Tag: World

Conflict-related sexual violence is increasing as the fighting in Sudan rages for a third month, yet the vast majority of cases are going unreported, according to Sulima Ishaq, the director of a government unit tasked with combating violence against women.

 

Ishaq told The New Humanitarian that her group – the Combating Violence Against Women Unit – has documented over 60 incidents of sexual violence in Khartoum and Darfur but that this represents just a fraction of the total number of cases.

 

Medical services and supplies for survivors are largely unavailable, Ishaq said. “Hospitals are using the minimum medical standards for rape cases and are focusing only on preventing pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases,” she said.

 

The war in Sudan began on 15 April, pitting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary group with roots in Darfur – against the regular army. Some 24.7 million people – roughly half the population – need aid and 2.5 million have been displaced.

 

The situation is especially critical for the millions of people trapped in the capital, Khartoum. The RSF controls large parts of the city and has embedded itself within residential neighbourhoods and homes as protection from military airstrikes.

 

Ishaq said RSF fighters are behind a wave of sexual violence in Khartoum, often using rape as tool to force families from their houses. Women and girls from refugee communities and poorer families in the city are also being targeted, she said. 

 

In Darfur, meanwhile, Ishaq said RSF militias – mostly drawn from local Arab groups and accused of targeting non-Arabs – have carried out “mass rapes” in major towns, as well as physical assaults on women and girls trying to escape the fighting. 

 

“It is a déjà vu and a repeat of what happened during the early days of the Darfur conflict, from 2003 to 2006,” Ishaq told The New Humanitarian in an emailed Q&A.

 

In what follows, Ishaq – a psychologist and trauma specialist who took part in the protest movement that brought down former president Omar al-Bashir in 2019 – describes the patterns of violence her unit is currently documenting.

 

She also discusses the impact of the work on her personally, including the time she was arrested last year after documenting sexual violence by government security forces in the aftermath of a 2021 coup. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

The New Humanitarian: Could you tell us a bit about your unit and the work you do?

 

Sulima Ishaq: The Combating Violence Against Women Unit was established by a decision of the Council of Ministers in November 2005. The unit is now affiliated with the ministry of social development. Its mandate includes setting general policies, strategies, executive plans, and implementation programmes for combating violence against women and children.

 

The New Humanitarian: How many cases of sexual violence has your unit documented since the conflict began? 

 

Ishaq: We have documented 36 cases in Khartoum and 25 cases in Nyala, in South Darfur state. But what we are reporting represents just 2% of what is actually happening in the states of Sudan under the threat of sexual violence. Most of these allegations, according to survivors’ witnesses protection committees, involve the RSF.

 

The New Humanitarian: Could you tell us about some of the cases you are documenting in Khartoum?

 

Ishaq: They are mostly young women and girls, between the ages of 12-28. Sexual violence is being used as a tool to get civilians to leave their houses. There is also the exploitation of young girls who come from impoverished families and are residing in rich neighbourhoods. They are mostly from African ethnicities.

 

The video that was published by CNN was among the cases where young girls aged 15, 16, or even younger have been sexually exploited and raped by more than three soldiers. Those young girls are minors, and their vulnerability against armed ruthless soldiers doesn’t give them the capacity to provide consent. It is sexual exploitation and rape.

 

Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees residing in Omdurman and Bahri [cities next to Khartoum] have also been targeted. Eyewitnesses confirm seeing soldiers wearing RSF uniforms bringing refugee men outside their houses and then keeping women inside, where they assault them.

 

There are also women who, during their trips to find food supplies and medical support, got harassed and raped.

 

The New Humanitarian: How difficult is it for survivors in Khartoum to get the treatment and services they need?

 

Ishaq: The dynamics of the conflict in Khartoum are changing, and that changes the availability of safe passages to health facilities. All supplies in terms of the clinical management of rape are in buildings that are under control of the RSF. Hospitals are using the minimum medical standards for rape cases and are focusing only on preventing pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

The New Humanitarian: What is the situation for women in Darfur? 

 

Ishaq: It’s a déjà vu and a repeat of what happened during the early days of the Darfur conflict, from 2003–2006.

 

We have documented Arab militias affiliated to the RSF, and RSF soldiers, abduct 25 women and girls in Nyala [in South Darfur state], and put them in an empty hotel called Aldaman. They raped them for days. These women and girls were aged 15-54 and resided in Otash displacement camp.

 

When attacks happened In El Geneina [in West Darfur state], there were nine cases of conflict-related sexual violence [in one area] and two [in another]. There were also mass rapes at a university building where people had been seeking safety and shelter. It is unclear how many because people were escaping in complete chaos.

 

Women and girls fleeing El Geneina to Chad were also subject to sexual harassment and abuse through personal and body searches by RSF soldiers. Their genitalia were touched, they were physically assaulted, and a number of women were killed for no reason.

 

The New Humanitarian: What impact does this work have on you personally? 

 

Ishaq: What is certain is that I am not very popular with [different] groups. Being outspoken about issues related to sexual violence within a rape culture society is not allowed. 

 

I have given myself to the cause, but I cannot deny my own avoidances and personal fears. The last time I was able to provide mental health services and trauma therapy was after documenting the sexual violence that happened on 3 June 2019 [when security forces led by the RSF killed and raped pro-democracy demonstrators]. I was a survivor of that massacre too.

 

I was also present in Darfur travelling all over the region between 2004 and 2006. I saw a lot, and this actually shaped my career path and choices. It gave me a personal attachment to documenting conflict-related sexual violence. I made a pact: It either ends me, or I have to live trying to end it.

 

The New Humanitarian: You were interrogated last year by the government because of your work. Could you explain what happened?

 

Ishaq: We had announced publicly and through the formal channels cases of confirmed sexual violence involving seven young women in the aftermath of a demonstration on 18 December 2021. Three months later, [the UN Sudan envoy] Volker Perthes made a report to the Security Council [that included the information we had documented]. I was then summoned for investigation. The allegation was that I was spying and destroying the constitutional order. There was huge support for me, at the international and national levels.

 

This project was funded by the H2H Network’s H2H Fund, which is supported by UK aid.

 

Edited by Philip Kleinfeld.

In the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, near a popular resort area with a water park and arboretum, stands a two-story home with a minimalist exterior and a flat gray roof. Its entire second floor is ringed by one continuous balcony. Large glass doors look out onto a well-kempt lawn and garden, a sparkling blue swimming pool, and a tennis court. A gated driveway slopes down to an underground garage.

This elegant villa belongs to a man named David Peradze. Since November 2017, he has been the director of Georgian Railway, the state company that manages the country’s strategically important rail transport system.

A new investigation by OCCRP’s Georgian partner, Studio Monitor, also reveals several other omissions.

Photos in which Peradze’s wife Tamar Kakhaia is tagged on Facebook show that she has a collection of luxury-brand shoes and accessories, including Prada and Dior purses and a Cartier bracelet. These items are sold online for between $3,520 and $8,000, and though all expenditures greater than 5,000 GEL (around $1,900) must be listed, Peradze has never declared any of these items.

Responding to reporters’ questions on Peradze’s behalf, Georgian Railway said that his villa is still being built, but it will be declared as required once completed.

