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Sexual abuse still a UN problem

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday recommitted the world body to "zero tolerance" of sexual exploitation and abuse by a minority of UN peacekeepers as he opened a high-level conference on the festering issue.

"Acts of sexual exploitation and abuse by both civilian and uniformed UN personnel continue," the outgoing secretary-general told a gathering of more than 100 senior leaders from the world body, NGOs, UN member states, academics and victim advocates.

"There have been crimes such as rape, pedophilia and human trafficking. My message of zero tolerance has still not got through to those who need to hear it -- from managers on the ground, to all our other personnel," he said.

However, he expressed his "tremendous pride in the admirable and upstanding behavior of the vast majority of UN peacekeepers serving around the world."

Annan, who is to step down at the end of the month to be succeeded by South Korea's former foreign minister Ban Ki-moon, said a key problem was the climate that makes it difficult to report and expose such abuses.

"This is unacceptable. We need to create an environment in which people feel able to report abuses without fear of retribution," he added.

Monday's conference at a hotel near UN headquarters in New York came close on the heels of a BBC expose that found allegations of child prostitution and rape involving the UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti and Liberia.

In an interview with the BBC last week, UN Assistant Secretary General for peacekeeping operations Jane Holl Lute conceded that the abuse reported in Haiti "is going on ... and I don't challenge the facts as they were presented."

She insisted, however, that the UN was working to deal with cases of abuse by peacekeepers, telling the broadcaster that the UN had "accepted our responsibility for dealing comprehensively with this."

On Monday, participants at the one-day conference approved a statement in which they reaffirmed their determination to prevent future acts of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN and NGO personnel.

They specifically committed themselves to implementing 10 key goals, including developing organization-specific strategies to deal with the problem, incorporating standards on induction materials and training courses for their personnel and preventing perpetrators of abuse from being "[re-] hired or [re-] deployed."

Other goals include taking appropriate action to "protect persons from retaliation" where allegations of sexual abuse are reported, to investigate allegations "in a timely and professional manner" and to provide "basic emergency assistance to complainants."

Last week, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric noted that 80 percent of the nearly 100,000 troops serving UN peacekeeping operations around the world could not be disciplined by the UN as they were answerable to troop-contributing countries.

"We are working very hard with troop-contributing countries to make sure people [abusers] who are sent back are disciplined," the spokesman then said.

Last August, the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo [MONUC] faced new allegations of "sexual exploitation of minors" by its peacekeepers.

It cited allegations about the existence of a major prostitution ring involving minors, close to a large concentration of Congolese soldiers and UN troops in South Kivu in the northeast of the country.

MONUC's reputation had already been sullied two years earlier by revelations that peacekeepers were involved in the sexual abuse of 13-year-old girls.

The UN then adopted a "zero tolerance" policy, including a "non-fraternization" rule that bars its peacekeepers from having sex with locals.
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