Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.
The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.
Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers.
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Dominique McAdams, the head of the UN in Bunia, said she believed that there was sexual violence in the camp, but said she had yet to see any evidence.
Because, you know, even if that kind of thing is going on there’s no point in doing something about it until McAdams has personally seen the evidence. Maybe she should tag along with The Independent reporters?
P.S. Does anyone know of a UN deployment in the last, say, twenty years that didn’t end up involving systematic sex crimes?
“There is something so liberating and exciting about it, you’ve got to try it out,” she [a 33 year old history professor] said recently as she fidgeted, fully clothed, on the couch in her friend Tasha’s Manhattan apartment. “I was teaching a class on imperialism, ” she continued, “and I was delivering all this material that was kind of new and upsetting, and everyone was getting all worked up and upset, and I was getting all worked up and upset, and all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was flash my underwear! It was crazy,” she said with a throaty giggle.
There’s the kind of relentless logic that’s made the anti-war protestors the intellectual force they are today.