Nickie Muir: Regrets... I've had a few

Nickie Muir.

There are always choices we make that we are less than proud of. Choices that you know a better self would not have made.

These are the choices that we make out of convenience or fear.

The biggest problem is they become our albatross - the easiest thing done and the hardest forgotten.

They are the choices that haunt a quarter of a century on, long after they've been cemented in our personal histories.

Sometimes they're the choices we made not to do anything at all when we really should have.

The case of the UN child sex abuse scandal is one in point.

In the many years since Cambodia, Kosovo, Haiti and recently the Central African Republic - and despite countless UN officials knowing that the abuse of children among so called peacekeepers was rife - the emails and questions bounced from one inbox to another without them ever really making a ripple on the surface of an institution supposedly there to help vulnerable people.

When someone did speak up, an Anders Kompass, blowing the whistle on the latest round of appalling abuse in the Central Africa Republic by passing confidential documents to French authorities after a systemic failure of the UN to react - he was vilified and suspended from work.

It took the hard graft from UK newspaper The Guardian in covering his treatment to cause enough embarrassment for the UN to launch an inquiry and reinstate him in his job.

Interesting that the first action of an organisation supposed to help engender world peace was to shoot the messenger.

I can't find it in me to judge . A long time ago when Pol Pot was still running round Cambodia and the UN were setting up the first elections - I went there.

I got in easily enough but got arrested on the way out. "You can not be a student tourist. No one is stupid enough to come here for fun! You must be spy!"

Wrong on all three counts. I was finally allowed one phone call and remembered the name of an army sergeant whom I had called a fascist at a party in Wellington only a few weeks before. I got put through to him.

Once I had apologised for using the F word and had got a barrel of insight into my own stupidity at being there at all he said he'd send a truck to pick me up and drop me back over the border into Thailand.

I couldn't thank him enough. The truck, filled with spotty, heavily armed young soldiers with American accents showed up.

On the way to the border they stopped at a "bar" and went inside for an hour.

I waited in the truck. I listened to their exploits with the 8 to 13-year-old girls who worked inside, all the way to the border. I never said a thing. And I have regretted it ever since.