WORLD When protectors become abusers

The site of a third of all UN sex crime complaints, apathy reigns in the DRC

The orphan girl haunts the UN’s top human rights official, even though more than a decade has passed since he heard her story.

It was a big day for Bunia town in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): A top UN delegation was paying a high-profile visit. But it was also the day, the girl said, that a Pakistani peacekeeper raped her.

“What on earth would it take for this soldier not to do it? To have all the heads of the UN together, and he still does it?” asked Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, a member of the delegation that heard the girl’s testimony in 2004.

One year later, he helped write a landmark report to curb sexual abuse and exploitation within the UN system. Yet neither Mr Zeid’s outrage nor his report helped the girl.

Her case is grimly emblematic of the underbelly of UN peacekeeping, and the organisation as a whole: In a year-long investigation, the AP 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.

If the UN sexual abuse crisis has an epicentre, it is the DRC, 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 over the past 12 years, more than 700 occurred in the DRC, where the UN’s largest peacekeeping force costs a staggering US$1 billion a year.

With rare exception, the victims got no help. Instead, many are banished from their families for having mixed-race children, who also are shunned.

To this day, the sexual violence continues: the DRC already accounts for nearly a third of the allegations made in 2017.

At the General Assembly on Monday, the UN’s new leader, Antonio Guterres, called on member states to take responsibility for peacekeepers who commit abuse and exploitation.

The UN had no record of the 14-yearold orphan who was raped on the day the top UN delegation visited. Officials did find another case with similar details, but said it was “unsubstantiated” at the time because the girl identified the wrong foreigner in a photo lineup.

But in just three days last month, the AP found a woman whose story closely matched Mr Zeid’s version of events. 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.

Peter Gallo, a former investigator at the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight, blames a bureaucratic, inefficient system 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 organisation was set up to protect.”

Even as the UN promises more reforms, that’s too little, too late for many young women in DRC like Bora, who was raped by two peacekeepers and bore their babies while she was still a child herself.

Her first attacker approached her when she was 11. He offered her bread and a banana, and then raped her. “It was the first man who ever touched me,” she recalled. The rape left her pregnant, and she gave birth to a son.

Two years later, another peacekeeper took advantage of her. She once again got pregnant.

When the child was still a baby, a relative whisked her away out of fear her biological mother would harm her. When the woman rescued the child, she gave the girl a new name, a name she prayed would give the girl a better life despite the circumstances of how she came into the world.

She called her Hope.