Issue of the Week: Human Rights, War, Personal Growth
“UN Sex Abuse Scandal”, July 24, 2018, Frontline, PBS
We take a break again from our commentary, The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, to focus on a related specific issue we noted in our post on July 8. Here’s the excerpt as the lead-in to today’s post:
“Any art of any value that deals with hard realities that need to be faced will be traumatic in some sense of the word—heartbreaking, painful, disturbing—to anyone who has a conscience or empathy. …The Whistleblower [one of the great cover-up movies of all time] …one of the few directed by a woman, Larysa Kondracki, was based on the UN peacekeepers sexual abuse of children and women in Bosnia [and] Kathryn Bolkovac who worked with the peacekeeping force and exposed the sexual abuse. …
Here’s Ed Vulliamy in The Observer in 2012:
‘We do not see the torture inflicted on one girl for trying to flee her captors, but we see the tears of her fellow slaves forced to watch. We see the iron bar tossed on to the cellar floor when the punishment is over, and we know what has happened. …
The Whistleblower spares you little. … the most searing drama-documentary of recent years…
Speaking to the Observer last week, Bolkovac said: ‘The thing that stood out about these cases in Bosnia, and cases that have been reported in other [UN] mission areas, is … that police and humanitarian workers were frequently involved in not only the facilitation of forced sexual abuse, and the use of children and young women in brothels, but in many instances became involved in the trade by racketeering, bribery and outright falsifying of documents as part of a broader criminal syndicate.’
We will note the modelling of Bolkovac in saying “children and young women”–children first as opposed to the child degrading and woman infantilizing “women and children”, as we’ve commented on at length before.
Bolkovac went through hell to tell the truth. She was eventually affirmed in everything she said. It rocked the UN, as other such revelations have since. It showed the usual collusion between all the private and public and national and international interests. It shows the corruption of the UN, and the possibilities.
For the most recent history and update on the issue, from Bosnia to Congo to the Central African Republic, be sure to watch PBS Frontline on July 24, UN Sex Abuse Scandal.
The UN is the ultimate global institution representing all nations. It is, to say the least, a work in progress, as the elements it is made up of are all the best and worst of humanity. If it will not hold itself accountable for the sexual abuse and slavery of children, and of adults, then that is the measure of why there is no place of ultimate resort yet for decent governance and justice on the planet.”
July 24 is here and “UN Sex Abuse Scandal” aired tonight. It picks up after the Bosnia scandal and focusses on more recent scandals in Congo and the CAR. It makes clear, however, that as always with institutions, the scandal is world-wide wherever UN peacekeepers are, is ongoing, and the awful number of victims known is clearly far less than the unknown
Watch the program here online at Frontline or in the US check your local PBS airtimes for repeats.
The introduction online reads:
“An investigation into sex abuse by United Nations peacekeepers in the world’s conflict zones. Award-winning correspondent Ramita Navai (Iraq Uncovered) traces allegations from Congo to the Central African Republic, with firsthand accounts from survivors, witnesses and officials.”
Frontline as always, and Navai, do at first-rate job.
The only downside with Navai is her seemingly unconscious use of the anachronistic phrase, “women and children”, which, as we noted above, is “child degrading and woman infantilizing”, simultaneously communicating that the rights and protection of children are not primary and being sexist toward women as if they are not adults.
As we also noted above, the whistleblower who risked her life to save children and women from the horrific abuse of UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac, modelled the opposite and appropriate language of children first. We’ve explored before and will again the sexist patriarchal origins of and damage from the ongoing improper use of phrases like the above and the degree to which they remain imbedded in the culture, which then continues to impact the culture.
In every other respect, Navai is truly superb. Her interactions with victims are respectful, empathetic and heart-wrenching. Her interviews of UN officials, especially those who evade answers to questions she relentlessly pursues, from the transparently covering-up to those using scripted-sounding words of empathy and responsibility, who ultimately neither take nor require responsibility, are the work of fine journalism. The interviews with those who refused to continue to collaborate with the system were informative, inspiring and depressing.
Navai’s confrontation with a serial child rapist is as chilling an experience as one could witness. He elicits as strongly as anything could Hannah Arendt’s famous phase, “the banality of evil” from her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (as do all the UN enablers as well in a more bureaucratic sense) when he reveals the number of children he raped without guilt, as if counting something utterly inconsequential. Navai could not in our view more perfectly exhibit the combination of a journalist doing her job and a human being who would protect children at all costs, eviscerating the monstrosity of a child rapist with laser eyes, which the camera and the editing brilliantly linger on.
