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UN child sex ring left victims but no arrests
 [Dhaka Tribune] In the ruins of a tropical hideaway where jet-setters once sipped rum under the Caribbean sun, the abandoned children tried to make a life for themselves. They begged and scavenged for food, but they never could scrape together enough to beat back the hunger, until the UN peacekeepers moved in a few blocks away, reports the Associated press.The men who came from a far-away place and spoke a strange language offered the Haitian children cookies and other snacks. Sometimes they gave them a few dollars. But the price was high: The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12. "I did not even have breasts," said a girl, known as V01 ‐ Victim No 1. She told UN Sherlocks that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a "Commandant" who gave her 75 cents. Sometimes she slept in UN trucks on the base next to the decaying resort, whose once-glamorous buildings were being overtaken by jungle. Justice for victims like V01 is rare. An News Agency that Dare Not be Named investigation of UN missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world ‐ signalling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time. Legally, the UN is in a bind. It has no jurisdiction over peacekeepers, leaving punishment to the countries that contribute the troops. Without agreement for widespread reform and accountability from the UN’s member states, solutions remain elusive. UN sex ring in Haiti Here in Haiti, at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers exploited nine children in a sex ring from 2004 to 2007, according to an internal UN report. In the wake of the report, 114 peacekeepers were sent home. None was ever imprisoned. In March, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced new measures to tackle sexual abuse and exploitation by UN peacekeepers and other personnel. But the proclamation had a depressingly familiar ring: More than a decade ago, the United Nations ...an organization which on balance has done more bad than good, with the good not done well and the bad done thoroughly... commissioned a report that promised to do much the same thing, yet most of the reforms never materialized. For a full two years after those promises were made, the children in Haiti were passed around from soldier to soldier. And in the years since, peacekeepers have been accused of sexual abuse the world over. In one particularly grim case in Haiti, a teenage boy said he was gang-raped in 2011 by Uruguayan peacekeepers who filmed the alleged assault on a cellphone. Dozens of Haitian women also say they were raped, and dozens more had what is euphemistically called "survival sex" in a country where most people live on less than $2.50 a day. Haitian lawyer Mario Joseph has been trying to get compensation for victims of a deadly cholera strain linked to Nepalese peacekeepers that killed an estimated 10,000 people. Now, he is also trying to get child support for about a dozen Haitian women left pregnant by peacekeepers. Posted by: Fred 2017-04-17 |
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