It was gathered that MINUSCA informed UN headquarters that an integrated team sent to Dekoa from March 25th to April 4th interviewed 59 women and girls. While some were on a list of 98 victims who reported sexual abuse to UNICEF last month, the team documented 41 new cases never previously reported.
At a conference call media briefing on Wednesday, deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told journalists who requested further details regarding over 100 reports of sexual abuse in CAR disclosed by Code Blue on March 30, 2016, that: “We’ve been providing updates on that in recent days, as you’re aware. I don’t have any update for you today, but as we get more information from our peacekeeping and field support counterparts, we’ll certainly relay those on to you.”
When media pressed the UN for details, spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said “…we hope to share more details with you as soon as we can. Obviously, you know, we’ve had preliminary work done. OIOS (the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services) will be going there on the ground. The difficulties… the logistical difficulties in the area also cannot be understated. From what I’m told, there’s electricity about two hours a day. The only communications are sat[elite] phones, so the communications with the teams on the ground are a little challenging as well. But we’re trying to harvest as much… as many numbers as we can for you and to try to bring a little clarity as to where we are on the number of allegations. As to the assessment, I don’t have any more numbers to share with you. I thin what I said and I hope I said it clearly is that OIOS would be sending an expanded team of about 10 people to the area.”
MINUSCA’s April 7, 2016 code cable to the UN headquarters which sources were quoted but however its original form not sent to the UN disclosed that the team was deployed to carry out a preliminary investigation into allegation of sexual violence by UN and non-UN international military forces and was composed of personnel from MINUSCA’s human rights division, UNFPA (the Population Fund), UNICEF (the UN Children’s Fund) and UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency). However, the ‘integrated team’ did not include professional investigators from the UN’s independent Office of Internal Oversight Services.
Details provided in the April 7th cable reveal that: “All of the alleged victims were women and girls. …allegations show that food, including rations, and money was exchanged for sex, often with promises of marriage. …numerous allegations of rapes – when victims went to collect water or when they approached international forces to sell fruit (a pattern of raping closely reminiscent of Darfur) as justice system in Dekoa is non-existent,”
A statement by Code Blue campaign noted that “If the UN, which is not authorised to conduct criminal investigations, is sending integrated teams and OIOS investigators to interview victims and witnesses, gather information and preserve evidence, are they acting alone, or in conjunction with—and at the request of—authorised law enforcement personnel from France, Gabon, Burundi, and any other governments whose troops have been identified so far?
“The Code Blue campaign sees the UN’s ad hoc responses to ever-growing reports of sexual violence as improvised and dangerously unprofessional. Droves of women and girls who’ve come forward in the past month are being subjected to a chaotic grab-bag of bits and pieces of UN activities, slapped together by the MINUSCA mission without adequate headquarters leadership or oversight, thought, planning, protocols, guidelines, or clear channels of communication.
Whatever the UN’s intentions, the organisation may well be compounding victims’ trauma irreversibly through this round-robin of “preliminary” interviews, conducted over and over again, and with no real justice, protection, or support in sight.”
