On March 29 Aicha Elbasri accepted the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize for 2015 at the National Press Club. Elbasri is the former spokesperson for the joint African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID), and the truth she told concerned that mission. UNAMID is poorly trained and badly equipped, faces escalating and overwhelming violence, and does not (and cannot) protect the population under its care, and the UN is concealing all these problems in order to retain the favor of a genocidal government in Khartoum.
In short, Elbasri is a whistleblower who, after months of harassment, resigned from her job with the UN in order to expose the truth about UNAMID in Darfur. And, she pointed out, Darfur is only one of many forgotten wars in central Africa.
Her speech last week coincided with the uprising in Baltimore provoked by the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed African-American man who made eye contact with a police officer and then ran from him. These combined acts resulted in Gray’s death from injuries inflicted on him during an illegal arrest. Ultimately, the attorney general for the state of Maryland charged six officers in the case, one of them, Cesar Goodson Jr., with depraved-heart murder.
The charge is both serious and rare, but its definition — the deliberate perpetration of a knowingly dangerous act with reckless and wanton unconcern and indifference about whether anyone is harmed or not — is chilling. The depraved-heart doctrine rests on the legal logic that, beyond a certain point, carelessness reaches a level of negligence equivalent to criminal culpability.
The same week that Elbasri spoke in Washington and Baltimore went up in flames, UN peacekeeping sustained another blow to its credibility: The Guardian reported that refugee children were routinely sodomized and raped by French troops deployed in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), under the authority of UN Security Council Resolution 2127. And like Elbasri, Anders Kompass, the UN staff member who told the truth about the crimes, was punished. On April 17 he was suspended by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, where he worked.