MOUCTAR BAH, ZIMMI- TWO Sierra Leonean women have complained that they were forced into providing sex to humanitarian aid workers in exchange for food.
”We finally agreed to ‘go with’ the people who were giving us food, we had no choice,” claimed Gloria Kanneh (38) and Fanta Kaisamba (29) who recently returned to Sierra Leone from Liberia, where they had fled as refugees from the civil war in their home country.
Speaking at a refugee transit camp in Zimmi in south-eastern Sierra Leone, the women complained they were subjected to threats and blackmail and had no other choice than to accept the sexual demands of some of the humanitarian aid workers.
The pair met up in 1992 when they were fleeing to Liberia at the height of the conflict in Sierra Leone. They became friends and realised that they could not go back to their former occupation as market traders.
They complained they were seriously mistreated during their stay at the Sinje II camp in western Liberia.
Gloria said she had had borne two children, and Fanta one, as a result of the unsolicited attentions of aid workers. ”I had no choice, either to accept or die,” she said.
”On several occasions, I was invited to take food with them. I refused for a long time for fear of looking like a tart in front of my compatriots.
”One day, one of the chiefs sent a guard to me to invite me to Voinjama, northern Liberia, to spend the weekend. I said I was sick. I learned afterwards that the chief was very angry with me and that I would be in trouble,” Gloria said.
But she admitted that the man finally had his way with her and she had his baby in 1996.
”He left Liberia when the child you can see over there, wearing a red T-shirt, was still unborn,” she said, pointing into the compound. The kid’s name is Willy.
Gloria said the man claimed he was off on a mission in Kenya and he would send for me to go there. But she said she had never heard from him since and had now been told he had been sent to an Arab country.
Gloria said she would not give the man’s name, ”because it is water under the bridge,” but added that another aid worker, whom she also refused to name, had made her pregnant in December, 1999, but that that baby died.
Last month, the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) admitted that numerous cases of sexual exploitation of young refugees by its workers had occurred in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Gloria and Fanta were not children, but they suffered during their exile and want to start life again in their home country, which underwent a terrible ten-year-long civil war.
They did not know each other before the conflict. But they ”went home together” and say nothing will come between them from now on. – AFP
