Girls Seized, Raped in Sierra Leone By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) - Musu Kamara laughs and smiles as she weaves a straw basket in a classroom full of chattering girls. Dressed in a navy blue uniform, she seems like any other teen-ager - apart from the letters ``RUF'' carved into her chest. Kamara, 19, was one of thousands of girls snatched from her home by Sierra Leone's feared Revolutionary United Front rebels and turned into sex slaves during eight years of civil war. Forced to carry heavy loads for the rebels by day, she was raped nearly every night. When she tried to escape, her captors beat her and carved their name into her chest with a razor blade. For Kamara, the nightmare ended last September, when, pregnant with her now 6-month-old daughter, she fled after eight months in captivity and, with the help of U.N. military observers, was eventually reunited with her mother. For many others, however, there is no end in sight. The rebels, who signed a peace accord with the government last July, reignited the conflict in May. Now, girls as young as 10 are again being abducted and raped, U.N. and aid workers say, and hundreds of others remain in rebel hands. Aminata Koroma, 18, sits stiffly, twisting a rag between her fingers at an Italian-run refuge for teen-age mothers in the capital, Freetown, as she recalls the terror of her capture. Rebels armed with guns and machetes broke down the door of her aunt's Freetown home in January 1999. They forced Koroma, her aunt and three cousins to strip naked, then poured kerosene around them and threatened to set them on fire, before marching them off at gunpoint to a jungle base. ``I was afraid all the time in the bush,'' says Koroma, tears streaming down her face. ``They killed people in front of me. They cut (off) people's hands. When there were babies crying, they cut off their head or swung the child against the wall.'' Koroma herself was beaten repeatedly and stabbed in the shoulder by the fighter who took her as his ``rebel wife.'' Her one comfort was a 7-year-old girl captured by the same man to cook and clean for him. ``I used to take care of her, do her hair,'' she says. But when Koroma escaped last August, she was forced to leave the girl behind. Exact figures are not available, but the New York-based Human Rights Watch says the raping of women and children during the war was systematic, organized and widespread - part of a rebel campaign of terror that also included maiming and mutilating thousands of people. More than 4,500 children under the age of 18 were reported missing from Freetown alone after the rebels invaded the capital in January 1999, and were later pushed back by a Nigerian-led West African intervention force. Of those, close to 60 percent were girls. Some were trained to fight, others became porters, but most are believed to have been captured for a combination of sex and domestic work. The girls also tended to be the last released by the rebels when the now aborted disarmament and demobilization campaign began, says Glenis Taylor, an assistant child protection officer for UNICEF. Those captured were often assigned to a particular rebel or attached themselves to one to avoid being repeatedly gang-raped, and were then called ``rebel wives.'' Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea, a result of the high infection rate found among rebels, Taylor says. Kamara still runs into the man who took her as his ``rebel wife'' in Freetown and is terrified he will come back for her one day. Now living with her mother, she attends classes at a Sierra Leonean-run arts and crafts program for war victims. But she is taunted by former friends and neighbors because of the 3-inch-high letters, carved just below her collar bone, which her blue-and-white checkered blouse cannot conceal. ``People tell me that I am rebel. Even the guy we stay with says he will let the soldiers come and kill me,'' Kamara says. ``But it was not our fault. I did not want to stay with them.'' Her abductors are likely to escape justice altogether. The July peace accord, which some U.N. and government officials hope can still be revived, included a blanket amnesty for war crimes. Justice, however, is not what is uppermost in the minds of many rape victims. At the Freetown refuge for teen-age mothers, where laughter rings out from a children's game and tiny shirts and booties flutter from a washing line, most of the girls just want to get on with their lives. ``I would like to get married, have children,'' says Agnes Bangura, 18, with a shy smile. But her face clouds as she gazes at her 4-month-old daughter, the product of repeated rapes over nine months in rebel camps. ``My heart is spoiled,'' she says.
