UN Warns Troops in W. Africa Against Sex Abuse

March 3, 2005 
Reuters
Original Source: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7791794

MONROVIA (Reuters) - The U.N.'s deputy chief urged peacekeepers in West Africa on Wednesday to obey strict rules on sexual conduct as the world body tried to limit damage from a scandal involving its troops in Congo. 

Deputy secretary general Louise Frechette is touring U.N. peacekeeping operations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast to drive home secretary general Kofi Annan's zero-tolerance policy on sexual abuse. 

Our soldiers are advised to go by the rules and not have sex with any minor, Frechette told reporters in Liberia's capital Monrovia. 

The U.N. mission in Liberia set up a hotline last month for people to report allegations of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers and a mission spokesman said it had received a number of complaints. 

Investigators would look into all of them but it was too soon to say if any could be substantiated, the spokesman said. 

In Congo, the U.N. has investigated 150 allegations of sexual exploitation of women and girls as young as 12 or 13, including gang rapes, by some 50 peacekeepers. 

It banned its soldiers from having sex with Congolese last month as part of a new non-fraternisation policy. 

Liberia is home to one of the largest U.N. peacekeeping missions, with some 15,000 soldiers. 
Three years ago, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR was mired in a scandal when a report it commissioned said that scores of refugee children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone had been subjected to sexual abuse in exchange for humanitarian aid. 

Frechette was due to visit the two other West African U.N. peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone later on Wednesday and in Ivory Coast on Friday.