UN Child Sex Abuse Whistleblower Resigns
Kompass tried to find justice for the sexually abused children in Africa, but the UN lashed out at him.
Anders Kompass, who worked as director of field operations at the UN human rights office, has resigned after the organization did not hold senior officials accountable for human rights abuses.
The UN suspended Kompass after he leaked a report that said French troops sexually abused children in the Central African Republic.
However, the UN never took action and Kompass decided “he could no longer work for an organisation with no accountability.” From The Guardian:
“The complete impunity for those who have been found to have, in various degrees, abused their authority, together with the unwillingness of the hierarchy to express any regrets for the way they acted towards me sadly confirms that lack of accountability is entrenched in the United Nations. This makes it impossible for me to continue working there.”
Last year, Kompass gave the French government the confidential UN report after officials did nothing to punish those involved, which took place in 2014. From The Guardian:
Entitled Sexual Abuse on Children by International Armed Forces and stamped “confidential” on every page, the report details the rape and sodomy of starving and homeless young boys by French peacekeeping troops who were supposed to be protecting them at a centre for internally displaced people in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic.
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The boys, some of whom were orphans, disclosed sexual exploitation, including rape and sodomy, between December 2013 and June 2014 by French troops at a centre for internally displaced people at M’Poko airport in Bangui.
The children described how they were sexually exploited in return for food and money. One 11-year-old boy said he was abused when he went out looking for food. A nine-year-old described being sexually abused with his friend by two French soldiers at the IDP camp when they went to a checkpoint to look for something to eat.
The child described how the soldiers forced him and his friend to carry out a sex act. The report describes how distressed the child was when disclosing the abuse and how he fled the camp in terror after the assault. Some of the children were able to give good descriptions of the soldiers involved.
One senior official had no problem with Kompass’s actions, but the organization suspended him anyway since he did not comply “with UN protocols on confidential documents.”
An internal investigation exonerated Kompass. The Office of Internal Oversight (OIOS) found that the UN’s “failure to respond to allegations that French peacekeepers sexually abused children in Central African Republic amounted to ‘gross institutional failure’ and allowed assaults to continue.” The report also said that Kompass did nothing wrong since he received “assurances that the information would be kept confidential and, more importantly, that France would take action to bring the perpetrators to justice … No adverse finding is made against the director on this issue.”
The panel criticized Susana Malcorra, Ban’s then chief of staff and one senior official involved in Kompass’s suspension, “for mishandling the affair.” She quit her job to become foreign minister of Argentina a month before the panel published its report.
But last month she announced she wants “to seek the position of UN secretary general when Ban stands down at the end of this year.”
Kompass’s resignation comes a few days after The Washington Post reported that aid workers in CAR found a grave with twelve dead bodies. They believe Congolese peacekeepers murdered the people in 2014 after a clash killed one peacekeeper:
“Angered by the death of their colleague, the Congolese peacekeepers surrounded the anti-Balaka leader’s house, arrested him and at least 12 others, including five women, one of whom was six months pregnant, and two children, one about 10 years old and the other 7 months old,” the [Human Rights Watch] report said.
“Later that night, witnesses heard screams and a volley of gunshots from an area near the villa on the other side of the road, followed about an hour later by another round of gunfire from the same location.”
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The U.N. is as corrupt as democrats.
Probably moreso. Over 200 countries, most of which can’t really afford to maintain a full UN mission, send relatives & cronies of ruling elites to live off their taxpayers and solicit foreign sources of further corruption.
The organization had a serious purpose during the Cold War, providing a neutral site for communications between hostile superpowers and resolution of regional conflicts. But with the fall of the Soviet Empire and the entry of China to full diplomatic status, it now has little effect on the world beyond being a clearinghouse for international corruption.
Retain a nominal membership with our historical voting clout.
Otherwise, get them OUT, and get us OUT.
We can do LOTS better.
There may be far more to this situation than meets the eye.
Starting about thirty years ago, reports of systematic rape, child abuse (including actual brothels staffed almost exclusively by captive children), and uncontrolled spread of disease by UN peacekeeping troops began to appear occasionally in the press. The abusers were reported to be black, all of them members of UN contingents from primarily black African UN member countries. Perhaps the only reason these reports found their way into the press in the first place is that this widespread sexual abuse was suspected to be a major vector for the transmission of AIDS in Africa. So, it could have been going on for years, but been ignored in the West; only after AIDS was added in did it become of more general interest. (Recall that AIDS was first clinically observed in the US in 1981.) A complicating factor is that at that time, African countries routinely—even frantically—denied that AIDS was a problem, and theories about the disease’s African origin were … you guessed it … “racist.” It seemed to me that that would be sufficient to account for the short news half-life of these reports. The UN may have been smothering the reports too, but maybe not.
These news reports dropped off in frequency, perhaps not coincidentally at about the same time that the rather suspect idea that AIDS is under control became common. If that was the reason, then there’s no firm basis for belief that continent-wide rape by UN troops had slacked off in the least. But news reports remained few and far between.
Now this story crops up. Why? It’s reported to be a French problem. Well, France is fair game for criticism in the press, because it’s primarily a white country (though as it becomes more Arab, it will move back into “protected” status). But the actual troops remain unidentified. Are they black, or white?
Around World War One, France had large contingents of black troops. They were so common that circa 1917-18 some American blacks, members of the American A.E.F., actually served with French regiments rather than American ones. Apparently to Americans of that era, black troops were quite a novelty, maybe even an aberration; but the French were accustomed to their own black troops, and taking on more caused no difficulties. BUT in those days France had African colonies—extending from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the north, to Senegal, Guinea and Ivory Coast in the west, to Cameroon, Gabon and a chunk of the modern Republic of the Congo in the south, to Chad, Niger, and the Central African Republic in central Africa. And there were a few “flyers” to the east and in the Indian Ocean; the Sechelles, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar, Djibouti, and more. That’s a lot of area for troop recruitment. In the north they’d be mainly Berbers, who are of course white, but Mali? Burkina Faso? Benin? Mauritania? Guinea? Definitely black, and far blacker than what’s called “black” in the US.
Of course that was then, this is now. No black colonies for France, so probably not all that many black troops. Still, if they have them, they’re perhaps most likely to be the ones deployed there; due to climate, not colonial nostalgia.
So the French forces causing the problems this time are probably white. Is that why it’s OK to make this headline material? If so, maybe something can be done about it. White perpetrators aren’t “off-limits” to the press or even the UN. But it won’t do anyting about the monstrously widespread deprations by black personnel with the UN’s non-French contingents—those, I’m sure, will continue unimpeded.