As with so many institutions which use the phrase, this documentary shows that “zero tolerance” has “zero meaning”.
The issue of child sexual abuse is, as noted often, not primarily an institutional issue–but the institutional issue is critical because any source of such abuse is critical to unmask, and because of the inter-related impact of institutions, culture, families and individuals.
And as we noted before, the importance of the scandal this documentary covers is in no small part that it is about the United Nations. This is the benchmark institution, with all its declarations and conventions, which is used to measure the proper or improper conduct of other institutions and nations on this and other issues. It will be the measure of whether nations and peoples decide to live by civilized values and mutually necessary rules, providing the basic human rights it espouses of equality, basic needs for all, and a sustainable planet. Human history led from the caves to this moment and is now a race between the above occurring and obliteration, for all the self-evident reasons we’ve observed. We’ll get back to that race and to this moment in history soon.
But for now we focus on this Frontline documentary and conclude with four articles from the Frontline site related to the documentary:
“How We Found Unreported Claims of UN Peacekeeper Abuse”
JULY 24, 2018
by LEILA MILLER Tow Journalism Fellow, FRONTLINE/Columbia Journalism School Fellowships
Over 2,000 young women and children have alleged to have been victims of UN peacekeepers since the early 1990s. But only a small fraction of those they’ve accused have been held accountable.
The UN has recorded only 53 uniformed peacekeepers and one civilian that have been sent to jail for these crimes. A 2005 UN report recommended that member states set up courts martial in mission areas to facilitate gathering witnesses and evidence. For civilian peacekeepers, it recommended an international agreement to ensure the prosecution of those facing allegations. There’s been no widespread effort by UN member states to adopt the measures. Meanwhile, more abuse allegations continue to emerge.
FRONTLINE producer Ramita Navai investigated the steps the UN has taken to deter abuse and why the problem has persisted. She traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic to look for previously unidentified victims and witness how the trauma has changed their lives.
We spoke to Navai for FRONTLINE’s newest documentary, UN Sex Abuse Scandal, about how she found these victims, why they often don’t report their abuse, and why there’s a lack of criminal accountability.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You found individuals who had never before reported being sexually abused by UN peacekeepers. Was this easier or harder than you expected?
The UN say they have really good mechanisms for getting people to report to them, that they do a lot of work in the field trying to spread the message, and they say this with absolute confidence. Yet, after only a few days of arriving in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we found so many women and children who say they were sexually abused or exploited by UN peacekeepers. It shocked us. Crucially, they hadn’t reported this abuse to the UN, which says to me that UN numbers nowhere near reflect how big the actual problem is.
Why does this reporting gap exist?
There are lots of different reasons people don’t report their abuse. One is shame. They’re embarrassed. They just want it to go away. They don’t want anyone to know. They think if they report it, more and more people will know. For some of them, they fear they will lose their chance of marrying – no one will want to marry them – which has happened.
Another reason is that they simply don’t know how. We went to the town of Bambari, about 250 miles north of the capital Bangui in the Central African Republic. These are very isolated places, really cut off communities, and many of them don’t even know what the UN is let alone how they can report something like this to the authority.
And of course, there are some who have heard that their neighbors have reported and nothing happened, so they think, ‘what’s the point?’
You tracked down victims of Didier Bourguet, a former UN employee who was convicted in France of raping two girls in Africa but who has faced more allegations. You asked the acting head of the Democratic Republic of Congo mission why the UN hasn’t found more of Bourguet’s victims when it took your team just a day. Has the UN prioritized identifying victims?
It doesn’t seem like it has. The secretary general has said that fighting exploitation and abuse is a top priority. The UN does talk a good talk, and the UN, it does try, it does make an effort. We went on some outreach programs – they go to schools, they try to spread the message, but something is clearly going wrong here.
These are very sensitive issues. When we had gotten in touch with some of the other women that Didier Bourguet had raped, sexually abused as children, they said to us that if they were to talk about this they would have to talk about it in a really sensitive way, away from their husbands. They didn’t want them to know. They didn’t want anyone in the community to know.
We were finding that the UN was calling victims and telling them that they must come to headquarters. When some of the women explained that they didn’t want to be seen at the base, or maybe they wanted to do this in a more discreet way, the UN didn’t seem to be accommodating.
