The Independant reports that UN troops have been buying sex from teenage refugees in the Congo – some as young as 13. The girls, of course, have no real choice – they’re facing starvation, and they often have children of their own to feed as well. The soldiers taking advantage of their desparation are the scum of the earth.
The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 – the victims of multiple rape by militiamen – can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.
Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers.
The trade, which according to one victim results in a banana or a cake to feed to her infant son, is taking place despite a pledge by the UN to adopt a “zero tolerance” attitude to cases of sexual misconduct by those representing the organisation.
The Independant has two articles up – one (quoted from above) brief, one longer and with more quotes from the abused girls. The horrifying thing is not just the actions of the UN troops, but how every aspect of the situation – from the misogynistic beliefs of her own culture, to the lack of sufficient aid from international helpers – has conspired to give these girls virtually no choice.
“I came to this camp nearly six months ago, when the fighting got bad in our village,” she explains, quietly. “The soldiers, different ones, were coming every night and we didn’t know what was going on, we were all scared. Every night the soldiers would come to our hut and make my sisters and I do it with them. We had no choice. If we said no, then they would hurt us. Sometimes they put their guns against my chest and sometimes between my legs. I was really scared.” Scared enough to leave the village where she had been born and begin the long walk through the jungle of Ituri province to the IDP camp. She knew before she left that she was pregnant, her child’s father one of the anonymous band of soldiers. “I had Joseph in the forest,” she says. “My father cannot help me any more – he is ashamed of me because I had this baby when I am not married. He has my brothers and sisters to look after.”
Faela expected to be safe in the camp. She believed life would be hard, but at least there would be no more late-night visits, no more men with guns. She felt that she would be fed, clothed and protected. Instead, she slowly discovered, as people refused her food, turned away from her, and talked of her “shame”, that she was a pariah.
“It is hard in the camp for the girls like me with little babies and no husbands,” she says. “We have no men to look after us. We have been dirtied by the soldiers who came to our villages. No one will now take us as their wives and it is hard to get food in the camp for us.”
Faced with starvation, and worried for her son, Faela, along with other girls in a similar predicament, turned to the only salvation they felt that they had – the Uruguayan and Moroccan Monuc soldiers stationed directly across from the camp, barely 20 metres away, with only barbed wire separating the two. “It is easy for us to get to the UN soldiers,” she explains. “We climb through the fence when it is dark, sometimes once a night, sometimes more.”
The article also discusses how no one seems willing to discipline the soldiers. And, of course, just stopping the soldiers – without doing anything about the reasons teenage girls are so desparate for food that they’ll trade sex for fruit – is no solution. More.
It seems ridiculous to call for more foreign aid – especially remembering the similar scandal that took place a couple of years ago – but what else can be done? The clear way to help these girls is to provide them and their children with access to enough food and security so that they don’t need to trade sex for food. Which means more foreign aid. Which may mean more exploitative foreign aid workers. Aaargh.
What these girls really need is a situation where they have power of their own, rather than being dependant on the power of men around them – fathers, brothers, local soldiers, UN soldiers, or aid workers. But I can’t imagine any way to bring that about, in the short term..
Scum of the earth, yeah. This would be terrible enough if it were rich civilians as opposed to soldiers – but the mean JOB of these peacekeepers is to protect these girls. Cripes.
I recently read Shake Hards With the Devil, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire’s account of the UN mission he led in Rwanda ten years ago. Dallaire mentions that at one point, before the genocide began, he heard that many of Belgian soldiers were fraternizing with the Tutsi women. In his book he writes, “In my opinion, there is no such thing as consensual sex between soldiers and civilians in a conflict zone.” The Belgian commander gave his troops hell, with Dallaire’s full support.
Compare and contrast, eh?
Yes, punish the soldiers. Also go up the chain of command–you can’t tell me that no one knew this crap was going on.
Sadly enough, I’m not surprised.
And I doubt very much that so much as a passing thought will be given to these young girls and their struggle to feed their kids. You’re right of course, this should be a top priority, but it isn’t. These girls are young, female, poor, and black. They simply don’t count.
There’ve been similar allegations against the UN troops in Kosovo, although there they include involvement at the wholesale level — trafficking, as opposed to simply indulging.
Doug M.
I’m feeling very cynical today, and my first reaction was to feel that the world will never change. Young women have one asset of value in the eyes of the world, and that’s their sexuality. They can either protect it to get a better deal for their virginity later on, or they can try to sell it to the highest bidder for food or for protection. But mostly, of course, it is someone else who takes control of this one asset and determines what the women will do.
