Chance, 16, is different from the other children in her school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) due to her fair skin. She is one of dozens offspring of UN peacekeepers, deployed in the troubled region for more than 20 years, who often face stigma in their communities.
Chance’s mother, Faida, said she had met a Uruguayan peacekeeper in 2006 while working as a cleaner at a UN base in Kavumu, a settlement in the militia-plagued South Kivu province.
“I was two months pregnant when he left the DRC without saying goodbye,” said Faida, echoing a theme of spurned love common among Congolese women who developed relationships with peacekeepers.
PHOTO : AFP
In Kavumu alone, reporters spoke to four women who said they had children with UN peacekeepers.
The situation is common enough for the peacekeeping mission, known as MONUSCO, to introduce measures such as paying school fees for the abandoned children of UN soldiers.
None of the women said that they had been abused, but some were aged 14 or 15 when they developed relationships with peacekeepers, and described exchanging sex for money or other small gifts.
MONUSCO’s code of conduct strictly prohibits sexual relations with children, as well as paying for sex. The force has a current strength of about 16,000 uniformed personnel.
Masika said she met a South African peacekeeper when she was selling peanuts near a UN base at age 15.
“He was a handsome guy, a giant,” the now 29-year-old woman said, adding that the soldier had given her some money.
Masika said she resisted the South African’s attempts to court her for months, but finally gave in.
By the time she had discovered she was pregnant, he had left the country.
The liaison left Masika “the object of rejection in society,” she said, adding that her 14-year-old daughter, Catherine, thankfully fits in locally because she is black.
MONUSCO also pays for the child’s school fees.
“The only problem is that she often asks me where her father is, and I don’t have an answer,” Masika said.
Sifa, 27, also said she fell pregnant by a South African peacekeeper while she was 14 years old working in a small restaurant in Kavumu airport. He had also departed by the time she found out she was expecting, leaving Sifa to face stigma at home.
Her daughter, Grace, is not in school because MONUSCO is not paying the fees.
Sifa said she never followed the procedure to officially declare the pregnancy.
“They didn’t put me on the list of beneficiaries,” she told reporters.
Zawadi Bazilyane, the head of a non-governmental organization working on peacekeeper paternity cases, said it is often difficult to establish paternity, as many of the women do not know the real identity of their lovers.
Bazilyane said that her team had identified 11 children in Kavumu allegedly fathered by peacekeepers.
Two of the children have since died and the remaining nine are all teenagers.
DR Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, where about 70 percent of the population of more than 90 million people lives on less than US$2 a day.
Women officially recognized by MONUSCO as having given birth to children fathered by peacekeepers receive child support in the form of school fees, as well as training in trades such as sewing for themselves.
A MONUSCO spokesperson said that all allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers are “dealt with quickly,” but added that many paternity cases remained unresolved.
Children born from sexual abuse cases also often face stigma, the spokesman said.
There have been no recorded cases of sexual abuse in Kavumu or nearby villages since 2013, the spokesperson said.
The total number of babies peacekeepers fathered across eastern DR Congo is unclear, but 63 children are receiving school assistance, MONUSCO data showed, while 158 women have benefited from UN-funded projects since 2018.
Faida, who had already had six children before she gave birth to Chance, said she hopes the UN would support her daughter through to university and help her get a job.
Life is harder for Chance in many ways, her mother said.
“She’s not adapting to life in the village,” Faida said, adding that her fair skin sets her apart.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS