Violating Peace by Jasmine-Kim Westendorf;

Author:Jasmine-Kim Westendorf; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-12-12T20:00:00+00:00

The 2015 Peacekeeper Sexual Abuse Scandal in the Central African Republic

Just as the Oxfam scandal demonstrates the risks sexual misconduct poses to global perceptions of the legitimacy of humanitarian organizations, the global reaction to the sexual abuse scandal in the Central African Republic in 2015 illustrates how such misconduct challenges the UN’s strategies of legitimation, which are critical to maintaining member states’ financial and political support for peace operations. It also shows how the Central African Republic scandal became a watershed moment for the UN, with the secretariat, Security Council, and member states increasingly talking about legitimacy in order to garner support for stronger mechanisms to ensure accountability for the perpetration of sexual exploitation and abuse. Perhaps most important, this case illustrates just how significant the global political implications of sexual misconduct are. The reactions to the scandal illustrate how sexual exploitation and abuse puts at risk the future of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts, the end result of a cycle whereby diminished perceptions of credibility reduce the capacity of peace operations, which in turn further undermines the international community’s ability to leverage perceptions of legitimacy.

The scandal broke when the NGO AIDS-Free World leaked to the Guardian an internal UN report on the violent sexual abuse of children in the Central African Republic by French Sangaris soldiers deployed under a Security Council mandate to support the peace operation and UN peacekeepers from Chad and Equatorial Guinea.40 The scandal revolved around not just the sadistic and violent nature of the abuses perpetrated but also the fact that the report had been ignored and suppressed for nearly a year by multiple UN offices and agencies. The scandal also hinged on the harsh treatment of the whistleblower, Anders Kompass, the UN human rights official who passed the report on the investigation of allegations to French officials after UN authorities across multiple agencies and departments had failed to act on it for nearly a year. Kompass was condemned by UN officials for leaking the report and suspended from his job, and an internal investigation into his conduct was launched, eventually exonerating him of all charges.41 Even Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the architect of the UN’s 2005 comprehensive policy on sexual exploitation and abuse and, by 2015, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, was himself implicated in the harsh treatment of Kompass.42

In the months that followed, AIDS-Free World published further leaked documents and reports of peacekeeper sexual misconduct in Central African Republic and elsewhere, and there was a flurry of news media reports on the issue globally.43 The particularly horrific nature of the allegations and the fact that the peacekeepers involved allegedly preyed on the most vulnerable children in the communities they had been sent to protect sharpened the global reaction in a way that previous sexual misconduct scandals had not, which may also reflect intensifying global attention to institutional child abuse and gender-based violence. Shortly after the report was leaked, the French president François Hollande pledged to “show no mercy” to French troops

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