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Sex Abuse Allegations Disgust Africans
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"The secretary-general of our camp once told me that if I did not make love to him or give him one of my seven girls aged between 22 years and 7 months, they would not supply us with food," Helen Kamara, 40, said at a refugee camp in Freetown, Sierra Leone. "I did not bother with him."
And Mamai Sesay, 26, called it "an open secret that there was nothing for nothing" at the Guinea refugee camp where she lived after fleeing fighting in Sierra Leone in 1991.
"A lot of girls made love to aid workers in charge of food distribution, but to be honest, some of the aid workers did not make it a condition," she said.
"If you ask some of the girls, they would say it is better to love and survive than to keep your pride and die of hunger," said Sesay, who left Guinea for home in 1997, but fled again later that year and is now living at a refugee camp near Monrovia.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and Save the Children, UK, published an interim report Tuesday claiming evidence of child sex abuse at camps in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Children told investigators that aid workers and some security forces extracted sexual favors in exchange for food and other services.
The allegations against 67 workers and 40 private aid groups, including UNHCR, could not be independently confirmed. But Save the Children, UK, and the United Nations (news - web sites) said the number of complaints left no doubt there was a serious problem of sexual exploitation.
"I know of cases here where those supplying us with food items make advances to women," Zainab Kamara, a 33-year-old trader from the northern town of Makeni who fled rebel fighting in 1999 and is now living at a camp in Freetown. "If they refuse, when the time comes for the supply of food items, you will be told that your name is not on the list," she said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) on Wednesday ordered an urgent investigation into the report. Two U.N. investigators from the Office of Internal Oversight, a pediatric expert on child abuse and staff from UNHCR's inspector general's office have been in the region for two weeks looking into the allegations.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers said a lack of funding and the lax enforcement of codes of conduct made it easy for predators to exploit children battered by years of war.
"And that is the responsibility of the international community ... I have already warned that if you underfund the UNHCR, you are really adding to poverty and miserable situations," Lubbers said Thursday in Kigali, Rwanda.
In Sierra Leone, Information Minister Cecil Blake called it a "shocking revelation" and pledged that anyone found guilty of sexually exploiting refugees would "face the full force of the law."
"Our women and children shouldn't have to offer themselves sexually and sell their bodies for things that are sent to us," said Mustafa Samah, a Sierra Leonean refugee in Monrovia. "But we as refugees don't have our own way."
Refugees at the Voice of America camp west of the Liberian capital, Monrovia, said victims kept silent out of shame and fear. Young men huddled together Thursday in small groups to share their views on the allegations.
"To be frank, no girl will easily admit to being affected because it is a shame here," said a woman from Sierra Leone as she fed her 2-month-old baby. She refused to give her name.
"But if you look at the need to survive during a civil war, you can conclude that a lot of girls were affected by the practice (news - Y! TV)," she said.
Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of West Africans have been displaced by war. Many fled armed groups such as Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, which raped, maimed and killed tens of thousands of civilians.
UNHCR and Save the Children say they have started taking steps to protect refugees, including dispatching more foreign personnel and increasing the number of women working in the camps.
Liberia was consumed by a seven-year civil war that ended in 1996; the war in Sierra Leone was only officially declared over last month.
Guinea was for years spared the violence that convulsed its two neighbors, but its reputation as a haven was shattered two years ago when fighting broke out along its borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone. The clashes have subsided, but a recent upsurge of fighting in Liberia has sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing again.