Monday, August 31, 2015

Keeping the Peace?

UN peacekeepers shot dead a 16-year old boy and his father and raped a 12-year-old girl in Central African Republic according to AmnestyInternational.

The next day, after armed clashes with residents had killed a soldier from Cameroon and injured several others, peacekeepers went to the area and “began shooting indiscriminately in the street where the killings had taken place,” Amnesty alleged. Joanne Mariner, its senior crisis response adviser, said: “These allegations of rape and indiscriminate killings committed by UN troops are supported by physical evidence and multiple witness accounts.

UN peacekeepers have been in CAR since September last year. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was “personally dismayed and disappointed, not just by these latest reports, but by the series of allegations that have surfaced in the Central African Republic mission in recent months”, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said. Earlier this year it emerged that French peacekeeping troops had been accused of abusing children in CAR.

No comments: