Predators on notice
It’s hard to imagine a worse betrayal — United Nations peacekeepers raping, abusing and exploiting women and children under their protection. Yet it’s a festering, growing problem. For years, the UN has wrung its hands impotently as countries turned a blind eye.
Apart from Canada, which gave a police officer in Haiti a token nine-day suspension for sexually exploiting someone last year, there’s no record of a UN peacekeeper being disciplined in 2015 for sexual abuse offences. Yet the UN documented 69 such cases last year, and 25 more this year.
Despite UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for “decisive, bold action,” and a decade of so-called “zero tolerance,” the scourge persists. Countries whose troops commit the gravest of crimes have chosen to look the other way.
That will be harder now. Thanks to tough, effective lobbying by U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, the Security Council passed a historic resolution on Friday tackling the problem.
It strongly backs Ban’s authority to send commanders and units home in disgrace where credible evidence surfaces of widespread sexual exploitation or abuse. It also supports his threat to send a country’s troops home if it fails to probe allegations, fails to hold abusers accountable or fails to keep his office in the loop.
This reinforces Ban’s recent decision to name and shame countries whose troops cross the line. It should lead to faster, tougher, more transparent action in investigating cases, hauling miscreants out of the field and seeing that they are punished.
As U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power points out, the crackdown is sorely needed. The UN got multiple complaints last year about troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo committing gang rape and other crimes in Central African Republic, but the contingent was pulled out only last month after even more complaints surfaced. “How could we let that happen?” she has asked. How indeed.
In one notorious case, a 14-year-old girl said Congolese blue helmets attacked her close by a UN base. “Suddenly one of them grabbed me by my arms and the other one ripped off my clothes,” she was quoted as saying. “They pulled me into the tall grass . . . and one . . . raped me.” Her screams finally drove them off.
Former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps, too, has slammed the UN for “gross institutional failure” in cases where peacekeepers traded food for sex with hungry children.
The Security Council’s get-tough approach is encouraging as Canadians prepare to get back into peacekeeping. The vast majority of the 107,000 UN troops and police bravely put their lives on the line to defuse conflict, protect the weak and uphold the law. The few predators in their ranks must be dealt with swiftly and effectively. Anything less subverts the UN’s legitimacy, endangers its missions and puts lives at risk.
Countries whose troops commit the gravest of crimes have chosen to look the other way