United Nations investigators "ignored, minimised, or shelved" allegations of serious abuses committed by Indian and Pakistani peacekeepers in Congo, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Friday.
Confidential UN documents made public for the first time by the rights group detail witness accounts that peacekeepers smuggled gold, traded weapons and ammunition with rebels and militia, and blocked efforts to disarm rebel fighters.
However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said little effort was made to investigate reports of abuses, mostly in Congo's lawless eastern borderlands - a patchwork of rebel and militia strongholds where most of the country's peacekeepers are based. HRW also made public an independent, external review of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the UN's internal investigations office, which called the body dysfunctional and said it should be scrapped.
"Peacekeepers worldwide play an essential and invaluable role," HRW's UN advocacy director Steve Crawshaw wrote in a letter to UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon on Thursday. "But the UN's failure to investigate its own crimes does nothing to keep the peace. Instead, it undermines peacekeeping efforts and the reputation of the UN itself." The United Nations has consistently denied allegations, which have repeatedly appeared in media reports over the past year, that such abuses have occurred on a large scale in eastern Congo.
"Only a few individual cases were discovered, and the results were transmitted to the respective countries," Kemal Saiki, spokesman for Congo's UN peacekeeping mission, known as Monuc, said on Friday.
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