Why did these victims decide to speak to you?
They’re the people that have gone past shame because their community already knew. They had already been ostracized. They had nothing to lose. They simply didn’t know how to report their cases or where to turn and so they wanted as much help as possible.
The father of one young girl we spoke to, she was called Daniella, she’d been raped as a little girl by French peacekeepers. He was taking Daniella around with him to his neighbors because Daniella had suffered absolute stigma. She was absolutely ostracized from her community as a little girl for being raped. Her father was a really enlightened, forward thinking strong man, [and he] took her from neighbor to neighbor explaining why Daniella should hold her head up high and why the community should support her.
For him, it was really important to talk out and let the world know what was happening. That his daughter had been raped and nobody had been in touch with him. He had received no help, no compensation, and he had no idea what had happened to these peacekeepers.
The film opens with a woman named Annie who said she was given a dollar by a peacekeeper from South Africa after he raped her. Others also recounted being given small sums after experiencing abuse. What are the power dynamics at play?
Annie’s story in some many ways represents the story of women in Congo. She said she watched her family, her parents and her siblings murdered in front of her. Then she was gang raped by the M23 rebels. Then the government soldiers took the town. She was elated, she thought they’d all be saved, and then she was then gang raped by government soldiers. At that point she fled, and that’s when she was raped by a UN peacekeeper sent to protect that population against raping soldiers.
When you speak to someone like Annie, it shocks you and it’s deeply affecting and deeply depressing. She’s not getting the psycho-social counseling she needs. She’s in absolute pain and suffers depression.
The film reported that only 53 uniformed peacekeepers have been sent to jail. Why have so few been prosecuted?
If you’re a military peacekeeper, it is the responsibility of the troop-contributing country to try you, to convict you, to hold you to account, because the UN doesn’t have jurisdiction. The military peacekeeper, whether he’s a uniformed policeman, military police or soldier, usually simply gets kicked out of peacekeeping, sent back to their country, gets a slap on the wrist. They’ll say that either there wasn’t enough evidence to try their soldier or by the time they got involved to investigate or by the time the UN started the investigation it was so far off the alleged abuse the evidence had been lost.
Another reason is that often it’s believed by many who talk to me off the record about this that they [the member states] don’t want the shame. They don’t want the attention.
You visited the Central African Republic where strict non-fraternization policies have been implemented to keep peacekeepers’ minds off of sex. Has this worked and have you seen any effective solutions to prevent abuse?
The numbers show it hasn’t really worked because abuse is still happening, exploitation is still happening. The UN is still logging cases on its website, and as we know, that’s not representative of the real cases on the ground.
I think you can have all the non-fraternization, zero tolerance policies, outreach programs in the world. It’s not going to stop it [the abuse] unless there’s accountability. That’s the crux of it. There isn’t accountability. All the UN can do, because the UN doesn’t have jurisdiction, is simply sack, dismiss the UN employee. They can hand them over to his relevant home country authority but only if they have extraterritorial jurisdiction can they [that country] try him.
What will it take to have accountability?
There are two solutions that were suggested by [UN high commissioner] Prince Zeid. One – countries adopting extraterritorial jurisdiction. For civilians, if they are caught abusing, the UN can hand them over to their home country and the authorities will prosecute, as was the case with Didier Bourguet.
Number two, better screening processes, which the UN say they are doing. Screening is important to make sure offenders can’t get back into the system.
Previous secretary generals, they always suggest on-site court martials as a way to tackle this. That would mean that the troop-contributing country would try their guys on the ground. And that means that they’d have easier access to evidence and witnesses. That’s one of the reasons that troop-contributing countries say they can’t try their men when they return home.
Member states have objected to the UN high commissioner’s recommendation to create a mechanism so that personnel could be tried in their home countries for crimes committed abroad. Why do they oppose that?
We were told either because they don’t want the attention, or they just don’t want outsiders meddling in their domestic affairs. They see it as a domestic problem. They want to deal with it themselves.
If member states won’t agree, there’s nothing that the UN secretariat can do. His argument is how much does the UN need troop contributing countries to provide troops, and how much do troop contributing countries want to be in UN peacekeeping?
It’s a pretty symbiotic relationship… It’s good for the troop-contributing countries because it gives them prestige. For the poorer countries, it gives them a little bit of money. Crucially, it gives these troops training. On the other side, we were told that if there’s an impending genocide, the UN’s desperate for troops. As a US ambassador to the UN told us, with somewhere like the Central African Republic when it looked like a potential genocide, you need troops on the ground yesterday. So how much leverage does the secretariat actually have is a really interesting question.
