Sudan’s ‘lost girls’ fear repatriation after peace deal: UN official

NAIROBI, Feb 18 (AFP) — Thousands of young Sudanese girls are reluctant to return home to southern Sudan from refugee camps around Africa after last month’s landmark north-south peace deal for fear they will be sold into marriage, a senior UN official said Friday.

Once the peace agreement is signed, Sudanese refugees like these in Kenya’s Kakuma camp will be able to go home. (UNHCR).

Adolescent girls in at least two camps have told interviewers from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that they will not return unless they are given legal protection against being married off, the official said.

“Everybody talks about the lost boys of Sudan, what about the lost girls?” said Wendy Chamberlin, the UN’s deputy high commissioner for refugees, after visiting the Rhino camp in Uganda and the Kakuma camp in Kenya.

The well-known phrase “lost boys” refers to the thousands young Sudanese men who fled the country to avoid forced conscription into rebel and militia forces, many of died in the bush before reaching refugee camps.

Chamberlin, a former US ambassador to Pakistan and Laos, said she had been surprised by the intensity of fear displayed by the girls in her conversations with them during her visits earlier in the week.

“Something that struck me, almost like a slap across the face, was the number of times that young girls raised the issue of (whether) they be protected if they went home,” she told reporters here.

“They want assurances before they go back that there will be some legal protections so that they will not be married off early against their will,” Chamberlin said. “It is a major obstacle for these young girls.”

The January 9 peace deal between Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) ended Africa’s longest running civil war and has created high hopes that more than 560,000 registered refugees from southern Sudan will soon be able to return home from UN camps in seven neighboring African nations.

Chamberlin said UNHCR was working to begin large-scale voluntary repatriations once this year’s rainy season ends in September but stressed that much groundwork had to be laid first.

“No one is in a rush at this moment to return,” she said.

Refugees in the camps in Kenya and Uganda expressed deep concerns about the state of the infrastructure in southern Sudan, health and education facilities, santitation, food security and access to potable water, Chamberlin said.

But, she said she was most moved by the concerns of the girls, which she and UNHCR Kenya country director George Okoth-Obbo maintained were born out by statistics collected at the Kakuma camp in northern Kenya.

Unlike in other UNHCR camps, in Kakuma there is a disproportionately high number of young male refugees (26,933) between the ages of five and 25 compared to young females (13,791), according to UN statistics compiled late last month.

The figures for children of both sexes under the age of four are consistant are with normal human birth rates of about 51 percent female and 49 percent male as are the numbers for the population over the age of 26.

According to Chamberlin and Okoth-Obbo, the discrepancy among adolescents bears out refugee testimony that young girls from the camp are being sold into marriage back in Sudan to take advantage of high bridal prices there.

“They are being married off at high rates across the border to husbands in Sudan,” Chamberlin told AFP.

“These are young girl refugees raising this to me as one of their concerns in returning home,” Chamberlin said. “We have to take seriously these very compelling pleas to us.”

She said UNHCR and other agencies preparing the return of Sudanese refugees were raising the matter of legal protection for young girls with the former SPLA/M, which will run southern Sudan as a semi-autonomous region of the country for six years.