Thousands of people fleeing fear of violence in Burundi have arrived in Mahama Refugee Camp, Rwanda. Credit: UNHCR/Kate Holt

By Paula Donovan
NEW YORK, May 6 2019 (IPS)

Last week the Washington Post published a scathing critique by the executive director of Human Rights Watch, titled “Why the U.N. Chief’s Silence on Human Rights is Deeply Troubling.” Kenneth Roth argued that Secretary-General António Guterres “is becoming defined by his silence on human rights—even as serious rights abuses proliferate.”

That must have made things difficult for the UN spokespeople who form a human shield around António Guterres. It’s impossible to explain away the litany of recent atrocities—by Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Syria, Congo, Myanmar, Trump—that have provoked neither comment nor condemnation from the Secretary-General.

Mr. Roth, who knows a great deal about the power of words, is absolutely right. Silence can be strategic, but sometimes it’s just spineless. Or worse: Sometimes silence means consent. Take the case of Burundi.

One is loath to believe that Mr. Guterres’ wordlessness on Burundi could possibly signal an endorsement of President Pierre Nkurunziza and the horrendous crimes he’s suspected of orchestrating against his political opponents.

But with no rationale coming from the Secretary-General to explain why he’s in business with an autocratic regime while it’s being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, we can only rely on documented facts. They speak for themselves.

The UN pays Burundi for the use of its soldiers as UN peacekeepers—some US $13 million annually, or almost a quarter of the poverty-stricken country’s entire defense budget—and currently deploys 740 of them to its mission known as MINUSCA to “protect” the war-racked Central African Republic (CAR).

The Security Council has authorized the Secretary-General to send military peacekeepers home “when there is credible evidence of widespread or systemic sexual exploitation and abuse.” It’s left to the Secretary-General to decide how much sexual violence is too much.

Burundians account for one-fifth of all the UN peacekeeping soldiers since 2015 who have been formally accused by CAR women and children of rape and other sexual “misconduct,” although fewer than seven percent of MINUSCA’s current complement of 11,158 peacekeeping soldiers are contributed by Burundi.

Burundi’s behavior in CAR should surprise no one. Back at home, the Burundian army’s chain of command looks something like this: President Nkurunziza is under divine orders—heard only by him—to rule for life, and his army is under instruction to eliminate Burundian citizens who dare to challenge that order.

When the president announced four years ago that he would seek a third term, voters demonstrated in the streets, and the massacres began. Since 2016, bone-chilling official reports from independent UN investigators and commissioners have described rape, sexual torture, dismemberment, and mass murder carried out by government soldiers, police, and militia.

Experts believe that the gruesome campaign is ongoing. Keeping an army loyal enough to sustain brutal levels of rape and murder against its own people, year after year, is costly. On whom can Nkurunziza depend for steady income? The answer: Secretary-General Guterres.

Even compared with the world’s most notorious campaigns of state terror and mayhem, Burundi stands out. International Criminal Court investigations are rare, but alleged past and ongoing attacks by the Nkurunziza government against its own citizens have been grotesque enough to warrant one, based on credible evidence of the worst of all offenses: crimes against humanity.

If there is any reasonable explanation for allowing Burundi to keep contributing peacekeepers, Nkurunziza’s victims deserve to hear it from the UN Secretary-General.

Why is he bankrolling their oppressor? And the women and children of CAR deserve to hear why, when their government asked the international community for peacekeepers, Mr. Guterres sent them an army notorious for raping and murdering instead.

Nkurunziza has no problem making his views heard. He angrily withdrew his country from the International Criminal Court when it announced the probe into alleged crimes against humanity (though by international law, the withdrawal was not enough to stop the ICC’s investigation.)

He had already forced the UN to withdraw its expert investigators and commissioners. And most recently, he expelled the UN human rights office from the country.

The withdrawals, expulsions, and denunciations have gone in just one direction. António Guterres has maintained his silence, punctured only by the sound of a pen scratching on a checkbook: Pay to the order of Pierre Nkurunziza, US $13 million. The world is owed an explanation.

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Secretary-General António Guterres (2nd right) delivers his remarks at the high-level meeting on the Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse. Credit: UN Photo-Evan Schneider

By Paula Donovan
NEW YORK, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

The UN’s youngest entity, UN Women, announced last week that a senior official, Ravi Karkara, had been found guilty of sexual transgressions against an unspecified number of men after a 15-month internal investigation. Newsweek reported that “at least” eight made accusations against him. Karkara’s punishment? Dismissal.