One of the larger questions in the film is whether the ultimate responsibility for these abuses lies with the UN or with the member states. Do you have an answer?
It was quite frustrating when I was talking to UN officials and they passed the buck – that’s how I felt. They passed the buck and said don’t talk to us, talk to the member states.
It [the UN] makes these very grand speeches and is very open and public about the need to address this issue. And yet, when you ask direct questions: what’s going wrong, who’s in charge, who’s responsible. They can’t answer those questions themselves. Ultimately, the victims suffer, as always.
“French Police to Investigate New Abuse Claims Against Former UN Peacekeeper”
JULY 24, 2018
by NICOLE EINBINDER Abrams Journalism Fellow, FRONTLINE/Columbia Journalism School Fellowships
Prosecutors in France have asked the police to investigate the claims of a woman interviewed by FRONTLINE, who said she had been sexually abused as a girl by a former United Nations peacekeeper who has already been convicted for the rape of two minors while on duty.
The woman told FRONTLINE in the documentary UN Sex Abuse Scandalthat she was abused by the civilian peacekeeper, Didier Bourguet, in 2004 while he was stationed in the Central African Republic. She was 14 years old at the time. Bourguet was a 40-yearold French national in charge of transport and logistics at the UN peacekeeping mission in Goma.
“He used to pass by every so often and saw me selling bananas,” the woman, whose first name is Valerie, told FRONTLINE. “When he told me that he loved me, he took me to Hotel Linda for the first time.”
She said Bourguet, who earned $7,000 a month while working for the UN, gave her money in exchange for sex. “The first time he gave me $2. The second time… $5. Another time… $15. I was still very young. I felt very bad because he was as old as my father,” she told FRONTLINE correspondent Ramita Navai.
Over a span of six months, Valerie said she had regular contact with Bourguet — until the day she went to see him and he was nowhere to be found. At that point, she realized other women and girls were also looking for him. “Yes, there were others,” she said, adding: “None of us ever found him.”
Bourguet was ultimately arrested by the Congolese police in Goma in a sting operation, and handed over to the French authorities on charges that he raped at least 20 young girls, some as young as 12 years old. Valerie was not one of the alleged victims at that time.
Bourguet admitted the rapes to French authorities, and confirmed them again in a recent interview after FRONTLINE tracked him down in the south of France. “I would say about 20. Twenty, 25, I didn’t count. Most of it was in Congo,” he said. He said that he also had sex with about 60 to 80 women. He said he had no recollection of Valerie or her specific allegations, but did admit to having sex with a girl her age in Goma.
The Bourguet case caused a global scandal, prompting the UN to promise additional reforms. In addition to sexually abusing young girls, Bourguet also photographed his victims while having sex with them. Congolese officials told ABC that they suspected he shared those images with others in the UN.
In 2008, a French judge ruled there was only enough evidence to convict him for the rape of two minors. Bourget was sentenced by a French court to nine years in prison. He has since been released. When FRONTLINE interviewed him, he was homeless and storing his belongings in the nearby woods.
Bourguet remains the only civilian peacekeeper to have been jailed for sexual abuse while working abroad for the UN. He described a culture of UN workers having sex with prostitutes, young women and children.
“Because we had money it was really easy,” he said. “We just had to give money to buy something and of course they were starving so of course… that is why it’s easy, it was easy.”
Valerie said she only told her mother about Bourguet, and never reported the incident to the UN.
“This brings back memories of what happened to me,” said Valerie, who didn’t know that Bourguet had been arrested. “Such heartache and pain remembering what I went through.”
With Valerie’s permission, FRONTLINE questioned French prosecutors about her allegations and they referred the matter to the police for investigation. Valerie’s allegations fall within the statute of limitations, and could potentially lead to a new case against the former peacekeeper.
While William Swing, then the UN’s head of mission in Congo, promised in 2005 to find and support Bourguet’s alleged victims, Valerie wasn’t contacted until FRONTLINE, again with permission, brought her case to UN officials.
Adama Ndao, the head of the conduct and discipline unit at the UN’s peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said that attempts to trace Bourguet’s victims had been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Valerie is still dealing with trauma from the abuse. “My heart is not content,” she said. “This person has ruined my life.”
