"When a Haitian teenager alleged that she had been raped and sodomized by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper, the government here dispatched a high-ranking general suspected of war crimes to lead the investigation.
He didn't interview the accuser or medical staff who examined her, but he cleared the peacekeeper - who remained in the Sri Lankan military...
It wasn't the first time that accusations against Sri Lankan peacekeepers were swept aside. In 2007, a group of orphaned Haitian children identified 134 Sri Lankans who gave them food for sex in a child sex ring that went on for three years, an Associated Press investigation found.
In that case, which was corroborated by U.N. investigators, the Sri Lankan military repatriated 114 of the peacekeepers, but none was ever jailed.
In fact, Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad, the AP found.
A culture of impunity that arose during Sri Lanka's civil war has seeped into its peacekeeping missions...
Despite those unresolved allegations, the U.N. has deployed thousands of peacekeepers from Sri Lanka. This is a pattern repeated around the world: Strapped for troops, the U.N. draws recruits from many countries with poor human rights records for its peacekeeping program, budgeted at nearly $8 billion this year..."