The actual response though was the same bureaucratic comedy of inaction as Benghazi.
Five minutes after that, the U.N. mission's Department of Safety and Security and its military command wing were alerted. At 4:33 p.m., a Quick Reaction Force, meant to intervene in emergencies, was informed. One minute later, the timeline notes the last contact on Monday from someone trapped inside Terrain.
For the next hour and a half the timeline is blank. At 6:52, shortly before sunset, the timeline states that "DSS would not send a team."
About 20 minutes later, a Quick Reaction Force of Ethiopians from the multinational U.N. mission was tasked to intervene, coordinating with South Sudan's army chief of staff, Paul Malong, who was also sending soldiers. But the Ethiopian battalion stood down, according to the timeline. Malong's troops eventually abandoned their intervention too because it took too long for the Quick Reaction Force to act.
And so nothing happened. Because it's the UN. And the attackers knew that nothing would happen because they were dealing with Obama and the UN.
The U.S. Embassy, which also received requests for help during the attack, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Don't worry. Obama will find out about it from the media.