“As for the house, its construction has been going on for several years and is still not finished,” Georgian Railway wrote to Studio Monitor. “Some work is left, including the improvement of the drainage system, and [the villa] will be declared according to the rules when it passes final inspection.”

When journalists visited the home, however, it appeared not only livable but actually occupied.

Drone footage captured in September 2023 shows a woman hanging laundry on the balcony and children riding a bike and a scooter around the property. There are no visible signs of construction work, the lawn and garden are well manicured, and there is patio furniture on the deck. In addition, the SUV driven by Peradze’s wife has been spotted at the villa on five occasions.

“In David Peradze’s declaration, his wife’s personal income is indicated,” the state company wrote. “The aforementioned declared incomes provide for the wife’s personal consumption items and if any of them needs to be declared, they will be reflected in the declaration in the appropriate manner.”

“As for the car, she definitely uses the family-owned Toyota RAV4,” the company added.

OCCRP has already reported on problems with Georgia’s declaration system, which was adopted in 2017 as a corruption-fighting mechanism. But the penalty for failing to declare assets — a one-time fine — appears to be of little deterrence.

Over half of the 346 officials whose declarations were checked by officials last year had omissions and inaccuracies, according to a report by Transparency International.

“The [Peradze] case is a direct example of the violation of the obligation to declare,” says Sandro Kevkhishvili, an analyst at the Georgian chapter of Transparency International. “These cases must be sent to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation. Only an investigation can determine whether there are actually undocumented assets and various corruption crimes.”

In his first five years as railway director, Peradze earned about $450,000 from his salary and other sources. His wife co-owns a small business from which she reported profits of $55,000 in the same period. The couple have also taken out a few hundred thousand dollars in mortgages in recent years. It is therefore plausible that the couple could afford their undeclared assets on their known incomes, making the failure to list them somewhat of a mystery.

In response to a query from journalists, Georgia’s Anti-Corruption Bureau wrote that Peradze had been selected for monitoring by an independent commission that chooses a certain number of declarations to be verified every year. “The declaration of David Peradze’s property status will be checked by the end of the year,” the Bureau wrote.

Ivanishvili founded Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, in 2012. Though officially retired from politics, his pervasive influence over the state is well-documented.

The EU has included “deoligarchization” among the primary conditions of Georgia’s accession to the bloc, a requirement widely understood as a call to curtail Ivanishvili’s system of informal power. The prevalence of the oligarch’s former employees at the highest levels of government has led the local chapter of Transparency International to call Georgia a “captured state.”

The country’s railways are a strategic asset, and their importance has only grown. Georgian rail lines form an important part of the so-called “Middle Corridor” route connecting two of the world’s largest traders — China and the European Union — while bypassing Russia.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has opened a new window of opportunity for the Middle Corridor, part of which is Georgia,” George Abashishvili, a former head of administration and economic advisor to the president, told reporters. “The biggest challenge is the infrastructure: how well can this infrastructure withstand the increased demand for freight?”

In November 2017, when Peradze was appointed the director of Georgian Railway, the company was in the midst of a troubled modernization program. Underway for years under both the current and previous governments, and plagued with delays, the still-unfinished effort has left the country’s railways working at half capacity, according to official statistics.

The stakes could scarcely have been higher for Hilda Heine, the former president of the Marshall Islands.

For years, her remote archipelago nation of just 40,000 people was best known to the world — if known at all — for Cold War nuclear testing that left scores of its islands poisoned. Sitting in the center of the Pacific Ocean, the country was a strategic but forgotten U.S. ally.

But the arrival of a couple of mysterious strangers threatened to change all that. With buckets of cash at their disposal, the Chinese pair, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou, had grand plans that could have thrust the Marshall Islands into the growing rivalry between China and the West and perhaps fracture the country itself.

First proposed in 2017, while Heine was still president, Yan and Zhou’s idea raised public controversy. With backing from foreign investors, the couple planned to rehabilitate one irradiated atoll, Rongelap, and turn it into a futuristic “digital special administrative region.” The new city of artificial islands would include an aviation logistics center, wellness resorts, a gaming and entertainment zone, and foreign embassies.

Thanks in part to the liberal payment of bribes, Yan and Zhou had managed to gain the support of some of the Marshall Islands’ most powerful politicians. They then lobbied for a draft bill that would have given the proposed zone, known as the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region (RASAR), its own separate courts and immigration laws.

Heine was opposed. The whole thing reeked of a Chinese effort to gain influence over the strategically located Marshall Islands, she told OCCRP.

The plan was unconstitutional and would have created a virtually “independent country” within the Marshall Islands’ borders, she said. The new Chinese investor-backed zone would also have occupied a geographically sensitive spot just 200 kilometers of open water away from Kwajalein Atoll, where the U.S. Army runs facilities that test intercontinental ballistic missiles and track foreign rocket launches.

But when President Heine argued against the draft law, she became a target herself. In November 2018, pro-RASAR politicians backed by Yan and Zhou pushed a no-confidence motion to remove her from power. She survived by one vote.

Even then, the president said she had no idea who this influential duo really were. Although they seemed to be Chinese, they carried Marshall Islands passports, which  gave them visa free access to the United States. Nobody seemed to know how they had obtained them.

“We looked and looked and we couldn’t find when and how they got [the passports],” Heine said. “We didn’t know what their connections were or if they had any connections with the Chinese government. But of course we were suspicious.”

The plan came to an abrupt end in November 2020, when Yan and Zhou were arrested in Thailand on a U.S. warrant. After being extradited to face trial in New York, they pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to bribe Marshallese officials.

Both were sentenced earlier this year. Zhou was deported to the Marshall Islands shortly after her sentencing, while Yan is due for release this November.

But although the federal case led to a brief burst of media attention, it left key questions unanswered.

Who really were Yan and Zhou? Who helped them in their audacious scheme? Were they simply crooks? Or were they also working to advance the interests of the Chinese government?

OCCRP spent nearly a year trying to find answers, conducting interviews around the world and poring through thousands of pages of documents. What reporters uncovered was a story more bizarre — and with far broader implications — than first expected.

As it turns out, Yan and Zhou were able to carry out their plans thanks to an earlier, successful ploy to buy high-level influence at the United Nations in New York.

In just a couple of years, the pair went from hawking scam miracle water to rubbing shoulders with world leaders and diplomatic grandees in Manhattan.

They gained access to the U.N. after paying over $1 million to diplomats and fixers. Among those who helped them were staff of the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, an alleged Chinese agent, and a disgraced ambassador then already under investigation by the FBI in a separate case.

The couple also hijacked a charity affiliated with the United Nations and turned it into a base for Chinese businesspeople and scammers who wanted to appear associated with the global body. Ensconced in a flashy office on Manhattan’s Third Avenue, the duo and their associates met with officials and even heads of state from at least 17 countries.

Reporters also found that, by the time their schemes culminated in the Marshall Islands plan, the couple was also openly promoting Chinese interests in the increasingly contested Pacific.

Eryn Schornick, a Washington, DC-based transnational financial crime expert, said Yan and Zhou are part of what appears to be a growing trend of Chinese criminals and scammers who seek to associate themselves with the U.N. and the NGOs that surround it.

On one level, these figures attempt to use the body’s legitimacy to promote themselves and their business ventures, she said. But they are often backed by a range of other powerful interests, including those with apparent links to the Chinese state and organized crime.

“Some of those fronting these types of schemes are bumbling fraudsters, but behind them are all types of powerful people and institutions who are benefitting from their connections,” Schornick said.

Yan and Zhou did not respond to reporters’ questions.

‘A Good Man’

As Yan stood for sentencing at a U.S. federal courthouse in mid-May, his defense team attempted to paint the portly, fifty-something convict in a sympathetic light.

Born into a poor family in China’s eastern Anhui province, Yan had been given up as a baby to a family of beggars, his lawyers told the Southern District Court of New York.

A harsh winter killed both Yan’s adoptive parents when he was 10, forcing him to scrounge out a life on the streets before he finally returned to his biological family.

Later proving himself a gifted student, he began a successful career as a business consultant with an interest in international philanthropy. Yan’s lawyers described his Marshall Islands bribery scheme as a slip-up in an otherwise spotless life.

“For Cary, charity and giving back is a deeply felt obligation. It’s a fundamental part of who he is,” said one of his lawyers, Jonathan Bolz.

But there was a lot about Yan’s background — including a history of fraud back in China — that went unmentioned by either side during his trial. (Prosecutors at the Southern District of New York turned down OCCRP’s requests for comment).

Reporters found that Yan’s journey to the U.S. courtroom began in China a decade earlier, with a business based on the sale of a purported miracle water cure that a Chinese court later found to be fraudulent.

Marketing material from Yan’s company describes the story as starting at a potassium salt mine owned by his family in China’s central Hubei province. As the story goes, a mishap one day in 2011 unleashed torrents of hot, briny water from the depths of the earth into the surrounding fields. After a local cowherd was supposedly cured of lupus after floating in the floodwaters, Yan and his brother began selling the liquid as a healing medicine under names including SSG Mineral Water and Genesis Life Raw Water.

But this $150-a-bottle miracle water was in fact a multi-level marketing scam. Promising investors that they could resell the water for a profit, the brothers defrauded nearly 20,000 victims out of more than $18 million, the Chinese court eventually found.

Yan’s brother was arrested in 2020 and sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the scheme. Yan, however, had already moved abroad and beyond the reach of Chinese law enforcement.

His American journey had begun at least six years earlier in the home of all things New Age: California.

‘Abusing the NASA Name’

Yan arrived in Silicon Valley looking to hype the product internationally. There, he met Zhou, who had first come to the U.S. as a student and was employed at a company working on a quixotic bid to build high-speed rail in the state.

The pair soon struck up a romance, according to former colleagues who worked with them in the U.S. Elegant and more than a decade Yan’s junior, Zhou also spoke fluent English. She soon became her partner’s international right hand.

In April 2014, the couple opened a spa in a strip mall in Santa Clara. Known as Immortal Float Center, the facility’s centerpiece was a treatment that combined Yan’s Chinese miracle water with spells inside a sensory deprivation tank dubbed the Immortal Digital Life Cube. The resulting effect was marketed as being “like the amniotic fluid of the uterus, flowing around the human body and regulating… its organs and systems.”

But Yan was ambitious, and a suburban business next to a coin-operated laundry was not enough. To give his healing water more cachet, Yan sought to attach it to NASA, with its world-renowned scientific credentials.

He did this with the help of Wing Kan Nip, a Malaysia-born entrepreneur who worked on the same rail project as Zhou. Nip shared documents and recollections of his time with the couple after being contacted by reporters.

At the time, Nip had his own alternative medical business at a rented space at the NASA Ames Research Center in nearby Mountain View. Its centerpiece was a device called a  “quantum resonance spectrometer,” which purported to measure “frequencies” given off by people or materials.

Nip said Yan asked him to use his device to test the water, and issue a report explaining its miraculous properties. Marketing materials obtained by reporters show that the NASA brand soon became key to selling the bogus product. Bottles of the water also carried labeling that implied they were manufactured at the NASA research park.

Nip said he had noticed that Yan and Zhou were “abusing the NASA name” not only in the U.S., but also in China, where he told investors that his product had been endorsed by the space agency.

“I think his direction was trying to sell this product at a very high price, like a pyramid scheme,” Nip said. Nonetheless, he stuck with Yan and Zhou for another three years until they finally had a falling out.

NASA officials confirmed the use of the NASA logo for commercial products is a trademark violation, and said that they had been unaware of the unauthorized use.

“NASA has no relationships with SSG Mineral Life Water in any capacity. NASA has not authorized the use of NASA logo, name, or emblem in any manner,” the agency said in an emailed response to questions.

‘An Incredible Amount of Fraud’

Yan and Zhou soon set their sights on building connections at the United Nations.

In early 2015, Nip was tasked with making this happen, he told OCCRP. His first point of contact was a New York-based businessman, Fan “Frank” Liu.

Nowadays, Liu is under indictment in New York’s Eastern District for allegedly working on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security to harass dissidents in the United States. But back in 2015, he was simply known as a Chinese community leader and charity operator who, according to media coverage from the time, was a fixture on the diplomatic cocktail circuit that surrounds the U.N.’s Manhattan headquarters.

Liu did not respond to questions from OCCRP.

Emails shared by Nip with reporters show that Liu and a close business associate, Jeanmarie Nicole Edwards, helped get Yan access to U.N. events and officials.

Yan was even able to get photos taken of himself alongside Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary General at the time, in return for payment. This effort was only the first of a series of photo-ops with U.N. grandees that Yan arranged with the help of paid fixers in an effort to raise his stature.

According to emails from Nip, the Ban photos were made possible thanks to an introduction Liu and Edwards provided with the office of the president of the U.N. General Assembly, a position then held by controversial Ugandan politician Sam Kutesa.

Based on this introduction, Yan and Zhou’s associate Nip traveled to San Francisco to meet Kutesa’s spokesman Jean-Victor Nkolo in mid-2015, the emails show. The spokesman promised Nip he could broker a meeting with his boss and other U.N. figures for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments, according to an email Nip sent to Zhou soon afterwards.

After agreeing to the deal, Yan, Zhou, and an entourage traveled to New York. On June 29, 2015, they had a meeting and lunch with Kutesa during a high-level U.N. meeting on climate change. The following day, Kutesa’s staffers helped Yan get a rushed series of photos with Ban on the sidelines of an art event in which the bemused-looking former secretary-general can be seen holding a box of Yan and Zhou’s miracle water.

Kutesa’s spokesman, Nkolo, appeared to be proud of his work.

“Absolutely remarkable,” Nkolo wrote soon afterwards in an email with the photos attached. “That’s why one always need[s] a top professional photographer to beautifully capture memorable moments that should not be missed. Priceless.”

In response to questions from OCCRP, the U.N. Secretary-General’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said that his office had become aware of Yan and Zhou’s activities during the course of a broader internal investigation, the contents of which he did not share with reporters. He confirmed the probe found that Yan and Zhou had indeed paid for their mid-2015 U.N. meetings, but that “none of these payments came through United Nations accounts.”

The U.N. investigation found that Yan and Zhou used proxies to send at least $150,000 from China disguised as “tuition fees” into a “shadow account” account run by Ugandan diplomats, Dujarric said. Nkolo resigned from the U.N. before the probe was concluded, he added.