Several of his accusers have gone public, describing how Karkara sexually assaulted and harassed them. One accuser, Steve Lee, alleged that Karkara grabbed his genitals in a Montreal hotel room—clearly, a crime. In announcing the firing, the executive director of UN Women said that Karkara “cannot be protected by diplomatic immunity” and UN Women “stands ready to cooperate with any national authority that decides to investigate this matter.”

So: UN Women conducted a lengthy administrative investigation before announcing it was ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

While the UN has rights as an employer, employers’ rights must never take precedence over criminal matters. Shouldn’t the UN, as a matter of policy, inform victims that potential crimes can be reported to and handled immediately by law enforcement?

Shockingly, it does not. The United Nations has no uniform standard when criminal allegations of sexual abuse are lodged against its personnel. Our Code Blue Campaign’s work with victims in recent cases involving accused UN perpetrators—including Luiz Loures of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Diego Palacios of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—reveals that different parts of the UN deploy different policies and procedures in a thoroughly ad hoc and inconsistent manner. The only consistent feature is a systemic protection of alleged perpetrators at the expense of victims.

The United Nations is, of course, a distinctive institution that must be permitted to operate on the world stage as a fearless arbiter of international norms. Since the world body’s founding, UN officials have enjoyed “immunity”—codified protections from the willful actions of vengeful localities and governments.

Upon learning of alleged sexual violence by one of its non-military personnel, the United Nations can and should quickly make two determinations.

First, could the allegation in any way be construed as an activity the UN official was conducting as part of his official UN duties? According to a 1946 convention on the “privileges and immunities” of the UN, most UN officials—including Ravi Karkara and Diego Palacios—have “functional immunity,” which means they are only immune from legal process for “words and deeds” committed in service of their UN functions. The UN has affirmed the truism that sexual crimes can never be part of UN functions.

Second, is it possible that the alleged crime could have occurred? The UN has a reasonable responsibility to ascertain not if the incident happened, but whether it could have happened. The UN should determine whether the alleged offender, for example, was in the vicinity of the alleged incident.

Once the UN has determined that the alleged act could have occurred and the alleged perpetrator is not protected by UN immunity, the UN must stand aside and let the national authorities of the country where the alleged crime took place do their job. Law enforcement and legal systems must be allowed to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute. Such are the necessary protocols of justice worldwide.

It must be emphasized: This does not currently happen. In sexual abuse cases, the UN routinely misapplies immunity to hinder police investigations of its accused personnel.

Take the case of UNFPA’s Palacios. After a woman named Prashanti Tiwari filed a criminal sexual assault complaint against Palacios in early 2018, the UN asserted immunity. The police investigation stalled while the UN conducted a months-long internal investigation. Because Ms. Tiwari persisted, the police investigation is now resuming, but only haltingly and with continued UN interference.

The UN takes advantage of widespread, and wrongheaded, assumptions about UN immunity, which is imbued with an almost mystical power in the public mind. The notion that a UN official cannot be arrested is so deeply embedded that the Indian government had to ask the UN for official “clarification.” (It received such clarification in writing—from the accused, Diego Palacios, the senior UNFPA official in India—who declared himself immune.)

The UN fosters the misapprehension by shrouding its immunity in mystery. It consistently prevents any external oversight of its actions. It refuses to disclose basic information about cases, asserting “confidentiality” over the public’s and victims’ rights to information.

Our thorough examinations of cases reveal that UN policies and procedures are so deficient—so rife with conflicts of interest—that the 193 governments that govern the bureaucracy must undertake a radical overhaul and pay no more heed to avowals of “zero tolerance” from the Secretary-General.

As a necessary first step, UN Member States must temporarily impanel impartial experts—not employees—to oversee the UN’s responses to claims of sexual exploitation and abuse across all parts of the UN.

It would monitor every step taken in real time, from receipt of each claim, through fact-finding and investigation, to the final outcome. We submit that a “Temporary Independent Oversight Panel,” reporting directly to Member States, could be well placed to gauge the level of the organization’s problems and make expert recommendations on the UN bureaucracy’s policies and procedures.

The UN should not be making headlines for impeding law enforcement investigations of accused sexual predators within its own ranks. It should leave criminal justice where it belongs, in the hands of national authorities, and make headlines instead for solving the grave crises that are rending the planet.

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