With such peacekeepers, victims of war needn’t fear persecutors

Recent revelations about two French peacekeepers who allegedly forced three young girls in the Central African Republic to perform acts of bestiality have led to a global public outcry against sexual abuse by peacekeepers.

This new revelation follows other reports that indicate that sexual abuse of women, girls, and boys by peacekeepers stationed in CAR and other strife-torn countries is quite common.

Journalist Maya Goodfellow claims that the problem is not just a few bad apples, but the whole UN peacekeeping system. She says that peacekeeping missions are imagined in such a way that they allow peacekeepers to get away with whatever they want, including sexual abuse of the people they are supposed to be protecting.

“The narrative is this: people living in these ‘war-torn’ societies don’t have the same values as the troops who come to protect them,” she adds.

Last year there were nearly 100 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers and UN staff. Most involved peacekeeping missions in 10 countries. Few of the peacekeepers implicated in these cases have been charged or tried in their own countries, nor does the UN have a system that can bring the culprits to justice.

Since most peacekeeping missions are in poor countries, civilians are even more at risk because peacekeepers are known to exchange food and money for sex. Unfortunately, the United Nations has often turned a blind eye to sexual abuse by its peacekeepers and, in some cases, has actively covered up their crimes.

For example, in 2014, when Anders Kompass, the director of field operations at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reported to the French government that French peacekeepers operating under the authorisation of the UN Security Council in the strife-torn Central African Republic were sexually abusing boys as young as nine years old, the UN’s senior managers responded by asking Kompass to resign.

When he refused to do so, they suspended him for “unauthorised disclosure of confidential information”, and, in a typical case of shooting the messenger, they directed their internal investigations towards him rather than towards the peacekeepers who had allegedly abused the children. The UN claimed that the unredacted report had put the victims at risk.

The report contained interviews with six internally displaced children aged between eight and 15 in the capital Bangui who claimed that they were forced to perform oral sex on French soldiers in exchange for food and money.

Kompass diligently transmitted the report to the French UN mission in Geneva for onward transmission to France’s law enforcement agencies.

Thanks to intense public pressure following media reports about the scandal, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ordered an independent inquiry into the child abuse allegations. The inquiry’s report concluded that the UN’s failure to respond to the allegations amounted to “gross institutional failure” that allowed the sexual abuse to continue.

Initial complaints about the abuse in early 2014 “were passed from desk to desk, inbox to inbox, across multiple UN offices, with no one willing to take responsibility”. The inquiry also found that there had been “unconscionable delays” in providing the abused children with medical care or psychological support.

Last month, the UN Security Council finally took a step towards addressing the problem (thanks to lobbying by the United States), by passing a resolution that calls for troop-producing countries to allow prosecution of the abusers in the countries where the crimes took place.

The resolution also calls for the creation of a DNA registry of all peacekeepers that can aid the investigation of sexual abuse cases. This is an important step towards ending impunity among peacekeepers. However, it may not be enough as justice systems in war-torn countries are often broken and subject to manipulation.

The UN must also take more responsibility in such crimes when they are committed instead of whitewashing them. For example, countries could be banned from future UN peacekeeping missions if their troops have been accused of sexual crimes.

It also does not make sense to send peacekeepers from strife-torn countries to other strife-torn countries. Why, for example, are Burundian troops in Somalia and CAR? Peacekeeping missions must also have a limited time span and not be allowed to stay in a country indefinitely, as seems to be happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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