DRC: Serious sex abuses
2005-01-07 20:58
New York - The United Nations acknowledged that allegations of sex abuse by UN staff in the DR Congo reflected a "serious and ongoing" problem, in an internal report published on Friday.
"The investigation ... found that the problem was serious and ongoing," the internal affairs report, on 72 cases of alleged abuse, read in part.
It said 20 cases were sufficiently detailed to move forward. Of those one involved an international civilian UN employee, and the other 19 UN peacekeepers.
Sources close to the cases said the civilian employee was a Frenchman who since has been jailed in France, and that the soldiers in question hail from Uruguay, Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa. Some 47 countries supply troops to the peacekeeping mission there.
The investigation was carried out in Bunia, Ituri, in the northeast of the DR Congo from May to September 2004 after local media reports of peacekeeper involvement in alleged sexual abuse of women and young girls.
The vast DRC is slowly emerging from a five-year war that claimed at least 2.5 million lives between 1998 and 2003.