By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive
UNITED NATIONS, February 28 -- A mass rape in Eastern Congo earlier this month by the Mai Mai Morgan militia group, with links to the Congolese Army, is being covered up the UN Mission MONUSCO, whistleblowers in UN Peacekeeping have exclusively told Inner City Press.
They say that over 50 women were raped over three days around February 8 in the villages of Zalana and Mbango near Mambasa, and that the UN Mission has been aware of it since at latest February 12. Why hasn't the UN spoken out?
Mai Mai Morgan, led by elephant poacher and illegal gold miner Paul Sadala a/k/a Morgan a/k/a Chuck Norris, has links with parts of the Congolese Army FARDC who are also involved in the illegal gold trade. For that reason, they say, Congolese authorities do not arrest or even speak much about Mai Mai Morgan.
And now the UN has gone silent too.
This comes the same week as US Secretary of State John Kerry and his UK counterpart William Hague held a press conference in Washington about sexual violence in conflict; it is a topic on which UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says the UN has "zero tolerance." But the whistleblowers ask, why then the silence about these rapes?
It is reminiscent of the months-long cover up by UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous about the more than 100 rapes in Minova in November 2012 by Congolese Army Battalions 41 and 391, the latter US-trained. Before that, amidmass rapes in Walikale, MONUSCO under then envoy Roger Meece tried to obscure what they knew and when they knew it.
In the run up to a meeting of UN Special Representatives of the Secretary General, to be attended by Ban Ki-moon himself, the whistleblowers asked when MONUSCO chief Martin Kobler knew about these rapes, if not why not, and if so: why the silence?
The UN's silence, the whistleblowers say, stands in contrast to how the UN highlighted every alleged abuse by the M23 rebels in the run-up to MONUSCO's "Force Intervention Brigade" attacking and neutralizing them.
There, human rights reporting fed into a military strategy. Here, with the Congolese Army linked to Mai Mai Morgan, the UN does not report abuses the whistleblower say the UN is aware of. Watch this site.
