By Kathie Klarreich
100Reporters
A United Nations presence in Haiti has become as familiar as the country’s barren hillsides. Troops of some sort have been there almost continuously since 1993, including five peacekeeping missions. The most recent, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, arrived in 2004 to provide a peaceful transition following months of armed conflict. Like its predecessors and most of the UN’s 16 peacekeeping missions worldwide, MINUSTAH, composed of troops from dozens of countries, is also charged with the protection of local citizens.
Violence continued to ravage Haiti’s capital for several years after MINUSTAH deployed but life was quieter in other parts of the country, earning Haiti the moniker “vacation location.” In the seaside town of Jacmel, 50 miles south of Port-au-Prince, the Sri Lankan MINUSTAH peacekeepers were so relaxed that they interspersed their routine security patrols with soccer games, ocean dips and fresh fish fries.
And cheap sex. For less than $5, the Sri Lankan soldiers exploited the very population they were sent to safeguard. They conveniently disregarded the trampled condition of the fence surrounding their military base so that Haitian boys and girls could crawl under and over it, which they did with great frequency. In their wake, they left behind condoms, which were noted by UN investigators when they finally cracked down on the security breach and the flagrant violation of UN policy.
But that was later, after the Sri Lankan troops had established a routine to traffic cigarettes, drugs and sex. After a pattern to discourage whistleblowers denouncing such violations became as ingrained in the global UN culture of peacekeeping as the violations themselves. After questionable appointments for key positions in New York prompted concern among other UN personnel that their efforts to enforce the principles they’d signed up for would be trumped by politics. All this despite a myriad of toothless reports and recommendations that seemed to copy and paste the UN’s zero-tolerance policy toward sexual abuse and exploitation, the only change being dates and datelines.
For the UN investigators in Jacmel, the situation they faced was more than the willful destruction of a perimeter security fence for sexual exploitation purposes – more than a typical ‘boys will be boys’ situation. That’s how it was described by the UN's top official in Cambodia, Yasushi Akashi, when peacekeepers in Cambodia were charged with sexually abusing girls in 2005. In 2007, the Tamil Tiger separatists were setting off bombs inside Sri Lanka; if they had gone after Sri Lankan troops deployed in Haiti, they could have killed hundreds in one fell swoop.
“If I’m a Tamil supporter,” said a UN official, “I can go anywhere in Haiti, wrap a grenade inside an package and say to one of these kids, ‘Hey, next time you go to have sex with these guys, this is a gift for his birthday. Put it in his bag and here's 50 bucks. It will be a big surprise for him.’ Then boom.”
The UN team of investigators from New York that flew to Haiti to investigate the Sri Lankan contingent found that transactional sex among the peacekeepers was rampant. Over the years, rotating peacekeepers from Sri Lanka gave the new recruits the SIM cards that held the names and numbers of those willing to engage in sex, including boys and girls just entering their teens. Inside the base, showers and dormitories were popular liaison spots. Outside the base, peacekeepers parked their UN vehicles nose to nose; from the back soldiers took turns as lookouts to cover for the illicit activity in the front. They even used the UN observation tower, according to a UN investigator.
II
Why, questioned several UN investigators, was it necessary for them to travel all the way from New York to report something so obvious? Wasn’t anyone paying attention to the pre-deployment training, to the code of conduct distributed to every mission employee and posted on all in-country MINUSTAH bulletin boards: “It is strictly prohibited for ALL MINUSTAH Personnel to engage in any act of sexual exploitation, sexual abuse or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior, including sexual activity with children, use of children or adults to procure sexual services for others, exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex, exchange of assistance that is due to beneficiaries, for sex.”
Transactional sex with peacekeepers isn’t new, nor is sexual exploitation and abuse – S.E.A., in UN jargon. The first widespread exposure of the practice, including exploitation of children, pornography, trafficking and sexual assault, occurred in the early 1990s. Then there was the sex-trafficking in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo, popularized with the 2010 release of the feature film The Whistleblower, adapted from the book by a US former police officer, Kathryn Bolkovac. In 1999, Bolkovac was employed as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina where she exposed the ring.
