Congo epicentre of UN sex-abuse crisis
World body fails to assist victims, stop rapes, exploitation by its peacekeepers
The girl was only 11 when the first peacekeeper raped her, luring her with bread and a banana as she was leaving school in her village in northeastern Congo.
“It was the first man who ever touched me,” said Bora, who asked that only her first name be used because she is a rape victim. The rape left her pregnant, and she gave birth to a son.
She was 13 when the second peacekeeper raped her. She once again got pregnant, and became a mother twice over while she was still a child herself.
Bora’s case is grimly emblematic of the underbelly of United Nations peacekeeping, and the organization as a whole.
In a yearlong investigation, the Associated Press found that despite promises of reform for more than a decade, the UN failed to meet many of its pledges to stop the abuse or help victims, some of whom have been lost to a sprawling bureaucracy.
Cases have disappeared, or have been handed off to the peacekeepers’ home countries — which often do nothing with them.
If the UN sexual-abuse crisis has an epicentre, it is Congo, where the overall scale of the scandal first emerged 13 years ago — and where the promised reforms have most clearly fallen short.
Of the 2,000 sexual-abuse and exploitation complaints made against the UN worldwide during the past 12 years, more than 700 occurred in Congo. The embattled African nation hosts the UN’s largest peacekeeping force, costing $1 billion US a year.
The mission is so problematic, the U.S. ambassador the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has threatened to cut off funds for it and others like it.
With rare exception, the victims interviewed by the AP in Congo got no help. Instead, many are banished from their families for having mixed-race children — who also are shunned, becoming a second generation of victims. Of the 2,000 allegations, about a quarter involved children. Some years, in fact, offences involving children accounted for nearly half of the allegations, including rape offences.
To this day, the violence continues: Congo already accounts for nearly one-third of the 43 allegations made worldwide so far in 2017.
Peter Gallo, a former investigator at the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight, blames a bureaucratic, inefficient agency for the enduring crisis.
“The UN system is essentially protecting the perpetrators of these crimes, and what is happening is that the UN is exploiting and is complicit in the exploitation of the very people that the organization was set up to protect.” heard the girl’s testimony in 2004. One year later, Zeid, now the UN human rights commissioner, helped write a landmark report on sexual abuse within the UN ranks.
Zeid says the UN needs to do much, much more — especially for victims.
“We set up a trust fund. It should have been flush with money,” he said, “But more than a decade later, it’s still in the planning stages.”
The fund has accumulated only half a million dollars US.
Neither Zeid’s outrage nor his 2005 report, however, helped the 14-year-old orphan. The UN had no record of her, saying only that a similar incident was later considered “unsubstantiated” at the time because the girl identified the wrong foreigner in a photo lineup. It didn’t know what became of her.
But in just three days last month, the AP found a woman whose story closely matched Zeid’s description. She was inebriated and living in poverty, the daughter born as a result of the assault now cared for by relatives. The victim, now 27, said she received no help from the UN after her child was born.
The adoptive mother of that child, Dorcas Zawadi, refuses to allow the girl near UN bases.
“The peacekeepers try to distract the girls with cookies, candy and milk to rape them,” she told the Associated Press.