(August 30) - Last week another story broke on abuses committed by UN peacekeepers. Maurizio Block, the military attorney in the Italian town of Padova, confirmed to the press that UN soldiers in Ethiopia and Eritrea went to Asmara and Massaua for weekends of prostitution, pedophilia, and orgies. Some girls were about 10 years old. A Red Cross sergeant-major belonging to the Italian contingent played a key role in their procurement.

Block indicated that he has both videos and pictures which confirm the accusations. Several papers mention that Italian, Danish, and Slovakian peacekeepers are involved. They also claim that the Danish authorities knew of the abuses at least since February, when they recalled three of their soldiers.

The UN conference against racism in Durban is an appropriate occasion to take a closer look at a few of the human rights offenses and other abuses committed under the UN aegis. In April 2000, Valerio Ercole, an Italian officer in the UN peacekeeping force in Somalia, was condemned because, in 1997, he had applied electricity to the testicles of a Somalian thief. Pictures of the torture were published in the Italian weekly Panorama.

In 1998, a commission of inquiry headed by Ettore Gallo, a former president of the country's constitutional court, confirmed other abuses by Italian UN soldiers, including the frequent use of fascist and Nazi slogans against the Somalians.

The Canadian commission of inquiry into the misbehavior of its country's forces in the UN Somali peacekeeping mission concluded that "during the deployment of Canadian troops events transpired in Somalia that impugned the reputations of individuals, Canada's military, and indeed the nation itself.

"Those events... included the shooting of Somalian intruders at the Canadian compound in Belet Huen [and] the beating to death of a teenager in the custody of soldiers from 2 Commando of the Canadian Airborne regiment."

The Canadian government cut the official inquiry short, after which the commission wrote: "The unexpected decision to impose a sudden time constraint on an inquiry of this magnitude is without precedent in Canada. There is no question that it has compromised and limited our search for the truth."

The Dutch involvement in UN peacekeeping in Bosnia until 1995 was even more problematic. A few months ago, three soldiers of the Dutch battalion who had been stationed in the Srebrenica enclave were allowed to pay a fine of approximately $200 to avoid prosecution for extreme rightist behavior against Muslims. They had made the Hitler salute and walked around in T-shirts with a picture of a UN soldier grabbing a Muslim child by the throat. Five other cases were not prosecuted. This information, known for years to military intelligence, had, until 1999, been withheld from the Dutch legal authorities.

This is only the tip of the Dutch UN iceberg. The role of the Dutch peacekeepers in helping the Bosnian Serbs to separate Muslim men in Srebrenica from the women and children has, six years later, not yet been fully clarified. After this separation, the Serbs murdered 6,000-8,000 men, the largest genocide in Europe since the Holocaust.

The aforementioned misbehavior of UN soldiers from democratic countries pales, however, in comparison with several decisions of the UN's top institutions that have major racist aspects. According to an official UN report, up to 20,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in and around the "safe areas" that the Security Council had established for their protection, while knowing that the UN member states did not intend to provide the necessary forces to protect them.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan called this "a massacre on a scale unprecedented in Europe since World War II - a massacre of a people who had been led to believe that the United Nations would ensure their safety."

The UN's attitude toward the Rwanda genocides was investigated in a report published in April 2000, which examined the "circumstances surrounding the failure of the international community to prevent the systematic slaughter of some 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994." Ingvar Carlsson, former prime minister of Sweden, was the chairman of this UN inquiry, which concluded that the [Security] Council made its decision "to reduce the strength of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir) after the genocide started, and despite its knowledge of the atrocities."

The UN is the main international forum today where criminal dictatorships are given a respectable opportunity to express moral judgments. Had the organization not been a paradigm of hypocrisy, it would have made its own failures in the field of human rights and racism the main theme of the Durban conference.

(The writer is chairman of the steering committee of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs.)