Former Secretary General Ban “had no knowledge whatsoever of Mr. Nkolo’s activities,” and did not know that someone had paid to have a photo taken with him, Dujarric said. He added that Ban had since appointed a task force “to promote transparency and accountability in the functioning of the President of the General Assembly.” A report on its findings was presented to the assembly in March 2016.

The associate of Liu who helped broker the deal, Edwards, told OCCRP that Liu received money as part of the arrangement but said she did not know how much. She said she was never involved in anything “illegal” during her work for Liu, which she described as consultancy.

Nkolo and Kutesa did not respond to reporters’ questions.

The incident comes as no surprise to Michael Jacobson, chairman of the Montessori Model U.N., a New York-based non-profit that teaches students about global conflict resolution. Jacobson hosted Yan and his retinue at one Model U.N. conference and accepted a donation from the Chinese businessman. He later regretted it, he told OCCRP.

In an interview, Jacobson described seeing a steady stream of questionable Chinese businessmen who wanted photos and other proof of their closeness to the U.N. The global body’s headquarters is a “watering hole for an incredible amount of fraud,” he said.

“The Chinese refer to the General Assembly as the ‘Golden Hall’,” he said. “If you’re photographed at the U.N. … you’re perceived to be a step above the average Chinese businessman.”

Jacobson failed to do his own due diligence on Yan and his associates, he said, because they were introduced to him by a trusted middleman, who would soon — thanks to another case — become a public face of U.N. corruption.

That man was Francis Lorenzo, an ambassador from the Dominican Republic to the U.N.

‘What the Heck is Going on Here?’

Yan and Zhou first engaged Lorenzo in mid-2015, according to internal emails and interviews with people familiar with the arrangement. They quickly came to rely on the Dominican’s network to achieve ever greater levels of U.N. access.

But in October 2015, within months of getting into business with the Chinese couple, Lorenzo was charged as part of a separate high-level U.S. probe.

The scheme, described in media at the time as the U.N.’s worst financial scandal in decades, involved over $1.3 million in bribes paid by a Macau casino billionaire to Kutesa’s predecessor as General Assembly president, Antigua’s John W. Ashe.

Lorenzo eventually pleaded guilty to bribery and money laundering, but did not serve a prison sentence.

Despite being caught up in a very public corruption case, he remained an influential figure who was able to shepherd Yan and Zhou through the U.N., reporters found.

This was possible in part because he was well-liked in the diplomatic community, explained Carlos Garcia, a former El Salvadoran permanent representative to the U.N., who worked for Lorenzo in his dealings with Yan and Zhou.

“He made a mistake, obviously,” Garcia said, summing up the attitude of many in the U.N. “But that doesn’t mean that he’s not a human being, a good person, too.”

Lorenzo was still able to freely walk the halls of the institution at that time, and only lost his U.N. ID several years later, when it expired in August 2018, U.N. spokesman Dujarric confirmed in response to reporters’ questions.

Meanwhile, interviews and documents show that Lorenzo’s help to Yan and Zhou at the U.N. was facilitated by repurposing the same pay-for-play network he had used in the previous scheme to bribe Ashe. This included a staff of at least three employees who worked on tasks like web administration and event management.

Among the services he delivered was at least one more photo-op for Yan with Secretary-General Ban. But what Yan and Zhou really wanted was a more formal association with the U.N., according to interviews and emails obtained by reporters. To this end, they planned to create a non-profit organization that would then join the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), one of the global body’s six main organs.

Emails from Yan and Zhou’s network show the group discussed giving the Dominican diplomat a $300,000 “initial fund” to set up a non-profit group.

That proved more challenging than expected, because registering an “intergovernmental organization” required support from at least three governments, said Garcia, Lorenzo’s employee at the time. It could also take years for any new organization to get ECOSOC accreditation, he added.

So Lorenzo hit on an ingenious solution. They would simply take over an NGO that had already been given the green light.

That’s when he approached Monica Westin, the Swedish-born founder of World of Hope International. This New York-based charity — which had ECOSOC accreditation — had long funded educational programs in West Africa. Westin, by then in her 70s, was worried about the organization’s future.

“[Lorenzo] contacted me and he said, ‘I have a very good opportunity for you… I want you to change your [charity’s] name,’” she recalled. “And then you will get all the help you will need for your organization in Ghana. You’re getting old. And if something happens to you, you will be taken care of.’”

At Lorenzo’s urging, Westin said she signed a memorandum of understanding that essentially turned over the organization to Yan. The charity was renamed the World Organization of Governance and Competitiveness (WOGC), complete with a logo that evoked the U.N. brand.

U.S. prosecutors would later reveal that Yan had paid Lorenzo $1 million to facilitate the takeover. Westin, however, said she received less than $10,000 of that amount. Through a lawyer, Lorenzo declined to respond to questions for this story.

With a growing staff, WOGC set up its headquarters in a glass-walled office tower in Midtown Manhattan, a short walk from the U.N. building. The organization billed itself as a charity geared towards achieving the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. Its buzzword-heavy website featured pledges to reduce poverty by promoting public-private partnerships.

A procession of politicians, staffers, and U.N. diplomats from countries all over the world, including Mauritania, Maldives, El Salvador, and Bangladesh, came by the office. A typical visit involved formal-looking meetings around a conference table with views of the Midtown skyline, and group photoshoots in front of a flag-festooned wall, according to a cache of internal photos obtained by reporters. One delegation, from the U.N. mission for Sierra Leone, was gifted an oversized check for $50,000 during one 2017 visit in order to help the country recover from flooding. (The mission did not respond to questions.)

Despite its grandeur, some visitors found the office and its inhabitants deeply strange.

Christian Batres, a web developer who built sites for Lorenzo’s Chinese clients, said something seemed off with the organization and its leader, Yan.

“I actually went through a few meetings where I realized, you know, like, the guy took off his shoes and started picking his toes,” Batres said. ‘And I was just like, you know, this is a meeting with ministers. And the whole table was like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’”

‘Lots of Gold’

The ECOSOC accreditation obtained by Yan and Zhou’s organization allowed it to organize a succession of U.N. events, starting with a glitzy launch in September 2016 during the meeting of the 71st Session of the General Assembly. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was the keynote speaker, and actor-cum-crooner Robert Davi was the main entertainment. (Bangladesh’s U.N. mission and Davi did not respond to questions.)

A pattern was soon set.

With Lorenzo’s extensive contact book, WOGC reached out to cash-strapped diplomatic missions from small and underdeveloped states to sponsor a series of events at the U.N., Garcia said. Yan and a procession of Chinese backers would cover the costs, using the meetings to collect even more photos and videos of themselves in the body’s rarefied settings.

Two former WOGC employees, who asked to remain anonymous over security concerns, said Yan solicited payments from other Chinese businessmen so that they could also appear to have U.N. backing.

The whole scheme was “some dirty businessmen doing dirty business in China,” said one former employee involved with WOGC’s operations in New York. “They told Chinese people to lend money to them because ‘I’m from the United Nations,’” the former employee said.

Once he was in the door, Yan used his U.N. foothold to promote a new range of schemes, including at least three separate cryptocurrency scams that Chinese authorities would later find defrauded investors of at least $130 million.

