UN peacekeepers from Bangladesh previously involved in torture of political opponents | DW News

UN peacekeepers from Bangladesh previously involved in torture of political opponents | DW News

these soldiers were deployed as un peacekeepers even after they served in a unit that kills and tortures they were high-ranking officers of Bangladesh’s Elite unit rapid action Battalion and in particular its notorious intelligence Wing in 2023 we revealed what the government continues to deny that RAB murders abducts and tortures alleged criminals and political opponents un peacekeeping missions cannot have in amongst them officers who may have been responsible for these kind of very serious abuses that defeats the purpose of peacekeeping for months we looked into Bangladesh one of the largest contributors to un missions and found that the two officers were not a unique case we analyzed classified military personnel files and Secret un deployment lists and found more than 100 soldiers who went from RAB to peacekeeping some of them admitted to extrajudicial killings during their time at RAB on the day of the execution the target is taken up with his hands tied and blindfolded after the bullet hit his skull some blood and brain fragment splashed on my uniform and yet the officers were deployed on un missions afterwards we went to Copenhagen to meet a man who in 2019 raised the alarm Yen modvig served as raor for the un’s Committee Against torture and the report on Bangladesh stated it was Gravely concerned about Rab’s abuses the recommendation was that former and current members of rap should not be allowed to to do service in peacekeeping operations but we found at least 40 RAB members who were deployed to peace missions after the report was published confronted with our findings UN peacekeeping in New York wrote we do not have the resources to review the information of all Personnel deployed and the vast majority of troops perform well this former un official told us that the organization has barely any power over which officers countries select as peacekeepers would it be an option do you think that’s until 9 Andrew Gilmore was UN assistant Secretary General for human rights and experienced firsthand what happens when the UN pushes countries to exclude possible human rights abusers one country that was really important literally said okay we’re going to pull out all together and the UN Secretary General at that time had to go basically to that country and essentially uh apologized to the head of state otherwise like four un PC operations would have collapsed he wouldn’t tell us which country but said that the UN is stuck in a dilemma the reason faced with dangerous and deadly missions Western governments increasingly pulled their troops out of peacekeeping operations instead they prefer to pay for them leaving the supplying of troops to countries like Bangladesh Pakistan Egypt and China many of which are known to have abusive Security Forces we get some really pretty useless troops and some pretty brutal ones as well but um if you’re still in the UN you can’t actually say that we also confronted Bangladesh’s government and every individual officer mentioned in this report they didn’t respond with me in the studio is Naomi Conrad from DW investigations she’s one of the authors of that report welcome Naomi um so your report focused on the records of un uh peace Keepers from Bangladesh but are there documented cases from other countries so we actually also looked at Sri Lanka um so I mean if you look at the list of of peacekeeping countries the top providers are Egypt and China Pakistan so take your pick I’m sure there are quite a few cases in most of these countries but we looked at Sri Lanka and found at least one case where activists had warned the UN about a specific officer who had been uh implicated in the atrocities committed in the at the end of the the Civil War in 2009 and he were sent despite these warnings um so it’s definitely going on I think if you dig in in some of the records of some of these other human of of some of these other peacekeepers you’re quite likely to find other cases too so the obvious question is I mean why is the UN using known human rights abusers as part of its its peacekeeping forces well the un’s hands are tied because um they need they need troops to maintain these peacekeeping operations a lot of governments have pulled out of peacekeeping operations I mean these missions are dangerous they’re often quite deadly it’s it’s very difficult to convince voters in democracy back home that you’re sending soldiers uh and they get returned to you in body bags so to to an extent the UN is stuck in this dilemma and there isn’t really an easy way out okay and and and what is being done to address this problem so obviously these issues are now being highlighted so so what’s happening is anything happening to change it there have been cases where the un’s human rights branch has teamed up with human rights commissions and activists um most notably the case that’s happened in Nepal so there are examples but the problem is that a lot of countries don’t actually want that they don’t want external bodies or even their own human rights organizations to look into the past of these soldiers because at least in in the case of Bangladesh one could argue that high ranking members of the government are ordering or at least letting these abuses happen so they don’t really want too much scrutiny okay we’ll have to leave it there no kred from DW investigations thanks so muchi and if you want to watch the whole of that DW documentary just go to our website that’s dw.com or you can look for our documentary Channel on YouTube

Officers from a Bangladeshi elite unit implicated in the torture and killing of political opponents are being sent on United Nations peacekeeping missions, a joint investigation by DW, Netra News and Süddeutsche Zeitung has revealed.

#UN #Bangladesh #Torture

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