—Ramita Navai and Sam Collyns contributed reporting.
“For Victims of UN Sex Abuse or Exploitation, Help Can Be Elusive”
JULY 24, 2018
by PRIYANKA BOGHANI Digital Reporter
In recent years, the UN has been rocked by reports of peacekeepers and UN staff sexually abusing or exploiting the very people they are meant to protect.
The UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic had been especially marred by a series of allegations involving peacekeepers since 2015.
When FRONTLINE correspondent Ramita Navai travelled to CAR while filming UN Sex Abuse Scandal, she found Manda, a 14-year-old girl.
Manda told Navai that she’d been on the way to the market about three years ago when a peacekeeper grabbed her.
“I was wearing a nice dress. I don’t know why he chose me,” Manda said. “After he had sex with me, he gave me money. He told me not to talk about it.”
She was 11 years old at the time. She told her mother, but they didn’t report the rape to the UN.
“It was in the second month that I got pregnant,” she said. “He didn’t do anything. Two weeks later, a big truck came and picked them up and they left.
“I thought it was a joke, but they were gone for good.” Manda was left to care for herself and her infant child on her own.
More than 2,000 young women and children have allegedly been sexually exploited or abused by UN peacekeepers — uniformed and civilian — in missions around the world since the early 1990s.
The UN has vowed to stamp out abuse — and support the victims. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres began his term last year announcinga new approach that would, he said, “put the rights and dignity of victims first.” In August, he appointed Jane Connors as the UN’s first victims’ rights advocate, dedicated to ensuring victims of sexual abuse and exploitation have access to assistance and get information about their cases.
One of the first challenges is finding them. Several victims FRONTLINE interviewed had not reported their abuse or exploitation to the UN. But when they do report their cases, help can still be elusive. FRONTLINE interviews with several victims and conversations with experts who track this problem show that support provided by the UN to victims of sexual abuse and exploitation in the past has appeared to be inconsistent, inadequate or difficult to obtain.
The UN says it provides “basic assistance” to those who report being sexually exploited and abused by UN peacekeepers. That can include medical care, help accessing psychological counseling, finding shelter, clothing, food and protection if they are at risk, according to the Conduct in UN Field Missions website. That support is supposed to come even before the UN completes its investigation: victims need not prove they were abused to receive assistance.
In 2013, an independent team of experts that assessed four peacekeeping missions found that “the bare minimum of victim assistance has been provided.” Aid that did come, it found, appeared to depend on goodwill of the UN’s agencies, member states and countries that contributed peacekeeping troops.
The UN can refer victims to counseling or other services, but a variety of circumstances can make it difficult for victims to access those services. Carla Ferstman, a human rights lawyer and lecturer at the Law University of Essex, compiled a report late last year that looked at victims’ access to reparation and assistance. She found that the NGOs and local civil society groups offering the assistance may not always have enough funding or resources to help.
It “can be almost impossible” for victims to access assistance, according to Lewis Mudge, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch’s Africa Division. “The Central African Republic, right now — 80 percent of the territory is controlled by non-state armed groups. So basic movement, let alone to a health clinic, is incredibly risky and downright dangerous.” Lack of security and reliable infrastructure make accessing assistance in CAR that much harder, Mudge noted. “In many cases, you’re talking about walking for several days.”
In cases where local women had children fathered by UN peacekeepers, the UN says it offers to “facilitate the pursuit of claims of paternity and child support.” But in the UN’s view, compensation and child support are the responsibility of the father and his home country.
Manda told FRONTLINE that she reached out to the man who raped her. “I called him twice. He kept saying that he was going to come back for his child,” she said. “It’s been more than two years. The child is walking, and he has not come yet.”
FRONTLINE also met a woman named Francine, who worked as a housekeeper for a civilian peacekeeper in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She said it soon became clear that she was expected to have sex with her employer. She was 15 at the time. After she became pregnant, she said the man who fathered the child disappeared.
“I would like for him to be found, and then for him to help me look after his child,” she said.
Nicole Phillips, a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, works to help women in Haiti gain compensation for babies they say were fathered by UN peacekeepers. The women struggle to earn enough to provide their children with food and water each day, and face major obstacles in receiving compensation.
In some cases, the woman may not know the real name or identity of the purported father. She may not have access to his DNA in order to confirm paternity. He may also have left the country, making it harder to track him down.