To do this, Yan and Zhou established at least two other organizations that they falsely claimed to be linked to the U.N. Along with a now-convicted Chinese fraudster named Charles Lu and his entourage, they used their three organizations to help market their digital assets as safe investments.

Under the auspices of WOGC and one of the newer fraudulent organizations, Yan’s network convinced Suriname’s U.N. mission to host a “high-level meeting” on “Sustainable Tourism, Trade and Global Digital Assets” in the General Assembly hall on January 17, 2017.

A video of the event, which remains online on a U.N. website, shows Lu and other Chinese associates delivering speeches through live translators about the transformative power of blockchain technology, alongside Lorenzo’s employee, Garcia.

The event started with an extra bit of trickery: a supposed video address from U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. In fact, Guterres was not speaking to participants at all –– the organizers had simply downloaded a previously-recorded video clip.

“The organizers used a generic, publicly available New Year’s Message from the Secretary-General without our prior knowledge,” said Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman.

Suriname’s U.N. mission did not respond to questions.

Documents and photos obtained by OCCRP show Yan and Zhou coupled their New York-based activities with travel to destinations in Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands.

The group sometimes impressed visitors with a visit to their New York office before follow-up meetings were held abroad.

“I remember gold, lots of gold,” said Tessie Lambourne, the leader of the opposition in the Pacific nation of Kiribati, who visited the office in September 2017 when she was still in the country’s cabinet.

Two months later, Yan, Zhou and their entourage were in Kiribati, where they were warmly greeted by President Taneti Maamau and ministers. WOGC donated $10,000 for an event to promote locally-made clothing, Lambourne said.

They walked away having secured i-Kiribati financial licenses for four companies whose names hinted at greater ambitions: World Digital Central Bank, World Digital Stock Exchange, World Digital Lottery Group, and World Digital Finance International Holding Group.

It was all part of the set-up for the plan to build the special economic zone in the Marshall Islands.

‘A Big Red Flag’

Arriving in the country’s capital of Majuro in 2017, the pair found a country where resentment still festers over the legacy of the United States’ nuclear testing.

Rongelap Atoll, the proposed site of their economic zone, was poisoned in a particularly notorious test, known as Castle Bravo, in 1954.

The detonation of the first deliverable hydrogen bomb on the neighboring Bikini Atoll was supposed to produce an explosion equivalent to five or six million tons of TNT. But scientists miscalculated, and the bomb ended up being roughly 1,000 more times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. As radioactive ash fell onto Rongelap, some curious villagers played with and even ate the strange, snow-like substance.

The special economic zone was billed as a way to finally clean up the radiation and enable the return of the thousands of displaced Rongelapese.

Kenneth Kedi, the speaker of Marshall Islands’ parliament, told OCCRP that he supported the plan because he believed the United States had not done enough to fix the damage.

The Chinese visitors’ proposals seemed outlandish, but he was reassured because they seemed to have the U.N.’s blessing, he said. “That was enough for me to say, ‘Wow, good, bring them over,’” Kedi said. “They must be a very good organization to be registered with the United Nations.”

By 2018, however, Kedi started seeing signs that Yan and Zhou were pushing a pro-Chinese geopolitical agenda.

His first awakening came when he was flown to Hong Kong in April 2018 for a “preparatory launch meeting” for RASAR. Held in the city’s AsiaWorld-Expo convention center, the event was preceded by a Chinese-language publicity blitz that included a glossy cover story in an official Communist Party-run magazine, Top China.

With a bilingual cast of female presenters and dazzling on-screen graphics, the meeting featured special guests from the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, El Salvador, and Honduras. Also in attendance were many of the Chinese crypto scammers who had been involved in Yan and Zhou’s activities at the UN.

Kedi said he was taken aback when he was handed the text of a speech to deliver at the event, which appeared to back Beijing’s claim that it was the sole legal government for all of China including Taiwan. The Marshall Islands is one of just over a dozen countries worldwide that diplomatically recognizes Taiwan, and Kedi said he refused to contradict that.

“They wanted me to talk about the ‘One China’ policy,” he said. “That was a big red flag right there.”

Kedi said he further soured the following year, when Zhou asked him to put his name on a letter, addressed to China’s foreign ministry, reassuring them that the autonomous zone was going ahead.

Endgame

Westin, the founder of the New York charity Yan and Zhou had taken over, was at the center of the case that brought down the pair’s entire operation.

Westin said she was approached by the FBI in April 2019 and shared evidence that Lorenzo had helped Yan and Zhou take over her charity. Federal agents were able to build their case under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because they found evidence that the U.S.-based charity was used to facilitate the bribery of Marshallese officials.

“It’s no justice, because I could not raise any funds in the U.S. and my name was smeared because of this,” she said. The takeover finished off much of her charity’s work with children and communities in West Africa and left her with a smaller, financially strapped organization.

Among the questions from reporters that federal prosecutors declined to answer was  whether they had pursued a wider investigation into Yan and Zhou network’s activities at the UN.

There are loose ends to the case in the Marshall Islands too.

The U.S. government has not publicized the identities of most of the local officials who were offered bribes, although court filings make it clear they included about half a dozen members of parliament and other senior officials. The State Department declined to comment.

And even though the Marshall Islands government says it does not know exactly how Yan and Zhou got their citizenship in the first place, the pair likely have nowhere else to go.

While Yan will remain in U.S. federal prison until near the end of this year, Zhou has already been released and deported to the Marshall Islands. She arrived in the capital, Majuro, on April 20 on a United Airlines flight wearing a bright red tracksuit, escorted off the plane by what appeared to be U.S. officials.

Heine, the former Marshall Islands president, said she is worried about what Yan and Zhou may do next in her lightly populated Pacific nation.

“They can get into politics, because they’re citizens of the Marshall Islands,” said Heine. “If they bring the money to buy elections and get selected people in power, they can easily sway or direct the government the way they want. So that’s scary to me.”

Additional reporting by Dan McGarry, Bernadette Carreon, Rimon Rimon, Giff Johnson (Marshall Islands Journal), Hilary Hosia (Marshall Islands Journal), Indunil Usgoda Arachchi, Beauregard Tromp, and Chikezie Omeje.

At the first sound of gunfire from the approaching vehicles, Falmata* and the rest of her village scattered into the bush behind their homes – they knew what was coming.

The Nigerian military had destroyed Bula Ali village three times before, she recalled.

 

This time, the patrol arrived on a December morning in 2021 and began shooting. The uniformed soldiers then dismounted, and while some torched houses and stores of food, others rounded up livestock and loaded them onto their vehicles.

 

According to Falmata, eight civilians died that day, including two children, aged 10 and 15, alongside their mother, Bintu. An elderly man, Ba Modu, was also killed – too frail to run, he died when his home was set on fire while he was still inside.

 

• Key findings: Evidence of violations committed by the Nigerian military

• Satellite imagery and testimonies suggest routine violations of international humanitarian law
• Civilians and villages targeted in counter-insurgency operations
• Hundreds of villages destroyed since 2010
• Villagers forcibly relocated to displaced persons camps 
• Indiscriminate and disproportionate airstrikes launched on villages
• Military restrictions compromise humanitarian principles of neutrality  

Bula Ali is no anomaly. In the 13-year war against jihadist groups in the northeast – collectively referred to as Boko Haram – the Nigerian military routinely launches what it terms “clearance” operations against communities it describes as insurgent strongholds. Entire villages are set alight, crops and livestock destroyed, and inhabitants scattered.