Everything else these young women have; those keen eyes and fast feet, that questioning brain, that laughter, that song; all of that is seen as worthless.
Ok. More realistically, clearly the soldiers should be disciplined and money should be channeled through organizations that are more interested in helping young girls. This will happen about the same time as the Devil starts taking skating lessons.
This is horrifying. Rape is a daily part of life for an enormous amount of women, and yet it seems that so many people see this as terrible anomalies rather than a systemic problem. Completely disgusting.
Wait a minute. Why are all of the UN peacekeepers male? Wouldn’t it make sense, in light of these allegations, to send more women in as UN peacekeepers?
I’ve already seen at least one hearty libertarian defend this – because, just like “regular” prostitutes, the girls are just working to earn a living and the “peacekeepers” are helping them out by “paying” them. The girls are doing it out of their own free will, after all.
I hope that this isn’t a common response.
When i was in nigeria this was a huge issue because Nigerian soldiers posted to UN peacekeeping initiatives in Liberia or Sierra Leone (not sure which one at the time) were bringing home AIDS and other STDs. As I remember it being discussed the girls and their problems were not really the focus of the national debate, it was more the issue of the soldiers’ health, and I remember being shocked that the girls who were obviously not being prostitutes by choice but out of desperation were not really considered as an issue at all.
The issue of gender discrimination in poor African countries, to me is very similar to the issue of gay bashing in Palestine. The African countries need help. On the other hand their cultural practices contradict your liberal values. What do you do? What is the best approach? I don’t think there are easy answers to this.
Wait a minute. Why are all of the UN peacekeepers male? Wouldn’t it make sense, in light of these allegations, to send more women in as UN peacekeepers?
The basic answer is because “UN Peacekeeper” is not a job that people go and apply for. There is no UN army. UN Peacekeeping forces are made up of the militaries of existing countries that contribute troops. The “UN Peacekeeping forces” in Congo are, in many cases, the same people who had previously been involved in military excursions into Congo in their jobs as a neighboring countries’ soldier. (Morroco, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda . . .)
Until African nations have a substantial female presence in their militaries, UN peacekeepers will be nearly entirely male.
Also, just to add about the women as peacekeepers comment:
I hate to say this, but I don’t think it would help much. Yes, it’s less likely that women would sleep with women in exchange for food. But they may exploit them in other ways, or they may turn their heads and shrug when their male counterparts continue to rape/sexually exploit desperate teenage girls.
I suppose in any situation where there is someone “occupying” your home/territory, wether it be “peacekeepers” or “regular” soldiers, as a matter of war, this happens. The possession of a vagina (or any suitable hole, I suppose) makes you the “obvious” target for rape.
She was asking for it, after all. She has a vagina. Having a need means people like this libertarian quoted above can double-speak it to “Well she wanted those things so she chose to sell her body for them. What’s the problem?”
Yes… vaginas… currency since the dawn of time.
If this sounds bitter and somewhat disjointed, I apologize. I am angry enough to wish I WAS a wookie and could go down there and rip peoples arms (or other appendages, I’m not picky) out of their sockets.
So… what can we do? Obviously this is unacceptable. But isn’t it also unacceptable to know about this terrible suffering and do nothing?
I’m serious: where are the humanitarian organizations to help– by giving food (*really* for free), by getting these women out of the country they’re in and setting them up in a new life– who’s working on this problem? And if the answer is “no one,” how can we change that? I don’t know anything about charity or humanitarian aid at all. But it seems to me there has to be something we can do other than being self-righteously appalled. Where– how– can I find out how I can help?
In my inexpert opinion, wookie and Sheelzebub are correct. The problem is not the concept of the UN peacekeeper, or the gender of the soldier, or the nationality of the soldier, but the power given to the organization. Organizations — be they corporations or governments — are made up of people, and when given power, they can be corrupted.
Give the Red Cross or Human Rights Watch dictatorial powers, and pretty soon they’d be torturing and raping people as well.
As an opening idea, the UN shouldn’t do anything at all. Rather, they should set up a fund and announce, “Anyone who wants to help refugees — governments, NGOs, corporations, humanitarian groups, Halliburton, kindly nuns, peace corps drop outs, Nader voters — go into Congo and start helping. For every refugee you can document helping, we’ll give you $100” (or $10, or however much they are spending now per refugee helped). Then require video cameras in the refugee camps to document and make sure they are really providing the aid.
Make the groups all compete for the refugees, instead of giving one group a “mandate” to help. If word gets out that the Halliburton guys are raping everyone, the refugees will start going to the Rwandan-sponsored refugee camp across town, where they have free wheat and extra-fuzzy blankets.
This is not surprising and is horribly disgusting.
