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Must Boys Be Boys? Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

Charges of sexual exploitation and abuse continue to dog UN peacekeeping missions around the world.* In early 2004, the abuses by the peacekeepers in the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) made international headlines and were subsequently the subject of Security Council meetings and US Congressional hearings. However, this problem is not limited to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). While peacekeepers are sent into post-conflict zones to provide protection to the most vulnerable, the cruel irony is that some use this position of trust to prey upon the vulnerable. Often, women and children offer the only material asset they have to trade, their bodies, to these peacekeepers as a method of survival.

Effective peacekeeping operations can transform conflict and bring about a stable peace so that displaced people can return home and societies can begin to rebuild. The thousands of men and women who have been deployed by the United Nations to help disarm warring groups and protect innocent civilians are key to ending years of bloodshed. Allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse cast a dark shadow over the positive impacts that UN peacekeepers have made. However, it is essential that a thorough and honest discussion of the problem of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers occurs in order to ensure that all peacekeeping missions are fully able to accomplish their goals of protecting the vulnerable. Allegations of exploitation and abuse only compromise their mission to secure the peace.

In July 2004, Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the Permanent Representative of Jordan, His Royal Highness Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, a former civilian peacekeeper and the UN ambassador of one of the major peacekeeping troop contributors, to prepare a comprehensive report for the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations. This report, “A Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations”¹ (referenced throughout this paper as the Zeid report) was released in July 2005 and set forth its findings and recommendations under four broad categories:

Rules and Standards of Conduct;
Investigative processes;
Organizational, managerial and command responsibility; and
Individual disciplinary, financial and criminal accountability.

The Zeid report makes numerous important and bold recommendations, notably that troop-contributing countries hold on-site court-martials for guilty parties and adopt formal memoranda of understanding in advance of deployment, so that cases of sexual exploitation and abuse are forwarded to their competent national or military authorities. The Zeid report also recommends establishing a professional investigative capacity with full participation of the troop-contributing country concerned and requiring managers and commanders to be accountable for creating an organizational culture that prevents sexual exploitation and abuse. The Zeid report calls for individual accountability for UN peacekeepers found guilty of abuses. The UN Security Council “reiterated the importance of ensuring that sexual exploitation and abuse are properly investigated and appropriately punished… and underlines the provision that an environment in which sexual exploitation and abuse are not tolerated is primarily the responsibility of managers and commanders.”²

Refugees International supports the major recommendations in the Zeid report and urges troop-contributing countries to immediately adopt them. RI recognizes, however, that financial and human resources will be required to support the overall strategy. While the report is an important first step to ending sexual exploitation and abuse in UN peacekeeping missions, these initiatives must be fully upheld and funded by all members of the United Nations after the scandals have died. If international donors are serious about ending sexual exploitation and ensuring the protection of victims of conflict throughout the world, they must give the United Nations the resources that it needs to fight this problem within the framework of its peacekeeping operations.

* Sexual exploitation and abuse is defined in the Special Representative of the Secretary General’s bulletin to members of the UN Mission in Liberia of 2003 as “Any actual or attempted abuse of a position of vulnerability, differential power, or trust, for sexual purposes, including but not limited to, profiting monetarily, socially or politically from the sexual exploitation of another.”

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