 

During a year-long investigation, The New Humanitarian and VICE News gathered satellite imagery, photographs, and videos – as well as dozens of testimonies from local and international aid workers, military experts, witnesses, and soldiers – that all support allegations of international humanitarian law (IHL) violations by the military. Some alleged violations occurred as recently as May this year. 

 

HumAngle, a news outlet covering conflict and humanitarian issues in Africa, estimated that more than 200 villages had been destroyed since 2010 in the northern Lake Chad region alone.

 

Reporting and satellite imagery analysis from The New Humanitarian and VICE News, however, indicates that the total number of villages destroyed by a combination of the Nigerian military, local Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) militia, and foreign military units deployed as part of a regional Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) that includes Chad, Cameroon, and Niger could stretch well into the hundreds. 

 

“The soldiers think everyone living in the villages are Boko Haram, but there’s no Boko Haram staying in Bula Ali,” Falmata told The New Humanitarian and VICE News late last year in one of a series of interviews with survivors, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. “We’re just caught in the middle.” 

 

According to UN figures, the counter-insurgency war has directly and indirectly killed 350,000 people and uprooted 2.5 million more – 1.8 million of them in the northeastern state of Borno, the epicentre of the conflict.

 

It has also targeted a region in Nigeria where aid agencies are currently running a $1.3 billion humanitarian operation to reach 8.3 million people in need. 

 

“There have always been rumours of atrocities, but we have never been granted the type of access [by the army] to check, let alone provide humanitarian assistance to people trapped behind the lines,” said Fred Eno, spokesperson for Matthias Schmale, the top UN official in Nigeria. “That’s why we need the international community to demand a thorough investigation.” 

 

Many villagers interviewed by The New Humanitarian and VICE News said they were forced from their homes in clearance operations by the military, which failed to distinguish between civilians and jihadists who operate in the area.

 

Falmata, and many of the other villagers, are now homeless, stuck in a badly overcrowded camp for displaced people in Bama, the nearest town. Their once-productive farms abandoned, they are dependent on humanitarian aid.

 

“When the soldiers come, they don’t ask questions, they don’t listen. They just shoot and burn houses,” said Yusuf from Abbaram village. He also spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals from the military.

 

The new findings add to a growing body of evidence – including earlier work by Reuters, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch – which suggests rights violations by the Nigerian military are both ongoing and systematic. 

 

Such violations include the use of disproportionate force in airstrikes that used unguided munitions on villages, as well as the destruction of civilian food stocks, according to villagers and analysts. 

 

Wounded combatants have also likely been executed, in clear contravention of international humanitarian law.

 

The Nigerian military did not respond to questions at the time of publication, but have previously denied rights violations. 

 

“The Nigerian authorities must thoroughly and promptly investigate the findings of this report,” said Amnesty International’s acting Nigeria director, Isa Sanusi, referring to the findings of this investigation by The New Humanitarian and VICE News, which were shared with the group in advance of publication.

 

The alleged violations have persisted under two presidents – Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari. Newly elected President Bola Tinubu, who was sworn in on 29 May after winning disputed elections earlier this year, replaced his predecessors’ military commanders earlier this month – a normal practice for an incoming head of state. But he has provided few clues if the security policy will change.

 

“The best thing [Tinubu] can do is to address the issue of IHL violations frontally,” said Idayat Hassan – the director of the Abuja-based think tank Centre for Democracy and Development, and an expert on the conflict in the northeast. 

 

“Nigeria needs international support given the scale of its humanitarian problems, and these allegations damage that relationship.”

 

Beyond ‘the trench’

For years, there has been an uneasy relationship between humanitarian workers and the Nigerian military, which has challenged whether aid groups are truly neutral in the conflict – a core principle in humanitarian operations. 

 

In 2019, Nigerian authorities temporarily closed the offices of Mercy Corps and Action Against Hunger in the northeast, accusing the relief agencies of aiding Boko Haram – an allegation repeatedly brandished against the broader humanitarian system, and denied by the two groups. Nigeria’s anti-terrorism law criminalises any contact with Boko Haram. 

 

The killing of an aid worker by a soldier in the northeastern town of Damboa in November last year has had a further chilling effect.

 

“Humanitarians are just scared to get into any confrontation with the military,” an aid manager in the northeast told The New Humanitarian and VICE News. “What they do is very opaque. And we don’t have the bandwidth. We’re overwhelmed by the number of people we’re trying to help.”

 

A single, overcrowded camp in the centre of Bama shelters around 50,000 displaced people. Conditions are difficult; those with friends and relations in the town move out as soon as they can. 

 

Bama, 70 kilometres south of the regional capital, Maiduguri, is the second largest town in the northeast and close to Sambisa forest, a longstanding base of Boko Haram.

 

In 2014, Bama was captured by the jihadists, who massacred hundreds of townspeople before it was finally retaken by the Nigerian army a year later. 

 

As the town has slowly recovered, there has been an influx of people from the countryside, attracted by the aid agencies and the relief they provide, and the growing trading opportunities.

 

 

Bama is also where the 21 Armoured Brigade, led by Brigadier General Adewale Adekeye, is based. Like other garrison towns, a five-kilometre-deep security perimeter – known as “the trench” – surrounds Bama.

 

Hardly any aid agencies work outside “the trench” – the only exception being the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been granted special permission.

 

“They say that ‘if you’re outside the trench, you’re on your own… we won’t distinguish between you and the enemy’,” the director of one international NGO told The New Humanitarian and VICE News, recalling conversations with soldiers. The director spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The displaced people interviewed described a precarious existence in the countryside, trying to manage the violence and intimidation of both the jihadists and military. 

 

But whereas Boko Haram largely just tax people’s harvests at gunpoint and demand whatever they want, the military tends to regard every villager as a potential target. 

 

Asked by reporters who they fear most, the universal answer was “the military”.

 

Video: “The soldiers told us that if we didn’t move to Bama and stayed there, they would kill us all or take us away.”

 

“They are both wicked, but I can say the soldiers are worse,” said Abubakar from Anbara village, about 50 kilometres south of Bama. “They killed my two children [who had been returning from their farms]. Boko Haram took all my belongings, my cows, everything we made from farming, but the military killed my children.”

 

 

“They can easily kill you, destroy your house and everything that you have,” said Ali, who described how his village of Dauleri had been burnt almost every year over the past six years. 

 

All the villagers interviewed said the military should have known it was attacking farmers, not jihadists.

 

“Nobody challenged the army when they came – nobody shot at them,” said Fatima, from Bula Chinguwa, 45 kilometres from Bama. “If Boko Haram had really been there, there would have been a fight.”

 

‘This is the field’

Nigeria, with a population of 220 million, is a major market and Western partner in the battle against jihadist expansion in Sahelian West Africa. 

 

Once a mainstay of UN and regional peacekeeping operations, the reputation of the Nigerian military – both internationally and domestically – has crumbled over the course of the northeastern war. 

 

Not only has the military’s professionalism been questioned, but it is also accused of being institutionally corrupt, overly politicised, and hamstrung by turf wars.

