U.N.
peacekeeping forces patrol during elections in the streets of a Muslim
district of Bangui in December. (Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images)
NAIROBI —
The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse
allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon recently called them
“a cancer in our system.”
Now,
officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal.
Investigators discovered this month that at least four U.N. peacekeepers
in the Central African Republic allegedly paid girls as little as 50
cents in exchange for sex.
The case is the
latest to plague the U.N. mission
in the Central African Republic, whose employees have been accused of
22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the
past 14 months. The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban’s
efforts to implement a “zero tolerance” policy for such offenses.
The
United Nations maintains nine peacekeeping operations in Africa,
employing more than 100,000 people on the continent, and the abuses
threaten to erode the organization’s legitimacy. Other sex-crime cases
have occurred in Mali, South Sudan, Liberia and Congo in recent years.
Last month, the United Nations published a damning independent
investigation
that said that poor enforcement of policies in place to deter and
report abuse meant that “the credibility of the U.N. and peacekeeping
operations are in jeopardy.” Experts and officials say systemic problems
still hinder the investigation
and prosecution of alleged abusers, leading to a perception of impunity.
Play Video1:36Speaking
Sept. 17, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned sexual
abuse allegedly carried out by U.N. peacekeepers. (UN Web TV)
The abuse “undermines everything we stand for,” said Anthony Banbury, the U.N. assistant secretary general for field support. The mission in the
Central African Republic,
where U.N. troops and civilians were sent in 2014 to help end a civil
war and support a fledgling government, stands out for its record of
sexual abuse and exploitation.
“They are preying on the people they’ve come to protect,” said Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, the top U.N. official in the country.
‘Horrible, unacceptable’
The
most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are
accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the
internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the
capital. The site, known as M’poko camp, is home to 20,000 people,
mostly Christians. It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding
old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway.
The
United Nations has not publicly released the nationalities of the
accused troops or provided details of the alleged abuse. But in
interviews, U.N. officials said the peacekeepers were from Gabon,
Morocco, Burundi and France. The prostitution ring they allegedly used
was run by boys and young men who offered girls “for anywhere from 50
cents to three dollars,” according to one official, who like others
spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to
discuss the ongoing investigation.
Some officials say there may
be many more cases of exploitation by peacekeepers that have gone
unreported. Because there is no regular U.N. presence in M’poko, it has
been difficult to gauge the scale of the problem.
M’poko had
already had a problem with sexual abuse before the recent cases were
reported. Its population had grown sharply since September, when
violence erupted between the warring parties in the Central African Republic.
Human Rights Watch
documented
nine cases of sexual violence between September and December in and
around the displacement camp. In several instances, Christian women were
raped by members of the mostly Christian “anti-balaka” militia after
being accused of interacting with Muslims. Across Bangui, the conflict
has fallen largely along religious lines.
“M’poko is a lawless
zone run by anti-balaka thugs a few hundred meters away from the
international airport. The camp is not being protected, and women are
being raped,” said Lewis Mudge, a Human Rights Watch researcher focused
on the Central African Republic.
But this marks the first time
that the United Nations has acknowledged the involvement of its
employees in the camp’s underworld of commercial sex work, which is
driven by abject poverty and a lack of law enforcement.
“The
M’poko camp is unfortunately a place where horrible, unacceptable things
happen to women and children,” said Banbury, the assistant secretary
general. “In some cases, we have credible allegations that there are
U.N. personnel that have committed these crimes.”
Banbury said U.N. troops plan to begin patrolling M’poko more frequently and will attempt to dismantle the prostitution ring.
The
U.N. mission in the Central African Republic has been plagued by sexual
abuse allegations. The previous U.N. special representative there,
retired Senegalese general Babacar Gaye,
was fired in August
over his team’s handling of the accusations. The organization has
dispatched special investigators to Bangui to better understand what has
gone wrong.
The United Nations was also strongly criticized for
failing to react to offenses by peacekeepers in the country. As many as
14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and
sodomized six boys between the ages of 9 and 15 in 2013 and 2014, before
the U.N. mission formally began. The United Nations took no action
after learning about the cases until a whistleblower leaked an internal
U.N. investigation to French authorities, according to U.N. officials.
Last
month, the report by a panel including former Canadian Supreme Court
justice Marie Deschamps found that U.N. staff in Bangui had “turned a
blind eye to the criminal actions of individual troops” in that case.
In August, two women and one girl
accused three U.N. peacekeepers of rape in the war-torn town of Bambari. That same month, a U.N. police officer
allegedly raped
a 12-year-old girl during an operation in Bangui’s main Muslim
neighborhood. She had been hiding in a bathroom while peacekeepers
searched her house, according to Amnesty International.
“When I cried, he slapped me hard and put his hand over my mouth,” the girl told an Amnesty International researcher.
Fractured enforcement
For
years, the United Nations has been trying to stop the sexual abuse
perpetrated by its employees and troops under its command. It has
ordered a series of reports to identify weaknesses in enforcement and
mandated that a component on sexual exploitation and abuse be included
in training for peacekeepers. Ban has also encouraged harsher penalties
for the peacekeeping units to which the abusers belong.
But the
slow pace of investigations into abuse has “severely undermined
enforcement,” according to a report last year from the U.N. Office of
Internal Oversight Services. Even more problematic, some experts say, is
that the prosecution of alleged offenders falls to the governments of
the countries that provide the peacekeepers. In many cases, those
governments conduct halfhearted investigations and fail to convict
offenders.
“To say that it is immensely frustrating is a tremendous understatement,” said Banbury.
“The
U.N. should stop tiptoeing around, trying not to offend governments,
and instead put the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse at the
heart of their policy,” said Sarah Taylor, an advocate in the women’s
rights division at Human Rights Watch.
Some argue that the lack
of enforcement encourages a sense among U.N. employees that they can
commit sexual crimes with impunity while based overseas.
“They think ‘We’re in a special class,’ that sexual abuse is not that serious,” said Paula Donovan, who leads
Code Blue, an advocacy campaign working to expose the issue of sexual abuse by U.N. personnel.
The
number of alleged cases of sexual exploitation and abuse committed by
U.N. personnel declined from 2008 to 2014, dropping from 83 to 51, which
U.N. officials say is evidence of increasingly effective intervention.
But critics say that those numbers are incomplete and that many cases go
unreported.
“The data is not just porous. It’s a joke,” Donovan said.
Other
analysts say that getting civilians to report sexual crimes in war-torn
environments, where there is a mistrust of authority and a lack of law
enforcement, is an enormous challenge. The victims might “fear
retaliation by the perpetrator, who in some cases carries a weapon,”
said a report last year on U.N. abuses by the Stimson Center, a
Washington-based research organization.
In many other cases, impoverished girls and women accept food and money in exchange for sex.
“This
is already a society whose social fabric has totally collapsed, with
youngsters left to fend for themselves,” said Onanga-Anyanga. “This is
putting salt into an open wound.”
Source: The Washington Post
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