MINUSTAH, composed of 8,896 unified personnel from 55 countries, including police and civilian, makes up only seven percent of UN peacekeepers worldwide, but accounts for 26 percent of the allegations of sexual assault and exploitation since 2013. Together, missions in just four countries—Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and South Sudan—account for 85% of all cases of sexual assault and exploitation, and have for the last three consecutive years. It’s hard to ignore the racial element here. “It is impossible to explain anything about the relationship between Haiti and the US or the rest of the world without relying heavily on racism,” said Brian Concannon Jr., executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. “I expect you could add D.R.C., Liberia and South Sudan to that.” Other human rights experts agree, citing other contributing factors, including but not limited to poverty. While allegations continue to drop throughout missions around the world, in MINUSTAH they have been growing – 20 percent since 2011.
To put this in perspective, it is estimated that less than 30 percent of sexual abuse cases in the United States are reported. Imagine the percentage when the alleged perpetrator is in uniform and packs a weapon. An independent mission team of experts that visited the four worst offending missions noted, in a November 2013 report, that sexual abuse and exploitation is the most significant risk to peacekeeping missions, adding that “official numbers mask what appears to be significant amounts of under-reporting.”
Under-reporting, or lack of reporting altogether, is being exploited by all parties. Many of the victims live in the dire conditions typical of countries or areas where missions are frequently deployed: poor, politically unstable, desperate, where potable water at home is a luxury, where schools – a long trek by foot – lack such basics as desks; and the most minimal of health services can be hours away. Haiti, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo rank 161, 174 and 186, respectively, out of 187 countries on the Human Development Index, a composite of life expectancy, education, and income indices that the UN uses to measure development. In Haiti, which for decades has dragged the tagline poorest-country-in-the-western-hemisphere, more than 80 percent of its people live below the poverty line. Life expectancy is 62.1 years, a full ten years less than that of the Dominican Republic, with whom it shares the island of Hispaniola. The average citizen has less than five years of education.
Sexual exploitation and abuse are frequently guised as contractual sex. Victims tend to keep quiet. Speaking up can mean the difference between survival and starvation. The exchange – money or goods – helps feed their families, so servicing eight, nine, ten soldiers a day, as was revealed during the investigation of the Sri Lankan peacekeepers, can provide crucial income. And not exclusive to Sri Lanka, the cultural norms surrounding women and gender issues differ widely from country to country – that perception can influence how countries perceive and respond to sexual abuse and exploitation.
Negotiating a price to silence victims can benefit everyone involved. A UN study of sexual abuse and exploitation in Haiti and elsewhere noted that “…[r]eporting brings losses to all parties with no compensation package for complainants and loss of job security for mission staff.” Local organizations fear calling attention to the abuse because it brings shame to the families. UN whistleblowers are seen as a threat and become targets for retaliation. They also worry about losing their jobs.
III
Such was the case for T., a 38-year-old former police officer from St. Louis who signed on for the US contingent of MINUSTAH’s police division, known as the United Nations Police, or UNPOL. T. is edgy and outspoken, but also funny. She often refers to her life as The Jerry Springer Show. In Haiti, she worked for Pacific Architects and Engineers, a Virginia-based government contractor.
A few weeks before Christmas in 2011, T. met with the leaders of a refugee camp where she served as a monitor and mentor for the Haitian National Police. Located in Haiti’s capital, Camp Carradeux was one of the larger camps set up after the earthquake, accommodating more than a thousand families in makeshift tents and tarps that were never intended for long-term use. Relief workers had cleared piles of rubble from the camp, but drainage ditches meant to help with runoff from the torrential rains in hurricane season did little to stop the flooding of tents downhill: standing puddles were fertile ground for breeding mosquitoes.
Members of the group were complaining that the UNPOL were cutting back on humanitarian programs but taking advantage of the women in the camp. They gave her a note written in French, asking for a meeting with UNPOL to discuss, among other things, the “courting” of several women in the camp by one of the UNPOL supervisors--a polite way, T. says, of broaching the subject of sexual abuse. T.’s relations with her employer were already strained over earlier, unrelated complaints T. had made about the personal hygiene of other UN forces. She gave the note to her superior at PAE. She later learned that UN investigators questioned the women and ruled out sexual abuse.
Less than a month later, T. said another person complained to her about sexual assault tied to UN forces. A priest had reported that a peacekeeper from Bangladesh had dragged a cleaning woman into a bathroom by her hair. A worker who witnessed the assault ran to her rescue, preventing rape, the priest said. Again, T. passed on the information to her supervisor. By then, she says, things had deteriorated with her supervisor as well as with some of her colleagues. In an email to the UN Conduct and Discipline Unit hotline, set up to report misconduct, T. wrote that she feared for her safety. “I am complaining about some people who are in my chain of command, and I do not believe my complaint will be taken or forwarded through the proper channels,” she wrote. “I am fearful of continued retaliation for reporting this to you, but I need this to be documented because the harassment and retaliation are continuing to escalate, and in case I am physically harmed.”
