National Post (National Edition)
THE UN PEACEKEEPERS WITH A PAST
THREE CASES HIGHLIGHT UNITED NATIONS’ INABILITY TO SCREEN ITS FORCES
The three officers received blue badges and slipped blue covers over their helmets. They were now UN peacekeepers, sent from Burundi to help protect victims of a brutal war in the Central African Republic.
But each of them had a past the United Nations was unaware of. When the deployments became public, Burundian activists were aghast.
One of the officers ran a military jail where beatings and torture occurred, civil-society groups and former prisoners say. Another committed human rights violations when anti-government demonstrations erupted in Burundi last year, UN officials would eventually learn. The third served as the spokesman for the Burundian army, publicly defending an institution accused of abuses.
They set out for the Central African Republic in different UN deployments over the past year. In each case, UN officials soon determined the allegations against the soldiers and their units were credible enough to send them home.
The three cases point to a deeper problem: even as the United Nations’ peacekeeping responsibilities grow, it has proven incapable of excluding potential human rights violators from its ranks.
The United Nations is managing 16 peacekeeping missions around the globe, with more than 100,000 uniformed personnel and an annual US$8 billion budget, more than 25 per cent of it paid by the United States.
As the world body scrambles to fulfil its commitments, it is recruiting some peacekeepers from militaries that have records of abuse or serve repressive governments. Yet the United Nations does not have an effective system to weed out those with violence-stained backgrounds. That puts the institution at risk of deploying peacekeepers who will tarnish its credibility and even harm the people they were meant to protect.
The United Nations has faced a growing crisis over allegations of sexual abuse by its forces. Since 2008, UN troops, police and civilian officials have been accused of more than 700 cases of sexual abuse and exploitation, as well as other crimes, its records show.
In Burundi, the government has used its security forces — including the military — to punish its political opponents, a UN-appointed team of human rights experts warned in September, adding the forces were committing “gross violations” of human rights. The team recommended the world body “phase out” its use of Burundian peacekeepers.
A senior spokesman, Farhan Haq, announced in June the UN would not accept more Burundian police as peacekeepers in the Central African Republic after the 280-person contingent finished its tour, “given the current allegations of serious and ongoing human rights violations in Burundi.”
However, the UN continues to employ more than 800 Burundian soldiers in the Central African Republic, where senior officials say the troops are necessary to keep the peace. The United Nations also supports 5,400 Burundian troops through the African Union’s mission in Somalia. Those missions have provided millions of dollars to the Burundian government for supplying the troops.
The Washington Post traced the cases of the three Burundian officers — Maj. Pierre Niyonzima, Lt. Col. Alfred Mayuyu and Col. Gaspard Baratuza — through interviews with UN officials, human rights groups and former Burundian soldiers and dissidents in that country and in exile.
Government and military officials in Burundi did not respond to messages about the cases. Ernest Ndabashinze, Burundi’s ambassador to Washington, defended the professionalism of his country’s peacekeepers and said the accusations against the men were part of a “campaign of misinformation” directed by his country’s political opposition.
Human rights groups say the United Nations’ failure to properly vet its forces undermines its mandate.
“The weakest and most vulnerable around the world rely on the UN to protect them, but it won’t be able to fulfil their expectations if its members send protectors who are known abusers back home,” said Akshaya Kumar, deputy UN director at Human Rights Watch.
In Burundi, as elsewhere, the United Nations relies on the governments contributing peacekeepers to screen them.
The UN “does not have dedicated resources to carry out human rights screening of individual contingent members, nor do we have the means to assess the records of individuals,” the UN spokesman Haq said in an email.
That might not be a problem in most countries — and the Burundian military was once considered a relatively disciplined fighting force. But by the time Niyonzima was dispatched as a UN peacekeeper in December 2015, the situation in his country had changed.
Eight months earlier, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza’s party nominated him for a third term, prompting angry demonstrations by citizens who deemed the move unconstitutional.
Security forces opened fire on protesters, killing and injuring scores of people, and cracked down on suspected government foes, arresting hundreds, according to Human Rights Watch and other international groups. Most of the abuses were attributed to the police and government intelligence officers, but news reports cited witnesses saying some soldiers used live ammunition against demonstrators.
After Niyonzima was deployed, the United Nations learned of allegations that he and two other Burundian peacekeepers had committed abuses in their homeland.
