Allegations of sexual abuse reveal weak monitoring

A United Nations investigation has been launched into allegations of sexual abuse and rape of children as young as 12 by international peacekeeping staff in southern Sudan, a spokesperson said on Wednesday.

An article in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper on Tuesday reported that at least 20 children said they had been picked up in the southern Sudanese capital of Juba by UN peacekeepers and forced to have sex, often in official UN vehicles.

Blue berets were deployed to help stabilise the region after a two-decade civil war that ended with the signing of a peace agreement in January 2005.

"The Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) is already in touch with [these] journalists," George Somerwill, spokesman for the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) told IRIN. "The OIOS will call on all parties to make available to them details including the names of the children interviewed. They will then follow up with these children and anyone else who was a source for these statements." The UN, he added, "takes all allegations of this kind very, very seriously indeed".

A UN spokesperson in New York said "the UN standard on this issue is clear - zero tolerance, meaning zero complacency and zero impunity", revealing that four UNMIS peacekeepers have been investigated in the past and repatriated, without detailing the cases.

The allegations have surfaced despite both the civilian and military arms of the UN operation taking measures to contain the problem. The UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, trained over 5,000 UN and NGO humanitarian and development staff since 2003 in southern Sudan on the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation. UNMIS also includes the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation in its training programmes, and bans its staff from notorious bars and market areas at night.

Regardless of the latest allegations, mechanisms to enforce the UN's strict code of conduct, issued in 2003, are insufficient to prevent abuse, Jennifer Kiiti, an expert in the issue told IRIN.

Kiiti, who set up training and reporting mechanisms for the UN agencies and NGOs in Southern Sudan said "I'm very frustrated". Speaking in Nairobi, she said current reporting and monitoring by the UN and the agencies themselves alone could not stop the abuses. "We do not have internal police...We need to put in place monitoring mechanisms. We need to be able to follow leads and take decisive action."

However, "if we are not committed systematically to put these things in place, the problem will continue. And it will continue under wraps. As long as the management commitment to total zero tolerance is not applied, it creates a space where employees believe they can do it and get away with it."

With thousands of peacekeepers and aid workers in Juba, it is "totally impossible" to say how often abuses occurred, she said. "Essentially I think the secret is to put the power in the hands of the community and systematically allow them to report cases of abuse," Kiiti said.

Meanwhile in Juba, a high-ranking police officer told IRIN no reports of such incidents had been received. "If there have been such cases, they have not been reported to the police station," he said. "I do not see any reason why a victim would not report something like this to the police."

Children are particularly vulnerable because of desperate poverty and fear, Kiiti said. "Children are very easy to convince and they don’t demand much, let me say with a packet of sweets you can convince a child. Also children are also less likely to report... you can frighten them into not reporting."

In Juba's Konyo Konyo market, a boy selling vegetables told IRIN, "we know this is happening. People are coming from other places and organisations to make our children bad." Sitting down on the ground on empty sacks, an older woman  described the situation of many of the children in Juba, especially orphans as grim. "They have to work, selling small things, whatever they can do to survive. This is the life here," she said.

The new reports of abuse come barely a month after the UN reaffirmed its zero tolerance policy to sexual exploitation of children. Senior UN, NGO and international leaders meeting in New York on 4 December issued a 10-point statement on prevention and response to sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers, and called for the rapid implementation of existing standards relating to the problem.

Kiiti said, "we are funded to assist and protect the human rights of vulnerable people. If we abuse those human rights we have no moral authority to be there. That's why it's outrageous."

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