UN staff member Vanessa Kent, Chief of Conduct and Discipline, reviewed T.’s email but said that she saw no incidents of retaliation. T. had a long list of complaints, including the fact that her performance evaluation for the UN, where she received poor marks in almost all categories, was done by one of the men named in the original complaint in Camp Carradeux.
T.’s complaints did not go unnoticed by the PAE staff. Three months after her reports, PAE’s contingent commander Scott Carnes wrote to the company’s deputy program manager Sean Harris that he was concerned that T.’s complaints might “bring the US police contingent into a negative light.” Harris said that he had met with T. on March 8 and wrote that she “displayed a range of emotions while describing what she considered an attack on her [b]y the UN. She vowed to ‘take them on’ promising ‘no more nice guy’ and ‘a definite TKO.’”
On March 18, 2012, Carnes sent an email blast to all PAE employees in Haiti that appeared to contradict not only T.’s training but the UN’s zero tolerance policy toward sexual abuse: “…3. Sexual Exploitation or Abuse: From the Police Commissioner and DPKO (Department of Peace Keeping Operations), if one more serious allegation of either is reported, this mission will be ended, and all of us will be on a plane for home in short order. It DOES NOT matter who the guilty party is, or where they are from, we will all be leaving. If you are unsure as to what the definition of SEA is please contact me, and also be aware that if you know of a situation and say nothing then you will be held as guilty as the offending party…”
The Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit that promotes accountability by protecting whistleblowers, was outraged by this email. In a letter to the UN ethics department, GAP’s international program director, Bea Edwards, wrote that while this email “could be interpreted as a warning not to engage in SEA, it also sends a chilling message to potential whistleblowers. If the purpose of the email was to serve as deterrence, it would have said that if one more act of SEA is ‘committed,’ then the mission would end. Instead, the email says that if one more act is ‘reported,’ the mission will end. This is a crucial difference that conveys the true intent of the email: to discourage whistleblowers such as [T.] from reporting SEA.”
One month shy of her one-year contract, T. was fired.
PAE rejects the notion that T. was terminated for being a whistleblower. In T.’s termination letter, PAE managers Harris and Reed Hennebury pointed to a UN Internal Affairs investigation that resulted in a written reprimand related to T.’s complaint about a fellow officer’s personal hygiene, failure to follow the chain of command and “ongoing behavior detrimental to the US contingent and the mission.” PAE declined interview requests for this article.
T. rolled her eyes when asked about these allegations. PAE, she said, “ruled with intimidation. They dealt with problems by turning it around to make it look like you were the problem.
“When I first brought up the allegations, which I repeatedly said was information passed on to me and for which I had no personal knowledge, they interrogated me for three and a half hours on this one incident and then acted as if I had made up this information, as if I was the suspect,” T. said. She slapped the air with her hands. “They kept repeating the same questions over and over, implying that I had ruined this guy’s reputation. When I got the initial information I wanted to investigate – I’m an officer, after all – but I knew I wasn’t allowed to. I was just following protocol and that’s what got me in trouble.”
T.’s attorney, Tom Whalen, contends that the company feared the UN would pressure the State Department to end its contract with PAE over the complaints. In 2013, PAE did, in fact, lose its $49 million contract.
Its replacement? Dyncorp, the same company that fired Bolkovac for blowing the whistle on the sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia.
Dyncorp said that since it was contracted by the State Department, any interview request had to be cleared by the State Department, which in turn denied multiple requests for an interview, made in writing over several months.
“I tried 10 to 15 lawyers before I got Whalen,” T. said. As a whistleblower during the Viet Nam war, Whalen was sympathetic to her case. “They all wanted money, but I didn’t have money,” she said. “I didn’t have a job. I couldn’t get a job.”
For the last year T. has worked at various jobs, including as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant, living with her parents and trying to dig herself out of increasing debt. “If I had it to do over again, I’d have kept my mouth shut,” she said. “PAE has destroyed my life. It’s been two years and I can’t get a job. Reporting all that stuff in Haiti was the biggest mistake of my life.”
