The French president, François Hollande, has vowed to show no mercy over allegations that French peacekeeping soldiers sexually abused starving and homeless children in the Central African Republic.
“If some soldiers have behaved badly, I will show no mercy,” he told reporters on a visit to Brest, north-west France.
A French judicial source has told Reuters that a certain number of French soldiers accused of the abuse had been identified.
A leaked United Nations report obtained by the Guardian on Wednesday revealed the alleged sexual abuse of 10 boys aged eight to 15 at a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in CAR’s capital, Bangui. The boys detail allegations against a number of soldiers. Le Monde reported on Thursday that more than a dozen French soldiers are under investigation.
While the details of the alleged abuse have sent shockwaves through France, Anders Kompass, the United Nations official who disclosed the allegations to French prosecutors, is under investigation for breaching protocols on the handling of confidential information. He has been suspended from his role as director of field operations by the UN and faces dismissal.
In France, the Socialist government has been criticised for staying quiet over the allegations even though it was notified in July last year and immediately informed prosecutors, who launched a preliminary inquiry. One opposition UMP MP told French TV it was a shame that details of the scandal had emerged in a foreign newspaper.
But Pierre Bayle, a spokesman for the defence ministry, told reporters: “There is no desire to hide anything.” He said the government had wanted to allow the judicial inquiry to take its course and the justice system to do its work.
The leaked report obtained by the Guardian contains interviews with six children who disclose sexual abuse at the hands of French soldiers, with some children indicating that several of their friends were also being sexually exploited.
The document, described by a UN source as a preliminary report, is a snapshot in time of the sexual abuse of children, suspected of taking place at the hands of soldiers in the peacekeeping mission.
The interviews were carried out by an official from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights justice section and a member of Unicef between May and June last year. The children, who are aged between eight and 15, disclose abuse dating back to December 2013. Entitled “Sexual abuse on children by international armed forces”, the document is stamped “confidential” on every page.
The allegations include claims that Chadian soldiers, who are part of the peacekeeping mission, were also involved in abuse.
The children all talk of being abused in return for food rations handed out by the soldiers. One interview details how two nine-year-old children were sexually exploited together by two French soldiers.
One of the children tells the interviewers: “One was short and smoking a lot, the other was thin and not smoking. They asked us what we wanted. We answered that we were hungry. The short man told us to first put his bangala [penis] out of his pants.
“The bangala of the thin one was for my friend,” the child said. “Their bangala were straight in front of us, at the level of our mouths.”
The child goes on to describe how he and his friend were told to carry out a sex act on both soldiers before being given three packs of military food rations and some money.
Another nine-year-old child describes how he went to ask for food from the French military at the IDP camp at M’Poko airport. He says the soldier told him to carry out a sex act on him first. The report states: “He [the child] had friends who had done it already, he knew what he had to do. Once done the military gave a military food portion and some food. X said the military had forbidden him to tell anything about him to anybody, and that if he would do so he would beat him.”
Another child, aged 13, described how several of his friends had been sexually exploited, and gives details of the soldiers who carried out the abuse. Another boy describes witnessing the rape of his friend by two Chadian soldiers and the same boy being abused by a French soldier.
On Thursday, the French army responded to the publication in the Guardian of the details of the allegations by promising “zero tolerance” and “total transparency”. A spokesman said French soldiers were subject to the same laws as everyone else in France.
The army has also launched its own inquiry to establish whether there was any “disfunction in the command chain”.
Meanwhile, Laurence Rossignol, the French families minister, told French TV: “We know very well that during wars or when countries are in chaos, women and children are victim to predators. That means that if those who are there to protect them are themselves predators, from a certain point of view they have committed a double crime.”
Hollande told reporters that any sanctions should correspond to the gravity of the crimes and “set an example”. “You know the trust I have in our army, [and] the role the French military play in the world,” he said, adding that no “stain” should sully them.
