(Newswire.net — May 2, 2015) — UN officials realize there might be more instances such as reports accusing French ‘Blue Helmets’ – UN peacekeeping forces – of sexual exploitation and abuse of children in Central African Republic between December 2013 and June 2014.
As the investigation of French peacekeepers war crimes procede, the UN has warned that it is a “horribly possible” that information about more such cases may emerge.
“It is possible, it’s horribly possible,” said UN human rights representative, Rupert Colville when asked by the French investigators of possibility of more sexual abuse cases by French military before the establishment of United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA).
Colville called the allegations “abhorrent” and “utterly odious,” Russia Today reported. The UN representative on Friday admitted, “Only the French can do this investigation … fully.”
Earlier this week, the Guardian published a leaked UN report exposing a rape case at the center for internally displaced people at M’Poko Airport in CAR’s capital Bangui. Based on witnesses testimony, the report alleges that French peacekeeping forces sodomized starving and homeless boys, some as young as nine.
Meanwhile, Paula Donovan, from the AIDS-Free World accused the UN of trying to cover up the scandal, saying interviewed molested children also accused soldiers from Chad and Equatorial Guinea. Officers from the UN, Unicef and the Commission for Human Rights interviewed the boys between 5 May and 24 June, 2014, but apparently no action was taken in that period, the International Business Times repoted.
“You can say it was a UN cover-up,” Paula Donovan, co-director of the AIDS-Free World, told IBT.
“There’s no indication of an intervention on the part of the interviewers to ensure that the authorities apprehended the perpetrators described by the very first victims they interviewed, and no indication that the children were referred immediately to professionals who could offer them treatment,” said Donovan.
In regards to soldiers from Chad and Equatorial Guinea, the UN said on Friday that they express hope that the French investigation might cover it.
“This is incredibly important, not just as a matter of accountability, but also as deterrence,” the UN human rights office said Friday. “There have been far too many incidents of peacekeeping troops engaged in such acts, whether within UN peacekeeping forces, or – as in this case – forces that are operating independently.”
United Nations announced Friday an internal investigation into the handling of the CAR incident in order to inspect cover-up allegations.