UN Is Examining Its Security Policies After Murders in Congo
May 21, 2017
In Tshimbulu, a town in Kasai-Central Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN peacekeepers were promoting dialogue amid news of mass graves. The photo was taken in February 2017, a month before two UN experts were killed in Kasai. CREATIVE COMMONS
A board of inquiry looking into major gaps or flaws in United Nations security policies that might have contributed to the murders of two UN experts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was set up May 1, according to documents not released to the public yet. The board is to travel to the Congo in early June as part of its work.
The four-member board, organized by the UN secretariat, is expected submit its report by July 31, 2017, to Peter Drennan, the head of the UN Department of Safety and Security.
The two members of the UN’s group of experts on the Congo — Michael Sharp, an American from Kansas, and Zaida Catalán, a Swedish-Chilean — were murdered in March in Kasai-Central Province. The region is home to militias and rebel groups, including ones using child soldiers.
The experts were hired as contractors by the UN to assist the Security Council’s sanctions committee to investigate regional and international networks linked to armed groups; arms supplies and transfers; and violators of humanitarian law.
So far, the Security Council has not created an investigatory body to determine who killed the two experts and four Congolese colleagues with them. But Sweden is an elected member of the Council, and Olof Skoog, the Swedish ambassador to the UN, said in March: “The circumstances surrounding the fate of Zaida Catalán, her colleagues and the others affected must be thoroughly investigated. The four Congolese citizens that remain unaccounted for must be found.” (The Swedish mission to the UN confirmed that a Swedish prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation into Catalán’s death.)
