The UN’s poor handling of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation at the hands of peacekeeper troops sent to protect vulnerable communities has led to increasingly heated debate about how their operations are run. There have been questions raised around the handling of internal reports, the treatment of whistleblowers, and the culture of impunity for abusers, as well as the need for greater transparency and promises of action that are more than PR.
Read part 1: The UN and its Whistleblowers and part 2: The #PredatoryPeacekeepers campaign
Some semblance of progress is being made, with senior-level UN figures increasingly promising in public that action will be taken. While this has been tentatively welcomed, one point raised by campaigners has been the potential psychological impact of the UN’s mismanagement on the victims, those who have been most silenced in this story.
Amid increased public pressure, “all Senior-Level actors” were called to an urgent crisis meeting on March 29th this year to discuss recently disclosed reports from the Central African Republic (CAR). Decisions made at the meeting included:
- 10 per cent of UNICEF’s remaining annual budget is to be allocated to response capacity in CAR and the UN mission there, MINUSCA, is to open funds to be used for victim assistance – including transportation, medical support and emergency psycho-social care.
- CAR Crisis Group Principals will “give urgent consideration to a strategy” to mitigate risk to victims, communities, and potential witnesses.
- “Integrated/multidisciplinary assessment teams” have been sent to investigate in affected remote areas of CAR and additional members are to be dispatched in the coming days.
Despite these assurances, the Code Blue campaign, launched in May 2015 by international advocacy organization AIDS-Free World, has been critical of the promises made by the UN regarding victim support. A recent press release stated:
“The Code Blue campaign sees the UN’s ad hoc responses to ever-growing reports of sexual violence as improvised and dangerously unprofessional. Droves of women and girls who’ve come forward in the past month are being subjected to a chaotic grab-bag of bits and pieces of UN activities, slapped together by the MINUSCA mission without adequate headquarters leadership or oversight, thought, planning, protocols, guidelines, or clear channels of communication. Whatever the UN’s intentions, the organization may well be compounding victims’ trauma irreversibly through this round-robin of “preliminary” interviews, conducted over and over again, and with no real justice, protection, or support in sight.”
Being interviewed and re-interviewed by a number of staff from a variety of departments over years, often without the legal powers to follow up and investigate to the point of prosecution, has meant children and young women have potentially had to re-tell their stories multiple times with no clear outcome.
Guilaine Kinouani, a therapist and one of the drivers of the #PredatoryPeacekeepers campaign, which has fought hard to spread the conversation and push for accountability and justice for victims, recently spoke to the Leveller:
“We do not know enough about how victims are being supported. There is a very long history of Western mental health or psychological services trying to import their paradigm in the Third World or in Africa, we’ve seen that in different conflict zones. My concern as a therapist and as a psychologist would be to ensure that the support that the victims get is appropriate and culturally relevant or adapted to the local population because the last thing that we want is for the victim to be re-traumatized by the ‘support’ that they are provided. It’s very, very likely that most of the children and young women affected will suffer long-term negative consequences on their emotional well-being and psychological functioning if they do not get the support. So we want to understand what is being given specifically – who is providing the support, what does the support look like?”
The situation of the victims is complex. The Guardian recently published an article on the Central African Republic’s “lost children,” who have been caught between conflicting groups, have become child soldiers after seeing family members killed or villages burned to the ground or have suffered rape and trauma after being kidnapped. Alongside this is a fragile political context and urgent requirement for aid.
What makes the story surrounding the UN so tragic is that the allegations involve those primarily tasked with protection and bringing peace, or at least momentary stability, to create the conditions for peace. While the longer-term questions of a resolution to conflict in the areas where peacekeepers are deployed pose significant challenges, a failure to address the organization’s own role in worsening the lives of those in its protection hinders trust in their ability to deliver.
Having failed to address reported allegations stretching across borders and spanning years, the communities that were promised protection have been further damaged. There must now be clear and concrete strategies, which are open to public scrutiny, that focus primarily on aiding the victims in beginning to repair their lives. Without this there is a risk of this lack of transparency and accountability repeating itself, when it has already darkened the organization’s historic handling of abuse.
Image: US Army Africa