“How are you supposed to file a claim against somebody from the UN who had left the country and now lives on another continent in a country that speaks another language?” Phillips said. “The hurdles are almost insurmountable for her.”
The UN has been working to offer more support. It has increased outreach in communities where peacekeepers serve, and added new ways for people to report abuse. In March 2016, the UN created a trust fund to address gaps in services for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse. Currently, around $2 million is available through voluntary contributions from 19 member states and payments withheld from peacekeepers found to have committed abuse or exploitation.
“We are determined to do everything possible to ensure that victims receive the assistance and justice they deserve,” a UN peacekeeping spokesperson said in a statement to FRONTLINE.
So far, about $550,000 from the fund has been used to improve the process for filing complaints in the DRC, fund health and legal services for victims in CAR; and support education and vocational training for victims in Liberia, the UN peacekeeping spokesperson said in a statement in response to questions.
It’s also rolling out a database to peacekeeping missions worldwide to keep track of victims and the assistance they receive later this year.
Since FRONTLINE shared details of their cases with the UN, Francine has been in touch with the UN team in the DRC. She’s waiting to hear back.
In CAR, Manda has also now heard from the UN.
“’This Is Unacceptable’: How the UN Falls Short in Responding to Alleged Sex Abuse”
JULY 24, 2018
by PATRICE TADDONIO Assistant Director of Audience Development
When UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited the Central African Republic (CAR) in October of 2017, his words echoed a theme that he’d been sounding since taking office in January: Stemming the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation by UN peacekeepers was among his top priorities.
“We know that the good work and tremendous sacrifice of peacekeepers around the world has been tarnished by the appalling acts of some UN personnel who have harmed the people they were meant to serve,” said Gutteres, who since becoming secretary-general had stated a commitment to “ensure that the voices of victims are heard,” and introduced a new role of victims’ rights advocate at the UN.
The same month of Guterres’ visit to CAR, the UN had received a report of a new rape case there. A young woman named Mauricette, who was 17 at the time, said she was raped by peacekeepers on her way home from a funeral. And as the new FRONTLINE documentary UN Sex Abuse Scandal reports, Mauricette went months without hearing from the UN after her initial interview with them – despite FRONTLINE correspondent Ramita Navai raising the delay with multiple UN officials earlier this year, and those officials telling her that such a delay is not acceptable.
The details of what allegedly happened to Mauricette are grim, as the above excerpt from the documentary explores.
“She was vomiting,” says Jean-Gaston Endjileteko, who works at Samaritans’ Medical Center, where Mauricette had been treated. “She told me she had drunk some drugged tea spiked with a powder at the Mauritanian checkpoint.
“There was a condom wrapper on the ground near her. And she said she had been “****** by soldiers,” Endjileteko adds.
The hospital reported Mauricette’s rape, and she was interviewed by a local UN representative. But then, the UN went silent.
“We don’t even know what happened to the person who did this, or whether the contingent has been punished or not,” Mauricette’s uncle, Aston, says in the above excerpt.
“I’ve heard nothing,” Mauricette says. “No news.”
That was approximately two months after Mauricette’s initial interview with the UN — so Navai brought the delay to the attention of Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, Head of UN Mission, Central African Republic.
“This is unacceptable,” he says. “I hope that through you we may be able to reach out to that person and make sure that she gets what is due to her and that our services may reach out. But it is absolutely unacceptable.”
Navai also brought the case to Jane Holl Lute, the UN’s special coordinator on improving its response to sexual exploitation and abuse.
“No, of course not. I don’t think it’s acceptable,” Lute says. “And of course I think, what needs to be done is that she gets the support she needs in any and all cases.”
Despite Onanga-Anyanga and Lute’s words, Mauricette still hadn’t heard anything further from the UN — four months after FRONTLINE brought the delay in communication with her about her case to the UN’s attention.
For the full story on why the UN has struggled to respond to victims’ allegations and hold peacekeepers who commit abuses accountable, watch UN Sex Abuse Scandal. From Navai and director Sam Collyns, the documentary tells the stories of many young people like Mauricette, who say they were sexually abused or exploited by peacekeepers in conflict zones around the world who were supposed to protect them. Gripping and comprehensive, the film is an in-depth look at the failures and constraints of the UN — which has the authority to fire people, but not prosecute them — and the role of member states in dealing with the problem.
UN Sex Abuse Scandal airs Tuesday, July 24 at 10/9c on PBS stations and online at pbs.org/frontline.