 

It also has a long history of alleged human rights violations. 

 

“In every single theatre the military operates in, they burn – it’s just what they do.”

 

In the northeast, it has repeatedly been accused of extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, detentions without trial and, most recently, conducting forced abortions on women made pregnant by the insurgents, as well as the targeted killing of male children.  

A special panel of the National Human Rights Commission was launched in February this year to investigate a Reuters report in December 2022 on forced abortions. But the government-funded commission does not have a track record of holding powerful institutions like the military to account.

 

“There have been several panels investigating allegations of violations by Nigeria’s military and other security agents, but there has been no meaningful accountability,” said Amnesty International’s Sanusi.

 

 “There are no innocent people left in the bush.”

 

The Nigerian military is not alone in struggling to distinguish between armed combatants and civilians in counter-insurgency operations. From Afghanistan to Iraq, even the most sophisticated of Western armies have been accused of serious breaches of IHL.

 

The provisions of IHL are part of the training for Nigerian officers. 

 

“But intellectually and consciously, they reject the concept,” said one humanitarian officer who interacts with the military high command in Maiduguri. “They say: ‘It’s good for the books and for academics, but this is the field’.”

 

Soldiers in Bama admit they are deeply distrustful of rural communities. 

 

“They are all Boko Haram,” noted a sergeant and four-year veteran of the area, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorised to speak about operations. “We set fire to their houses, and they rebuild. You cannot stay there if you are not Boko Haram; it means they have that way of thinking in them.” 

 

Failure to move to Bama is seen by the military as almost proof of allegiance to the jihadists. “When an attack is on, it’s their chance to find a way to come out. Those that don’t leave are with them,” said another corporal. “There are no innocent people left in the bush.”

Video: “People in our village have nothing to do with Boko Haram”

“Western governments don’t say it publicly, but they accept civilian casualties as collateral damage in their [counter-insurgency operations] around the world,” said the director of one international NGO, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the friction between the military and NGOs. “The Nigerian military doesn’t feel any pressure to do things differently.”

The Nigerian air force has also been accused of indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on villages and civilian locations that are in direct violation of the rules of war.

 

However, a scorched earth culture is deeply ingrained within the Nigerian military, according to a former soldier and now security expert who spoke to researchers. 

 

“There are no official orders. It’s more an attitude than a policy thing,” he noted, asking to remain anonymous so he could speak freely. “In every single theatre the military operates in, they burn – it’s just what they do.”

 

Video: Witness claims it was the Nigerian army that burnt down his village

Due to the remoteness of rural villages, and the lack of communications, non-combatant casualties have typically gone unreported.

 

The army also routinely reports that the majority of the alleged insurgents have been killed outright or managed to escape capture – language that suggests that wounded combatants are rarely captured alive.

 

Combatants in non-state armed groups like Boko Haram – incapacitated or otherwise incapable of fighting due to injuries – are legally protected under IHL as persons ‘hors de combat’.

 

A corporal, based in Bama, said soldiers are governed by a strict military code. But in reality – and especially for surrendering combatants – “if there are no phones or anything around, you just ‘clear’ that person”. 

 

No other soldiers, out of eight interviewed by The New Humanitarian, admitted to unlawful killings.

 

Losing ‘hearts and minds’

The original Boko Haram, Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād (JAS), was led by Abubakar Shekau. 

 

A split in 2016 saw the emergence of the so-called Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), which has developed into a far more potent – and politically savvy force – operating in northern Borno. 

 

In 2018, a string of isolated forward operating bases along the fringes of Lake Chad were being overrun by ISWAP, enabling the group to develop a supply route to neighbouring Niger. 

 

It was then that the military abandoned its tactic of maintaining such bases and launched a so-called “super camp” strategy, with troops concentrated in more easily defendable garrison towns. 

 

Now, it’s from towns like Bama that aid agencies access those in need.

 

Video: A witness speaks of Nigerian army shooting and killing people in his village

While critics argue that the strategy has abandoned the countryside and rural population to the jihadists, the military counters that it now mounts regular long-range patrols, often backed by air cover, to “dominate” the territory. 

 

A senior member of the CJTF militia in Bama – which often accompanies the military on operations as the local “eyes and ears” – explained what that can entail.

 

“There are two types of operations: You can go for a day or two and come back, or you can spend two to three weeks,” he said. “If it’s a day or two, our trucks carry the food and animals away [from the villages attacked] back to Bama.” 

 

“But if the target is ahead, you set the village on fire and move on. On these missions, we kill all the animals. If there are food items, burn it. If there’s a farm, we enter with our vehicles and scatter the farm, so hunger will make [the villagers] come to Bama.”

 

Since the split within the jihadist movement in 2021, the Nigerian government has welcomed the defection of former fighters – accompanied by family members and villagers under their control who fled with them. 

 

They undergo “screening” and a rudimentary “deradicalisation” in three reception centres in Maiduguri.

 

Separately, hundreds of other ex-insurgents have gone through a more formal and much older initiative known as Operation Safe Corridor. 

 

The military describes those sent to this programme as “low-risk” Boko Haram. But in reality, the majority of those enrolled are said not to be fighters – another indication of the military’s difficulty in distinguishing between civilians and combatants. 

 

Still, by inviting defectors into rehabilitation schemes that could allow them to eventually return safely to civilian life, the military has recognised the strategic value of disarming its adversaries by guile rather than slugging it out on the battlefield.

 

Nigeria’s war in the northeast is not only a military contest but also a political battle. 

 

Jihadist propaganda portrays the military as vicious killers, and promises “a better life” for Muslims who join them, noted another Nigerian analyst, who writes extensively on the conflict in the northeast and asked that his name not be used because of his continuing research. The challenge for the Nigerian state is to prove that is false, he added. 

 

Yet the rights violations and intimidation of the local population in the zones of military operations in the northeast runs counter to any “hearts and minds” goal – generally recognised as a key component of any counterinsurgency strategy.

 

A number of analysts have pointed to the need for security sector reform in Nigeria.

 

However, for Hassan, director of the Abuja-based think tank, “it’s less about training and much more about ending impunity”.

 

“When people are held to account – not just a few officers, but the topmost hierarchy – that’s what will deter IHL violations.”

 

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of survivors who feared retaliation from the Nigerian military and authorities. The names of those killed are real. Others interviewed by reporters spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of their work in Nigeria. 

 

Additional research and satellite imagery analysis by Josh Lyons.

The sex trade has long been part of the fabric of Peru, but the rapid expansion of one of the region’s most ruthless gangs has seen a surge in violence against sex workers as the group has exploited Venezuela’s migrant crisis to build a trafficking empire.

 

Tren de Aragua’s activities include kidnapping, drug smuggling, armed robbery, extortion, and human trafficking. Local branches in Peru have been seeking to push out competitors in the sex industry, replacing them with groups they control. 

 

“There have been successive waves of migration in the Peruvian prostitution industry. First it was Ecuadorians, then Colombians, and now Venezuelans,” said Angela Villón, the head of Miluska, a collective of sex workers in the Peruvian capital, Lima.

