© Dieu Nalio Chery / The Associated PressMartine Gestime 32, wipes her tears during an interview in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Gestime said she was raped by a Brazilian peacekeeper in 2008 and became pregnant with her son, Ashford.
In the ruins of a tropical hideaway where jetsetters once sipped rum under the Caribbean sun, the abandoned children tried to make a life for themselves. They begged and scavenged for food, but they never could scrape together enough to beat back the hunger, until the UN peacekeepers moved in a few blocks away.
The men who came from a faraway place and spoke a strange language offered the Haitian children cookies and other snacks. Sometimes they gave them a few dollars. But the price was high: The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12.
"I did not even have breasts," said a girl, known as V01 — Victim No. 1. She told UN investigators that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a "Commandant" who gave her 75 cents. Sometimes she slept in UN trucks on the base next to the decaying resort, whose once-glamorous buildings were being overtaken by jungle.
Justice for victims like V01 is rare. An Associated Press investigation of U.N. missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world — signalling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, the AP found, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time.
Legally, the UN is in a bind.
It has no jurisdiction over peacekeepers, leaving punishment to the countries that contribute the troops.
Comment: Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov said on April 14 that Akilov had been recruited by the Islamic State (IS) militant group after he left Uzbekistan in 2014 and settled in Sweden.