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The personal security of refugees, particularly of women and children, is an essential element of international protection. . . . Assuring physical protection is often extremely difficult. Sometimes refugee populations live in remote areas . . . UNHCR has in recent years been faced with extremely difficult challenges where it has been called to assist populations living amidst conflict. Clearly a basic level of security is needed and should be provided for humanitarian action; but there are times when the office has had to act in its absence. As UNHCR and other organizations have shown, even during ongoing conflict, basic needs of children can be met through extraordinary and creative efforts.

Sierra Leonean refugee children in Guinea are among the most vulnerable children in the world. They have lived through an extremely brutal war-most have witnessed or suffered unspeakable atrocities including widespread killing, mutilation, and sexual abuse. The human rights abuses that drove these children into flight are only the first chapter of hardship for many Sierra Leoneans affected by the crisis. Even after traveling across an international border to seek refuge in Guinea, they remain vulnerable to hazardous labor exploitation, physical abuse, denial of education, sexual violence and exploitation, cross-border attacks, militarization of refugee camps, and recruitment as child soldiers.

Guinea is host to one of the largest refugee populations in the world, including more than 300,000 Sierra Leoneans, up to 65 percent of whom are estimated to be under age eighteen. Most of these children have been in Guinea since early 1998, when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels embarked upon a massive reign of terror after being ousted from power in Sierra Leone. Those who arrived in 1998 have largely settled in the more than sixty camps in the Gueckedou area of southeastern Guinea, which forms a peninsula-like territory stretching into eastern Sierra Leone. Their situation is characterized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as one of "care and maintenance" (i.e. normal operations), following the initial "emergency" phase from February to December 1998 when refugees poured into Guinea, sometimes at a rate of thousands per day. Although the parties to the Sierra Leonean conflict recently signed a peace accord, the rights of refugees, including children, must be protected as long as they remain in Guinea. Until true peace, security, and respect for human rights can be guaranteed in Sierra Leone, the refugee children are likely to remain at great risk in the refugee camps.

Children in all the refugee camps may face serious protection concerns at the hands of their caregivers including physical abuse, sexual abuse and exploitation, denial of food, hazardous labor exploitation, and denial of education. These concerns are particularly acute for children who have become separated from their parents during the war, commonly referred to as "separated children" and "unaccompanied minors," most of whom have been taken in by families whom one child described as "forced caretakers." (The term separated children refers to all children not being cared for by their parents. They generally live with foster families, either extended family members or families they did not know before the war. The term unaccompanied minors is more restrictive and includes only children in the care of unrelated adults. This report uses the broader term, separated children, which includes unaccompanied minors.) Some of these caregivers say that it is common practice for families to accept children in need into their homes. However, many cautioned that they should not be expected to treat these children as well as they treat their own.

While it is a positive development that these children are being cared for by families rather than in institutions, it is essential that their treatment be monitored. Through implementing partners, UNHCR has established a network of refugee social workers, which is supplemented by UNHCR protection and community services officers, for this purpose. However, social workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch were frequently shocked to learn that the separated children they were responsible for had suffered abuse. In fact, social workers have not even identified or registered the majority of separated children in the camps and, consequently, cannot be expected to monitor their care or intervene on the children's behalf. While these social workers are well-meaning, they lack training in international standards and UNHCR guidelines on refugee children, and how to identify and address child abuse and exploitation. Of the fifteen social workers in six camps interviewed by Human Rights Watch, none had received copies of UNHCR guidelines on refugee children and most did not even know that these guidelines existed.

In addition, Human Rights Watch documented sexual violence against girls in the camps, a problem that remains largely unaddressed. Neither UNHCR nor the Guinean government had made sufficient efforts to determine the scale of, prevent, or respond to incidents of sexual violence in the camps. Guinean authorities are not known to have brought any prosecutions for crimes of sexual violence against refugees before the Guinean courts. At the time of publication, more than a year after the refugees' arrival, one promising community-based program combating sexual and gender based violence was about to be launched.

Human Rights Watch also identified a serious problem of child prostitution in the camps, where girls as young as twelve said that they feel compelled to "play sex for money" in order to support themselves and, in some cases, their families. As with the problem of sexual violence, very little has been done by UNHCR to understand the problem of child prostitution in the camps in Guinea or to prevent it. In addition, little has been done to protect the human rights of girls forced into the practice, including their rights to education and reproductive health care.

Another concern, which Human Rights Watch has raised for more than one year, is that many refugee camps are located dangerously close to the Sierra Leonean border, in contravention of international standards and UNHCR policy. In 1999, UNHCR attempted to move some refugees in camps close to the border to safer locations, but the process has been slow and disorganized. Less than 10 percent of the more than 100,000 refugees near the border had been moved to safety as of July 1999. In the interim, these camps have been subjected to several cross-border attacks over the past year, resulting in killings and abduction of dozens of refugees and grave danger for refugee children.