The UN human rights office “has raised serious concerns about alleged human rights violations committed by the officers during the violent demonstrations which started in Burundi since April 2015,” said a memo obtained by The Post dated Feb. 5, 2016, and issued by Lt. Gen. Maqsood Ahmed, of the UN peacekeeping office in New York. The memo, which ordered the repatriation of Niyonzima and the two other men, was first disclosed by New York-based Inner City Press.
“The UN did a background check that revealed allegations of his (Niyonzima’s) direct implication in serious human rights violations” in Burundi, a senior UN peacekeeping official in New York said in an email. He spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The official did not provide details. But two former military officers who broke with the government, and are now refugees in Rwanda, said members of Niyonzima’s unit fired into a crowd of unarmed protesters in the capital in May 2015.
“And this is the guy they send?” asked one of the men, a 32-year-old former army captain.
The former captain and another ex-officer claimed that, in the same month, they saw Niyonzima among a group of soldiers and police who stormed a hospital in the capital where wounded coup supporters were being treated. Media reports after the attack on the Bumerec hospital showed bullet marks in the walls and blood on the floors. The security forces exchanged gunfire with people inside the hospital before detaining two wounded soldiers and one of their colleagues, according to Human Rights Watch.
Burundi’s military isn’t the only one that supplies peacekeepers despite a widely criticized human rights record.
Congo sent 850 peacekeepers to the Central African Republic as part of an A.U. mission that in 2014 was absorbed by the United Nations. Congo’s military has been accused by human rights groups of raping and killing civilians during a civil war.
The UN announced in January it was ending Congo’s role in the Central African Republic, after finding incoming troops failed to meet UN standards for vetting, training and equipment. UN officials said privately the move was also in response to abuse allegations against the Congolese peacekeepers. At least 21 have been accused of raping or exploiting women and children during their assignments in the Central African Republic, according to the United Nations.
In many developing countries, peacekeeping assignments are considered a reward. In Burundi, a lieutenant makes about $500 per year but can earn more than $12,000 as a UN peacekeeper, according to interviews with eight former Burundian soldiers.
Current and former soldiers said the Burundian government frequently reserved the coveted peacekeeping nominations for loyalists.
Mayuyu was a government loyalist, an officer who ran a military detention centre in Bujumbura where military and civilian dissidents were sent after the coup, according to Burundian civil-society groups and eight men, interviewed separately, who spent time in the prison.
In August, a journalist asked at a UN news briefing in New York whether Mayuyu was being deployed as a peacekeeper, adding the soldier had been linked to a unit “that was involved in torture and other abuse” in Burundi. The response was no.
Weeks later, Stephane Dujarric, the UN secretarygeneral’s spokesman, acknowledged to reporters that Mayuyu had been serving as a UN military observer in the Central African Republic since July, but added he was being “repatriated with immediate effect.”
UN officials said Mayuyu failed to disclose his role in the military police in his paperwork.
Reached by phone, Mayuyu said he was sent home “based on rumours” and denied allegations of torture. He acknowledged he commanded the military police unit but said there was no prison on his base. He said he didn’t think it was relevant to list his unit on his UN forms.
As more Burundian troops have served in the Central African Republic, more complaints have emerged. In July, a soldier was accused of sexually abusing a 12-yearold girl in Kemo prefecture. Another allegedly raped and impregnated a 13-year-old in the capital, Bangui. This month, the UN announced it had identified 25 Burundian peacekeepers in the Central African Republic who were “possible perpetrators” of sexual abuse against women and girls in the past two years in Kemo. It has not released the names of the accused.
“They are sending us guys who shouldn’t be here,” said one senior UN official in the country.
Perhaps the most jarring illustration of the feeble UN vetting system was the case of Baratuza. In mid-December 2015, he set out for the Central African Republic, chosen by his country to serve as the new spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission. Burundian civic activists erupted in outrage, launching a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #SendBaratuzaBack.
An Internet search would have shown Baratuza defended aggressive Burundian military operations while serving as army spokesman. What infuriated the activists was his comment that 79 “enemies” had been killed by government forces on Dec. 11, 2015, after attacks by armed men on several military installations in Bujumbura. Amnesty International reported the deaths occurred as security forces raided neighbourhoods sympathetic to the political opposition, dragging young men from their homes and executing them.
Dujarric told a media briefing on Dec. 17, 2015, that Baratuza’s deployment had been “suspended.” He was repatriated even before arriving in the Central African Republic, during a stopover in Uganda, officials said.