In the US, the process of contracting peacekeepers and police is so convoluted that whistleblower protection is almost unattainable. In T.’s case, GAP’s director Edwards also wrote in her letter to the UN’s ethics department: “[A]lthough we went round and round with the State Department we can’t figure out who retaliated – was it the company, the State Department, the UN – where’s the responsibility?”
In July, GAP urged lawmakers in Virginia, where T.’s employer is registered, to improve protection for whistleblowers. The group said that Virginia has become a safe haven for companies, many of them government contractors, that retaliate against whistleblowers with impunity. In a letter, Edwards cited a study of 5,400 companies worldwide by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which found that “whistleblowers detect more fraud than corporate security, audits, rotation of personnel, fraud risk, management and law enforcement combined.” She added, “Whistleblowers have tremendous potential to protect the State of Virginia’s resources, but until Virginia passes stronger whistleblower protection, employees who are aware of misconduct and corruption involving companies based in Virginia are likely to remain silent.”
IV
If it has been that difficult for whistleblowers with the means and wherewithal to speak up, it’s exponentially worse for victims in poor countries to fight the UN’s immunity, a freedom granted to them through the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations.
“Today, in the 21st century, there’s no reason for the UN to enjoy an absolute immunity that harkens back to the days of kings and queens,” says Patrick Flaherty, a lawyer who specializes in whistleblower protection. “Unless that is addressed, there will be no effective oversight.”
Flaherty is one of the lawyers seeking retribution for the wrongful death of some 1,500 victims of cholera, a disease introduced to Haiti in 2010 by Nepalese UN peacekeepers. It’s the deadliest outbreak in the world and has killed nearly 8,500 people and sickened more than 750,000 people in Haiti. The plaintiffs say the UN is accountable according to a 2004 agreement in which it said it would compensate innocent third parties it harms while MINUSTAH was in country. The agreement provides for complaints before a Standing Claims Commission, composed of one person from the UN, one from the host country and one person appointed by mutual agreement. The commission is empowered to hear a complaint and compensate the victim, in a public recognition of wrongdoing.
The commission, however, has never been established. “The UN has relied on its absolute immunity to throw people under the bus,” said Ira Kurzban, another lawyer on the case. “Every agreement they have signed worldwide has this provision.”
There is only one case in MINUSTAH’s recent history when members of the mission were held accountable publicly. In 2011, a video was recorded on a cell phone of several Uruguayan troops laughing as they pinned down and sexually assault a young man later identified as 18-year old Johnny Jean. The video went viral and created an international outcry, resulting in three investigations, one by the Haitian authorities, a second by MINUSTAH and a third by the Uruguayan Defense Ministry. The Uruguayan defense minister, along with the Uruguayan president, also sent a letter of apology to the Haitian president over the incident and promised to compensate the victim.
The accused peacekeepers were repatriated and, in an all but unheard of bid for justice, the victim eventually flew to Uruguay to testify against his abusers; four of the five men accused were convicted, two years later, for “private violence,” which carries a more lenient sentence than a rape or assault charge. Still, some considered it a minor victory because, unlike the victims in the 2007 Sri Lankan incident, Jean was recognized as such by a public trial that acknowledged a crime had been committed.
The Sri Lankans repatriated 113 of their peacekeepers, including three commanders who were simply replaced by other Sri Lankan peacekeepers, all at the expense of the UN. Each contributing country now receives $1,332 per person per month, exponentially more than many of the peacekeepers earn back home, so peacekeeping is, for them, like so many poor countries, a cash cow. The government pays its soldiers based on their rank and experience. In addition, the UN compensates contributing countries a small stipend to cover other expenses. (MINUSTAH’s budget runs $850 million a year.)
“When the original unit of 113 was pulled out of Haiti, the UN cited that as a model for the rest of the UN membership which contributed peacekeepers. No other country at that time had taken such stringent measures when confronted with allegations of this nature,” says Sri Lanka’s Permanent Ambassador to Haiti, Dr. Palitha Kohona. Since, in Sri Lanka, the sex was considered to be consensual and thus not a criminal offense, the charges were limited to breach of the UN and Sri Lankan military codes of conduct, Kohona says, adding that several officers were asked to leave the military, others were demoted and eight were disciplined in such a way that they would have difficulty with future promotions and postings.
Contributing countries have a 10-day limit to take action against any UN personnel under their command accused of sexual assault and abuse. Kohona says the Sri Lankans reported to UN headquarters, but the UN’s internal oversight office says it has never seen the report. When asked for a copy, the Sri Lankans deferred to the UN peacekeeping operations unit to provide it, but repeated written requests to obtain a copy of the report went unanswered.