Where is the United States on this issue? Nowhere!
Why? — Because our soldiers are doing similar and equally horrible things in Iraq.
We’re losing any sense of moral authority — it’s time we stand up, speak out, and seriously address human rights violations such as these.
While I’m not sure how this gets to be America’s fault, I am getting a strange case of deja vu. Now I know why.
Here’s a UNpress release put out two years ago about exactly the same thing happening in Liberia/ Sierra Leone, but how it was okay because there were not procedures in place to make sure it never happened again.
Read it and see if it possible to believe that it was put out two years May, 2002, not May, 2004.
“now procedures”, not “not procedures”.
I’ve seen it claimed that no one’s outraged about the UN, and that only US outrages count on the left.
http://www.improvedclinch.com/index.php?id=P1030
I’m glad to see that there isn’t much truth to that.
The primary problem as I see it (and, hey, what do you know: it really is my job to assess these things) is that Atlas Logistique isn’t providing the minimum standard access to food and services for these girls and young women. Second, AL aren’t providing the minimum standard of security. This shouldn’t be an issue for an organization like AL who, after all, run these camps as their profession.
Furthermore, there are in fact standards that NGOs are supposed meet. They have been collected and codified by the SPHERE Project.
To quote from the SPHERE Handbook:
Key indicators [of security include]
Systems to prevent and manage the consequences of sexual and gender-based violence are in place.
Guidance Notes:
Security measures: the coordinating agency should ensure that there is lighting in strategic areas at night and that female- and adolescent-headed households and single women are housed in secure areas near facilities, but not in such a way that ‘ghettos’ are created. It is important to work with the affected population to establish security measures including, for example, safe haven facilities and neighborhood watch groups. Measures to prevent sexual violence may include: site planing in consultation with women and men from the affected population; ensuring the presence of female protection and health staff and interpreters; reviewing issues of sexual violence in coordination meetings.
The actual policies and practices will naturally vary from situation to situation, but you shouldn’t be running a camp without some ability to deal with these issues in the local context.
. . .
Every society has some way of reintegrating people who have been “dirtied”, whether through committing acts of violence or through being a victim of violence. I don’t know what that is in Ituri, but it should be possible for people there, on the ground, to find out. I also know that people in dire straits are very often compassionate with others in a similar situation. There are almost certainly other people in the camp, very likely older women, who could help provide protection for these girls within the camp and help assure that they had access to food.
Obviously, these are avenues that do not appear to be being explored.
. . .
Write to Atlas Logistique and ask them why they aren’t implementing the SPHERE Standards. Write to Oxfam – Great Britain (also present in the camp) and ask them, as they were among the agencies involved in the development of SPHERE, why the SPHERE Standards don’t appear to be being applied at Bunia. Write to UNHCR and ask them why an agency not implementing SPHERE is allowed to be the lead agency in running this – or any – camp.
Write to the UN Mission in Congo and demand accountability. Start calling for accountability from Jean-Marie Guéhenno, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations (I have not been able to find a method of contacting his office – so write your local paper).
Richard Bellamy proposes letting just anyone run these camps. Sadly, this is a bad idea. What we know about refugee/IDP camps comes from hard earned experience. Amateurs get people killed.
I am not letting Atlas Logistique off the hook here: they are fucking up really badly. But I am dead serious when I say that organizations without experience would be much, much worse.
I think a good start would be to begin speaking out more about the inherent inequality and harm of prostitution everywhere, not just in select countries at select moments. The atrocities are global, and a global enlightenment of women’s inherent right to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy is essential.
International anti-prostitution workers have a terribly hard time prosecuting pimps and johns because we as a world still agree that prostitution it is an acceptable form of work for poverty-stricken women. From Los Angeles to Cambodia to Congo, the illegal status of prostitution is not enforced, or else there is no way California could be the world’s leader in pornography production even as California state law declares it illegal to pay a person to perform sex acts. How many millions of people have to turn a blind eye to this obvious truth in order for prostitution to be the expansive growth ‘industry’ it is?
Prostitution is a global problem, and if we can’t clean up the massive sexual exploitation and slavery in our own neighborhoods we have no credibility trying to clean up the sexual exploitation and slavery elsewhere. Oregon alone has thousands of women, children and men trapped into trading their physical and mental health for survival every day. “Think globally, act locally” is a very nice motto.
