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New York — Amnesty International is accusing the UN peacekeepers of indiscriminately killing a 16-year-old boy and his father and raping a 12-year-old girl in separate incidents in Central African Republic, the latest in a series of sexual and other allegations against peacekeepers there. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is “personally dismayed and disappointed”, his spokesperson said on Tuesday. “We would like to emphasise once more that no misconduct of this nature will be tolerated,” Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
The UN, however, has no powers of criminal investigation or prosecution, leaving it up to peacekeepers’ home countries — which the UN officials often don’t name publicly.
Amnesty International said the two incidents on August 2 and 3 occurred as the peacekeepers from Rwanda and Cameroon were carrying out an operation in the capital, Bangui. The UN peacekeepers have been in the country since September to try to calm unprecedented, deadly violence between Christians and Muslims.
The girl was hiding in a bathroom when a man wearing a UN peacekeeping helmet and vest “took her outside and raped her behind a truck”, a statement from the human rights group said. It said a nurse who examined the girl “found medical evidence consistent with sexual assault”.
The next day, after armed clashes with residents had killed a soldier from Cameroon and wounded several others, peacekeepers went to the area and “began shooting indiscriminately in the street where the killings had taken place”, the group said.
Amnesty International said resident Balla Hadji, 61, and his son Souleimane Hadji, 16, were shot and killed outside their home. The group said it interviewed 15 witnesses immediately after both incidents, plus the 12-year-old girl and her family.
“An independent civilian investigation must be urgently launched, and those implicated must be suspended immediately and for the duration of the investigation,” the organisation’s senior crisis response adviser, Joanne Mariner, said.
But one week after the UN was first informed of the allegations, it was not clear just how the peacekeeping mission in Central African Republic was looking into them. The UN peacekeeping office in New York wasn’t informed until Monday, despite its recent order to all peacekeeping missions to immediately tell it about any such allegations.
The mission’s spokesperson, Hamadoun Toure, said that “personally, I don’t think” the rape occurred. He said the peacekeepers had been trying to execute an arrest warrant for local judicial authorities when they were attacked, and that the girl was the sister of the suspect they were trying to arrest.
“I don’t know how we can reach out to this girl. They won’t accept any contact,” said Toure, interviewed by telephone from Central African Republic.
He said the mission doesn’t have the names or details of the accused peacekeepers.
In an email from Bangui, the Amnesty International researcher in Central African Republic, Jonathan Pedneault, said the peacekeeping mission’s human rights division has “sadly, due to their own security constraints” not yet been able to investigate at the scene.
“In the rape case, the operation took place in the dead of night in a frantic atmosphere,” lit only by the peacekeepers’ flashlights amid a local power cut, he said. — AFP
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