Civilian Suffering in Turbulent Congo Tests the UN By Barbara Crossette
Jan. 20 -- Amid fears in late 2009 that the UN’s mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo is on the edge of catastrophe, demands were made in New York and the region that the organization’s peacekeeping department, with its reputation again at stake, either stop the lawlessness and abuse of civilians or end the operation.
No peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world works in a more violent environment or records more cases in its own ranks of rape and other sexual abuses of women and children. In mid-December, the UN posted chilling statistics from 2007-2009 on a Web site devoted to the conduct of soldiers and civilians in the mission (http://cdu.unlb.org/statistics).
UN peacekeepers who have violated the organization’s code of conduct have been responsible for not only sex crimes but also the misuse or theft of military equipment and the illegal sale or barter of UN weapons for cash or gold. All around the Congo mission is lawless chaos, with thousands of innocent civilians being killed or terrorized by marauding local armies, freelance gunmen or Congolese troops and officers ostensibly there to protect their nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
People working for the UN are not immune to danger, either. On Christmas Eve, three UN human rights staff received death threats.
As last year drew to a close, the Security Council extended the UN mission in Congo for only six months instead of a year, and asked Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to conduct a thorough review of the operation, with emphasis on an exit strategy. He must report to the council by April 1, laying out “the critical tasks that need to be accomplished before MONUC can envisage its drawdown without triggering a relapse into instability.” Given the facts on the ground, “relapse” seems hardly the right word.
At a news conference on Dec. 14, 2009, the secretary-general acknowledged that the fate of the mission is in balance. “I am not sure whether it is desirable to suspend the whole peacekeeping operation there,” he said. “That is what the Security Council has to decide.”
Background to UN’s Mission in Congo
The mission, known as MONUC from its initials in French, was first authorized in 1999 and is now the largest UN peacekeeping operation, with more than 22,000 troops and police from about four-dozen countries, based in a remote region of eastern Congo bordering Rwanda and Uganda.
While all of Congo has been wracked by upheaval and misgovernment before and since independence in 1960, the eastern region of North and South Kivu has been in especially deadly turmoil since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when a largely ethnic Tutsi force drove Hutus responsible for the killings across the border into Congo, then called Zaire. Many thousands of refugees, Tutsi and Hutu, fled into the same area.
Within a few years, many other actors entered the fray, along with military units from half a dozen African countries, some of them plundering precious minerals and other resources while backing one faction or another in a civil war that ultimately brought down the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. He was replaced by a rebel leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, to be succeeded by his son Joseph. The younger Kabila leads a weak government in far-off Kinshasa, nearly a thousand miles from the chaotic eastern border.
At the end of December 2009, Alan Doss, the experienced British UN official who is the civilian head of the mission in Congo, suspended some logistical cooperation with the Congolese Army because of civilian casualties caused by troops fighting a new cycle of rebellion in the east. Doss, who ran earlier missions in Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, told the Security Council that his mission needed clear guidance on further relations with the Congolese military. Meanwhile, he said, the UN was “holding ground” to protect local people. It is also doing what it can to introduce essential services for civilians.
Human Rights in Congo
The Congolese government and military have been supported blindly by some other African nations and Arab states in the UN Human Rights Council, where the mandate of an independent human rights monitor for Congo was terminated in 2008 on the absurd argument that protection had improved. In 2009, efforts by Canada and others to reinstate the monitoring program were defeated in the council.
The current situation in Congo is untenable for peacekeepers if the national government, whose citizens the UN is there to help protect, refuses to safeguard noncombatants. This would seem to be a classic violation of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine endorsed by UN member nations in 2005. Matters are made worse when extremist movements from outside, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, cross into Congolese territory to slaughter and kidnap residents.
A recent report from the office of Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that over the last 10 months of 2009, the Lord’s Resistance Army killed at least 1,200 people and abducted around 1,400, including 600 children. About 230,000 Congolese were displaced from their homes, adding to the more than 1.2 million already wandering in search of safety and sustenance.
The UN Peacekeeping Department, with Security Council direction or backing, may decide that the Congo mission cannot continue indefinitely under these conditions.
The Problem With Peacekeepers’ Behavior
That still leaves the question of what to do when the peacekeepers themselves are part of the problem. The UN excuse -- that it has scant control over the soldiers sent for duty from nations with poor human rights records -- is wearing thin. Commanders of these troops are expected to send them home for punishment, which rarely happens, despite two Security Council resolutions (1325, passed in 2000, and 1820, in 2008) demanding protection of women in war zones and peacekeeping operations.
Cora Weiss, president of The Hague Appeal for Peace and an advocate for women throughout the UN system, says that the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) should insist on human rights training for troops sent to UN missions.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the DPKO demanded of troop contributing countries that all peacekeepers be thoroughly trained in Resolutions 1325 and 1820 before being allowed to deploy, and that all private contractors hired, no matter their position -- cooks, drivers, guards, etc. -- also receive the same serious training as part of their contracts with the UN,” she said in an interview. “Any abuser must be held accountable. When women are safe, protected and participating in all decision making the country will be safer. The ultimate safety is not to make war anymore.”
No secretary-general has summoned the courage to fire a battalion or force commander to set an example to those armies whose officers shrug off UN rules of behavior with a flippant “boys will be boys” response. Anwarul Chowdhury, a former UN under secretary-general and earlier the ambassador to the UN from Bangladesh, a top troop-contributing country, has advocated making the civilian head of a UN mission ultimately responsible when military commanders do not control peacekeeping troops.
Speaking at an international conference in Britain in 2006, Chowdhury said that member nations cannot be relied on to enforce rules, especially on sexual abuse, “because many of them do not have the enthusiasm to carry forward the implementation of resolution 1325 in its true spirit.” He predicted then, correctly, that the follow-up would be “wishy-washy, as with so many resolutions.” He recommended assigning a full-time international advocate and monitor for the enforcement of the resolution.
Besides rules against sexual assault and harassment, the UN’s code of conduct also includes a ban on prostitution. Yet peacekeepers sometimes set up brothels. They also extort sex from desperate, hungry women and girls who come to their “protectors” for help. When any payment is offered, UN records show, it may be only a pittance in cash – or a couple of eggs, just enough food to stay alive till the next humiliating and abusive encounter.
Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.
Keywords:
Congo, MONUC, Ban Ki-moon, UN peacekeeping operation, sexual abuse in Congo, Security Council, Resolution 1325, Resolution 1820, North Kivu, South Kivu, Rwandan genocide, Hutu, Tutsi, genocide, Mobutu Sese Seko, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Joseph Kabila, Kinshasa, Lord’s Resistance Army, Human Rights Council, Navi Pillay, Alan Doss, Cora Weiss, The Hague Appeal for Peace, DPKO, Anwarul Choudhury
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