Human Rights Watch also documented the presence of combatants in refugee camps, with large numbers of child soldiers in their ranks. The Kamajors, a Sierra Leonean government civil defense force, maintain a presence in at least two refugee camps, which they have used as a base for military activities. The presence of combatants with children in their ranks in the camps violates international standards mandating the civilian character of refugee camps and prohibiting the use of child soldiers. It is not clear whether armed groups have actively recruited children from the refugee camps. However, the potential for large-scale recruitment of child soldiers, depending on the turn of events in the Sierra Leonean civil war, has been real and was acknowledged to Human Rights Watch by a Kamajor commander.

Many of these protection concerns, particularly the various forms of hazardous labor exploitation, are directly linked to a lack of food security. Refugees and assistance workers in several camps told Human Rights Watch that they had not received food distributions for up to three months; that the distributions they received were inadequate; that some refugees were not able to register and, consequently, to receive any distributions; and that assistance did not always reach separated children and other vulnerable refugees (including the elderly, physically handicapped, and single-headed households); and UNHCR has failed to address these problems.

One alarming result of this is that many refugees, primarily those in camps close to the border, feel compelled to cross into nearby Sierra Leone in search of food to feed themselves and their families. Despite the obvious safety risks involved, caregivers frequently have frequently sent adolescents across the border to forage for food. Human Rights Watch interviewed one seventeen-year-old boy who was abducted by RUF rebels while searching for food in Sierra Leone. Several other children told Human Rights Watch that they encountered rebel soldiers, but managed to escape back to Guinea.

Despite the facts that these children have suffered enormously and that they remain extremely vulnerable, their plight has largely been ignored by the international community. UNHCR, the primary actor responsible for the assistance and protection of refugee children, has developed extensive policies and guidelines over the past several years aimed at ensuring respect for the rights of refugee children facing these difficulties. Nevertheless, there remain significant shortcomings in the implementation of these policies in refugee camps in Guinea.

Human Rights Watch visited Guinea in February and March 1999. Research focused on refugees in the Gueckedou area, where most Sierra Leonean refugees have lived for over one year. The researchers interviewed staff of UNHCR and its implementing partners in Gueckedou, Kissidugou, and Conakry and traveled to six refugee camps in the Gueckedou area: Boudou, Fangamadou, Koulomba, Kundou-Lengo-Bengo, Mangay, and Massakundou. In the refugee camps, they interviewed dozens of refugee teachers, social workers, and other community leaders as well as forty-nine refugee children: thirty-three girls and sixteen boys ranging in age from six to seventeen. Many of these interviews were conducted in Creole (Krio) with interpreters. Statements cited from these interviews have been translated into English. Most of these children had been separated from their parents during the conflict and are being cared for by other families. This report relates the testimony of these children, whose names have been changed to protect their privacy.

This was the second Human Rights Watch research mission to Guinea to investigate the rights of Sierra Leonean refugees within the past year. Human Rights Watch found that little had changed in intervening months and that the international community had continued to neglect this dire situation. Appeals by UNHCR to donor countries to deal with the refugee crisis in Guinea have largely gone unheeded, while nearly unlimited funds have been forthcoming for refugee crises in Europe.

UNHCR faces substantial political, financial, and logistical challenges in protecting the human rights of refugee children in Guinea. The focus of international attention on recent refugee crises in Europe, as well as "donor fatigue" with respect to African refugees, have served to limit resources available for Guinea. One manifestation of this has been a grossly insufficient number of staff present inside or near camps. UNHCR also faces severe logistical constraints in the Gueckedou area of Guinea, which houses more than sixty refugee camps spread out across two administrative zones. One of the most intractable constraints is the poor state of the unpaved roads, which often become impassable during Guinea's June to November rainy season, making it very difficult for aid workers to have access to many of the camps. In addition, the remote nature of Gueckedou has made it difficult for UNHCR to recruit qualified staff to move there.

However, the failure to adequately protect the rights of refugee children can only partially be attributed to a lack of resources. The international community has failed to identify vulnerable children; to monitor children for abuse and exploitation; to protect girls from sexual abuse and exploitation; to move the refugees to safe locations away from the border; to preserve the humanitarian character of the refugee camps; and to prevent refugee children from serving as child soldiers.

Children make up 52 percent of refugees worldwide, and 65 percent of the refugees in Guinea. UNHCR, other international agencies, and governments must make a sustained commitment to implement the programs and policies necessary to effectively protect and promote the rights of refugee children.