 

“The Venezuelans come with no respect for life,” she told The New Humanitarian. “Before, they might use a blade to cut off your hair or slash your clothes, but they wouldn’t kill you. That’s all changed now. The Venezuelans kill. They kill the women, but they also kill their bosses.”  

 

According to unofficial figures compiled by Villón, 70 of her co-workers were either murdered or disappeared in 2022. In the first four months of 2023, 18 more vanished, she said. According to UNAIDS, more than 10 sex workers were killed across Peru in the first six weeks of this year alone. The National Police of Peru (PNP) did not respond to The New Humanitarian’s requests for comments.

 

Emerging out of a local labour union working on a railway construction project in Venezuela’s Aragua state, Tren de Aragua’s ascent has to a large extent been built on the exploitation of Venezuelan women since the country’s economic implosion.

 

Led from its prison headquarters – complete with a gym, a swimming pool, a playground, a restaurant, and a nightclub – by Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero”, it has rapidly expanded since 2018 along the routes taken by Venezuelan migrants. It now operates in Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Panama. 

 

First, the group extended its operations by scouring beauty pageants for vulnerable girls to seduce into becoming jail escorts. Then, after taking control of the smuggling routes for migrants escaping Venezuela’s downfall, it expanded regionally by forcing vulnerable women into the sex trade by extortion or threatening their family members back home.

 

The surge in violence has driven the sex trade further underground in Peru, just as social conservatives opposed to even using the word “gender” in policy documents have gained control of the country’s Congress and several other public institutions, including the government-run human rights watchdog (Defensoría del Pueblo). This, women’s rights advocates say, is making it even harder to support victims of sex trafficking, let alone provide them with safe routes out of lives of exploitation.

 

“This issue is not allowed to be public,” Villón said. “That puts sex workers in an even greater position of vulnerability.” 

 

‘They even know where their children are’ 

Even in Latin America, Peru’s economy stands out for its informal sector, which employs between 70% and 80% of the working population. Of the many criminal activities, human trafficking is one of the most lucrative, generating profits of at least $1.3 billion a year, $700 million of which is based on sexual exploitation. Tren de Aragua reportedly makes around $275,000 a month from 10 sex worker rings in Lima alone.

 

According to the UN’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2022, up to 87% of reported victims of sexual exploitation in the region are women, and 11% are girls. They are also the target of physical violence from traffickers at a rate three times higher than men, the report says: 9% are victims of “extreme” violence, 44% of physical violence, and 26% of threats and psychological violence.  

 

“When they arrive, the victims realise that they are not getting what they were offered,” said Vanessa Soto, who works for the local nonprofit Promsex with victims of trafficking in the jungle region of Madre de Dios, where sex traffickers are mainly Peruvian.

“The gangs have them completely under their thumbs. They even know where their children are back in Venezuela.”

“The trafficker will pose as a friend or ally of the victim. [He]’ll be sympathetic and talk about how they can together get out of this hole,” she said. “The women are charged for absolutely everything, starting with their transport from home, their room, their clothes and many other things. Basically, they are told that they have a debt. They can earn money for every beer that a client consumes, but they will soon realise that their best way to earn money is sex.”  

 

Peru hosts the second highest number of Venezuelan migrants after Colombia: 1.5 million of the 7.1 million globally. Victims of sex trafficking in Peru include a disproportionately high number of Venezuelan migrants: In 2022, the PNP rescued 947 victims of human trafficking; 887 of them were women and 435 were Venezuelan. 

 

“[Venezuelan refugees] are especially vulnerable,” said Karina Jensen, a human trafficking specialist with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Lima. “They have no documents, are in Peru irregularly, and have no family or social network that can support them.

 

“At one point, [Tren de Aragua] were bringing dozens of women a day into the country, and they didn’t have anywhere for them to go. So, they started trying to move the Peruvian women out and charging them [fees to work in the streets they control].”  

 

Diana Mabel, a sex worker gunned down by two killers on a motorcycle in downtown Lima late last year, is believed to have been one victim of that trend, after she repeatedly refused to pay the criminals trying to extort her.   

 

The militarisation of Peru’s borders has only pushed more migrants into the hands of traffickers. Venezuelan women come to Peru hoping to find a better life, as rampant inflation, insecurity, food shortages, and the breakdown of the healthcare system plague their country. 

 

“But [the gangs] have them completely under their thumbs. They even know where their children are back in Venezuela,” Villón said. “They started kidnapping women. They put a revolver to [their] heads. They download the contacts from [their] phones and send them threatening messages.” 

 

These women face a life of hardship. They drop out of school and lose contact with families — in some cases cut off from their own children. They suffer health issues, ranging from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) to mental health problems. According to prosecutors, 4% of victims haven’t finished primary school, 11.2% haven’t started secondary school, and 16.9% haven’t finished secondary school.  

 

What aid groups are doing to help

Despite the efforts of some police officers, prosecutors, and judges, experts say the Peruvian state is failing to deliver on its commitments to tackle sex trafficking. And few victims who escape or are rescued receive the psychological care or support they need.

 

A new national strategy that aims to address some of these failures is being put in place for the next seven years with the help of the ILO.

 

Ricardo Valdés, a former deputy interior minister who now works with the nonprofit Capital Humano y Social (CHS), told The New Humanitarian that women who leave the sex trade can take up to five years to move on from the trauma and resume normal lives. While NGOs can support these women, they can’t replace Peruvian government agencies, according to Valdés. “The state is the only one that can generate sustainability,” he said.

“The data is not consistent, complete, or coherent. It is poor quality and relates to cases that are reported, not necessarily to the reality of what is going on. It makes it impossible to develop effective, targeted policies.”

Nevertheless, some NGOs are trying to fill gaps and help the Peruvian authorities: from Catholic Relief Services helping to prevent women from falling into the hands of traffickers, to Promsex’s work in Madre de Dios assisting victims to recover, to other efforts to improve the judiciary system and the capabilities of prosecutors to pursue such crimes.

 

Veeduria Mirada Ciudadana, a group founded with CHS, empowers citizens to monitor the authorities’ progress in tackling the problem, while the UN’s migration agency, IOM, is training border agents to identify trafficking victims and offer gender-focused healthcare.

 

Julio Rodríguez, a human trafficking specialist at the Lima office of the ILO, warns that one of the first policy challenges is to accurately identify sex trafficking, including statistically. 

 

“The data is not consistent, complete, or coherent,” Rodríguez said. “It is poor quality and relates to cases that are reported, not necessarily to the reality of what is going on. It makes it impossible to develop effective, targeted policies.” 

 

Valdés said the problem is rooted in Peru’s weak institutions, and noted that it has worsened in the last two years of political instability under the chaotic administration of Pedro Castillo, whose failed coup attempt left his vice president, Dina Boluarte, in power. Her administration has been condemned both domestically and internationally for committing human rights abuses against anti-government protesters.  

 

Official corruption and institutional incompetence means the traffickers know they’re unlikely to pay any penalty for their criminality. “Around four or six cases in 100 end in a conviction in Peru,” Valdés said. “There’s just too much impunity.”

 

Corruption, he added, compounds the issue, as gang members can simply pay off police officers to keep their operations going. “A business that has little risk and low costs is obviously going to work well,” Valdés said. “It’s sustainable.”  

 

Edited by Daniela Mohor, Tom Brady, and Andrew Gully.