La MONUSCO menace de cesser de travailler avec les unités des FARDC accusés de viol! Et pourtant des maisons de passe (prostitution) sont établies par les soldats de la MONUSCO à Uvira!

La MONUSCO menace de cesser de travailler avec les unités des FARDC accusés de viol! Et pourtant des maisons de passe (prostitution) sont établies par les soldats de la MONUSCO à Uvira!

Ce n'est demain que la MONUSCO va quitter le Congo!

Welcome to the Hotel Uvira: Such a Lovely Place…
Victoria Fontan
August 23, 2012

http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?id_article=930

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Back from her most recent trip to the Congo, researcher Victoria Fontan shares her observations about the darker side of the peace industry in Kivu province. In a region where sexual violence is a prominent and ongoing issue, she provides a glimpse of how the UN Peacekeeping forces fuel a thriving underground sex industry.

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On a dark desert “highway”, nested between the Burundian border and a Pakistani MONUSO compound; Hotel Uvira is a magnificent beach resort. Its rooms are facing the beautiful Tanganika Lake, refreshed by a soft breeze cooling a radiant sun. At first, the spot appears to be the perfect place for a relaxing vacation, the only catch being that it is located in the Kivu Province of Congo, one of the most unstable regions of the country. Built only four months ago, Hotel Uvira was an immediate success among UN Peacekeepers. Its owner, Maître Ferdinand, a lawyer trained in Brussels, was amazed at the speed at which reservations came. After a few days, the grim reality dawned on him. The resort of his dreams, which he had saved for years to build, transformed itself overnight into a nightmare. The hotel became a prostitution hotspot, often involving teenage and underage girls.

Maître Ferdinand particularly despises his best clients, the Russian pilots of the UN fleet, whose airport is located only a few kilometers away from the hotel. At the weekends, he says, they come in the evenings, drink a lot of vodka, and receive their first “girls” late into the night. Maître Ferdinand says that they can hardly contain themselves when the girls arrive, often leaving their rooms half naked to receive them in the lobby. When he is there, and the young age of the “girls” is obvious, Maître Ferdinand knocks at the rooms’ doors, reminding the pilots that underage prostitution is illegal in Congo, and asking them to release the girls on the spot.

This grim scenario puts Maître Ferdinand in a very difficult situation. A Congolese himself, he resents how the UN comes into his country, supposedly to bring peace, but according to him, only to abuse its local population. After having witnessed four months of constant, systematic abuse, he is convinced that the UN is only in Congo to “serve its own sick needs.” Yet business is business, and when girls are over 18, there is nothing he can or wants to do.

How do the children make it to the hotel late at night?

Gerard, a doorman who speaks on condition of anonymity, asserts that they either come in bulk, by minibus, or are sent in one-by-one by Congolese intermediaries. After a few times, the girls become regulars, and the mobile phones that the peacekeepers give them allow for their company to be requested at any time, bypassing intermediaries.

Alice is also a regular sex worker at the Hotel Uvira, although she is 29. She has been doing this more than three years, and regularly meets MONUSCO staff, from all nationalities. Last year, she fell in love with a Pakistani soldier, but it all ended after he was sent home, unable to contain a drug addiction. Then there was another regular, from Japan, who refused to pay her several times. She tried to sue him through a local court, only for the prosecutor to take this as an opportunity to blackmail him into buying his case out for a few hundred dollars. Now Alice knows that there is no use trying to sue bad customers. The regular price for an encounter is between $20 and $30, yet she asserts that girls under 18 are regularly exploited for less than $3 per intercourse.

When I ask her what her children say about her activities, she tells me that she has a day job, and that they are not aware of what she really does for a living. Every morning, she works for a prominent US-based NGO, one for which my institution regularly works. I chuckle to myself when I hear their name being mentioned, and then I feel disgust. She is so badly paid as a cleaner, earning less than $100 per month, that she has to work as a prostitute to feed her children, all while white expatriates earn enormous salaries on the back of her suffering. The peace industry strikes again: does the only difference between it and the Russian pilots lay in the fact that Alice is over 18?

After visiting the nightclub where Alice picks her customers up, I return to my beloved Hotel Uvira, late at night. The parking lot is filled with UN SUVs. The Russians are there, watching porn in the hotel lobby to prepare themselves, waiting for their flesh to turn up. As I wake up early the next day, all the cars are gone, as if it had only been a sordid nightmare. Then Gerard comes back with disturbing tales of the former night, which according to him was very “busy.” He then says that there are two kinds of UN customers, the night owls, and the ones who use the hotel as their “home.” He gives the example of two Uruguayan UN officials who have resorted to pay for a room monthly, to be able to use it as a bachelor pad. I remember how former IMF boss Dominic Strauss-Khan had such a pad in Paris. How organized, refined, almost normal…

As I leave Uvira, I pass by villages that harbor a plethora of “peace building signs.” So many NGOs compete for a visible spot in villages on the main road, to ostensibly show the benefit of their presence in the region. Most of the signs address sexual violence in the region, a very lucrative business to be engaged in for international NGOs. In a way, it is much easier to “address” the sexual abuses committed by “savage” Congolese, than to acknowledge the sexual violence brought in with peacekeeping contingents. I dream that one day, I will return to Hotel Uvira and find a sign there, acknowledging how our peace industry is also part of the sexual violence “issue” in Uvira.

Victoria Fontan is the Director for Academic Development and Head of Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace, Costa Rica.

U.N. threatens to stop working with Congo army units accused of rape

By Michelle Nichols | Reuters – 14 hrs ago

http://news.yahoo.com/u-n-threatens-stop-working-congo-army-units-222650273.html;_ylt=AwrNUbIN4zlRcWcAu.nQtDMD

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  Reuters/Reuters - An U.N. Peacekeeper records a video of Congolese national police officers arriving on a ferry at a port at Lake Kivu, Goma November 30, 2012 in Goma while Congolese Revolutionary Army (CRA) …more 

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congohas threatened to stop supporting two Congolese army battalions unless soldiers accused of raping scores of women in an eastern town are prosecuted, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

The United Nations said 126 women were raped in Minova in November after Congolese troops fled to the town as so-called M23 rebels briefly captured the nearby provincial capital of Goma.

The senior U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the two Congolese battalions had been told to start prosecuting soldiers accused of raping the women in Minova this month or they would lose the support of U.N. peacekeepers.

"Many rapes were committed. We have investigated, we have identified a number of cases and we demand that the Congolese authorities take action legally against those people," said the official. He did not say how many soldiers had been accused.

"Since nothing sufficient has happened at this stage we have already put two units of the armed forces of Congo on notice that if they do not act promptly we shall cease supporting them," he said. "They have to shape up."

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said in December that alleged human rights abuses were committed in and around Minova between November 20 and November 30, including the 126 rapes and the killing of two civilians. Nesirky said at the time that two soldiers were charged with rape, while seven more were charged with looting.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUSCO, has a mandate to protect civilians and supports operations by the Congolese army. There are more than 17,000 troops in Congo - a country the size of Western Europe.

Peacekeepers have been stretched thin by the M23 rebellion in the resource-rich east of Congo and the U.N. Security Council is considering creating a special intervention force, which one senior council diplomat has said would be able to "search and destroy" the M23 rebels and other armed groups in the country.

M23 began taking parts of eastern Congo early last year, accusing the government of failing to honor a 2009 peace deal. That deal ended a previous rebellion and led to the rebels' integration into the army, but they have since deserted.

African leaders signed a U.N.-mediated accord late last month aimed at ending two decades of conflict in eastern Congo and paving the way for the intervention force.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; editing by Christopher Wilson)