A long-time UN observer said that to some extent, the UN rules set “the fox to guard the chicken coop,” as members themselves set the rules governing conduct, order and discipline of UN forces overseas. The host country actually has no say in the matter once UN boots are on the ground.
Critics said that failure to prosecute peacekeepers who violate the policies on sexual abuse and exploitation demonstrates a laissez-faire attitude that permits politics to trump policy.
“Name and shame has to be increased,” said a UN investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You have to have the courage, as an organization, to explain in detail what happened and also what you did with government X or Y so that it’s open. Often the UN is highly selective when it comes to accountability. More than perception, there’s no accountability.”
Take the case of the Pakistani contingent of MINUSTAH. In January 2012, several Pakistani soldiers reported to their commanding officer that contingent members were sexually abusing a mentally handicapped 13-year old boy in the town of Gonaives, some 50 miles north of the Port-au-Prince, since he was eight years old, passing his name from contingent to contingent for five years. Following the chain of command, the Pakistani commander should have reported the abuse to MINUSTAH, but he decided to handle it himself, hoping it seems, that it would disappear, since he was also abusing the boy.
UN police quickly ascertained that the Pakistani military had hired two local boys to take the victim away from the town without his mother’s knowledge or permission. They found the boy unharmed: one of the kidnappers escaped but the second, Alexandre Vladimir, was arrested and jailed. Vladimir admitted that the MINUSTAH commander from Pakistan had asked him to remove the boy from the area, and that the Pakistanis had come to his home bearing gifts for his mother: $12 and a sack of rice.
Collecting evidence can be tricky because of bribes, the reluctance or fear on the part of the victim to talk, evidence tampering or lack of evidence. Had the Pakistanis cooperated, the investigation might have concluded in even less time than the unprecedented 36 days. OIOS is often criticized for the length of time it takes to complete an investigation – back then, the average was 19 months. Today it’s 18 months.
Even the Haitian Senate became involved as news of Jean’s ordeal spread, passing a resolution requesting the trial be held in Haiti.
A UN internal document obtained by 100Reporters confirmed that the UN had agreed with the Pakistani authorities’ request for the nine Pakistanis charged with the rape and abduction of a Haitian minor to be rotated out of the country, but not before three of the officers were subjected to a court-martial in Haiti. While Vladimir served time in a filthy prison in Gonaives, the Haitians offered to build a separate jail to hold the Pakistanis before their trial. But according to a source with knowledge of the meeting, a dinner between the Pakistanis and the Secretary General for Peacekeeping, Hervé Ladsous, resulted instead in the accused being sent home.
The Pakistanis refused the UN’s request that it dispatch a senior government official to Haiti, and insisted that the court-martial, conducted by members of the national contingent who themselves were implicated in the allegations, be closed to outsiders. It was, the UN said, “[A] military justice procedure…undertaken in accordance with the national laws of Pakistan.”
The UN “also received verbal assurances from the Permanent Representative of Pakistan that he would see that the Government of Pakistan provide compensation to Haitian victims, if any,” according to a confidential UN cable to the Haiti peacekeeping contingent.
Instead of showcasing this investigation, the UN let it fizzle out, away from public view. No public court martial, no compensation for the victim. Pakistani troops continued then, as they do now, to rotate through peacekeeping missions, unperturbed.
“This system is frequently unsatisfactory in that the UN has no way of compelling member states to provide full information concerning the dispensation of individual cases,” said a senior UN official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He admitted that it was “undoubtedly frustrating” for citizens in the host country, who seldom receive a “full accounting” once troops accused of rape are sent home.
The recommendations that were included in the Pakistani report mirrored those from five years earlier, which mirrored those in-between: more training, tighter supervision, expulsion and punishment back home, repercussions for willful obstruction of investigations.
Not a single high-level administrator has been removed from office for corruption in the past few years. Of the 99 cases brought by whistleblowers to an internal UN ethics committee since it started reviewing cases in 2006, only two have been substantiated.
“No one is guarding the guardians,” says defense lawyer Flaherty. “It’s a system set up by the defendant, controlled by the defendant and run by the defendant.”
Kathie Klarreich, a member of the 100Reporters investigative news group, has lived in or reported on Haiti for more than 25 years, and is the author of “Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Death and Civil Strife in Haiti.”
This project was supported by the International Anti-Corruption Conference Global Game Changers Initiative.
