The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently called them "a cancer in our system. Now, officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal. The most recent allegations involve at least four peacekeepers who are accused of paying girls as young as 13 for sex at a camp for the internally displaced next to the international airport in Bangui, the capital.
It is a vast agglomeration of white tents surrounding old, decaying airplanes, just yards from the airport runway. The United Nations has not publicly released the nationalities of the acccused troops, or provided details of the alleged abuse. Some officials say that there may be many more cases of exploitation by peacekeepers that have gone unreported. Its population had grown sharply since September, when violence erupted between the warring parties in the Central African Republic.
Human Rights Watch documented nine cases of sexual violence between September and December in and around the displacement camp. In several instances, Christian women were raped by members of the mostly Christian "anti-balaka" militia after being accused of interacting with Muslims. Across Bangui, the conflict has fallen largely along religious lines. The organization has dispatched special investigators to Bangui to better understand what has gone wrong.
She had been hiding in a bathroom while peacekeepers searched her house, according to Amnesty International. For years, the United Nations has been trying to stop the sexual abuse perpetrated by its own employees and troops. Ban has encouraged harsher penalties for the peacekeeping units to which the abusers belong. Even more problematic, some experts say, is that the prosecution of alleged offenders falls to the governments of the countries that provide the peacekeepers.
In many cases, those governments conduct halfhearted investigations and fail to convict offenders. But critics say those numbers are incomplete, and that many cases go unreported.