Yes, Mr. Bellamy, the problem is definitely not new. Like I said I heard similar stuff when I was in Nigeria; what I did not say was that that was in 96-97. And it was not new then. However I disagree with you saying that it’s the UN that is the problem. The problems are very complex (I keep saying this about Africa, don’t I, afraid I come off kind of like I have a single point to make over and over). They stem largely from the cultural biases of the UN soldiers as well as from the whole issue of the peacekeeping at the point of a gun paradox issue. I don’t have an answer for it but don’t think international peacekeeping is necessarily a net evil. for example in my neck of the woods the UN forces in Sinai have been keeping peace in tense situations and doing a very good job.
Martial — I am certain that you are correct that well-trained UN staff members — when acting properly — could do the job better than “amateurs”. The question is, when they are not doing their job properly, and there is no other alternative in the region, could anyone be doing the job worse? Are we going to rely on the “either heaven or hell” option, or will we be better off with a not-so-happy medium where things are not ideal, but at least there are options for those stuck in hell.
Anna- You are also certainly correct that the issue is “complex.” Just as you were correct in the other thread that the Israel/Palestinian conflict is complex. But “complex,” as you accurately observe, is just a cop-out, not an answer. It is a cop-out that we use whenever the people we support are caught doing bad things (recently: Palestinian rights supporters attacking homosexuals, UN workers raping girls.)
The underlying causes and reasons and justifications and excuses may be complex, but the actual wrong we are discussing is not. It is very simple. If we will use “complex” and refer to “cultural biases” to avoid levelling blame at the appropriately harsh levels — as an excuse for inaction — then maybe it’s better to pretend that the issue is actually “simple.” Continue fighting against root unfairnesses, but do not allow that to blind us to the flowering evils on the other side of the plant.
We do not want to be paralyzed by complexity when there are real harms to be righted.
Richard,
The issue of whether it is right or wrong is very, very simple, and as clear as can be. The issue of what to DO about it is what is complex. The issue of how best to effect change is nearly impossible.
You are right that it is easy for me to say “complex” as a way of avoiding the issue, but I do not mean to suggest that. I mean to suggest that we need to come up with strategies that will really deal with a situation in the best possible way, particularly from the point of view of the oppressed in each situation (the gays in the Arab world; the exploited women in war-torn African countries; etc.).
If you have simple solutions for the complex problems that will actually work and won’t just make us feel good that we are doing something illusory, please let me know what they are. Because I would love to know about them and would love to be proved worng here. I would like the issues to be simple — as in solvable.
For me personally, I prefer action to inaction when a situation is actively getting worse. As anyone who has been reading the news since this thread started knows, the problems in Congo have spread far beyond women raped by the UN workers, as the Congolose mobs are now blaming (and attacking) the UN for failure to prevent rebels from taking a city near Rwanda. If anything, this turn will not assist the UN in their humanitarian work.
In my mind, humanitarian work simply must be divorced from all military involvement. Otherwise we have situations like the Congo where military problems can be blamed on humanitarian workers, or issues like in the Palestinian territories, where UN humanitarian ambulances were videotaped by Reuters being used by militants.
I suggested above diversifying to groups permitted to provide humanitarian aid — essentially creating a “market” for humanitarian work — but martial criticized my idea to leave the job to “amateurs”. Despite the occassional success, I consider the UN’s humanitarian work an overall failure — specifically in situations like the aftermath of Rwanda where refugees used the camps as bases to lauch counterattacks back into Rwanda. THAT is what gets people killed.
Meanwhile, having armed UN peacekeepers AND unarmed UN aid workers in the same country? Insane.
I am sure martial is right that — done right — the pros can do it better than anyone else. My problem is that — without any alternative — when they do not do it right, no one could possibly do it worse.
After a decade of examples of UN aid workers raping refugees, why is the burden on those who want to change the situation? If your poor West African country was sinking into chaos, would you want the UN called in? I certainly wouldn’t.
I encourage any of you who are truly interested in this topic to sign up for the newsletter at UNObserver.org –
Best,
K
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isnt this all just very typical of the sickening world in which we live in today, corruption and betrayal at all levels, who can be trusted. ” the answer is imle” nobody. greed- lust- power.
Martial Writes:
May 27th, 2004 at 2:52 pm
Richard Bellamy proposes letting just anyone run these camps. Sadly, this is a bad idea. What we know about refugee/IDP camps comes from hard earned experience. Amateurs get people killed.
I am not letting Atlas Logistique off the hook here: they are fucking up really badly. But I am dead serious when I say that organizations without experience would be much, much worse.
” what could be worse than sexually exploiting kids for food ” you sanctamonious fool, i think death would be a better option for some of these poor kids. than living a night mare life… why dont we send in more women to deal with this problem , In my mind, humanitarian work simply must be divorced from all military involvement. agree, send in the real army and include women to sort this mess out.
darren .www.rocksofice.co.uk