Somalis Refugees being Voilated!

[Che -Guevara]

I thought share this sad story.I hope Somalis start awekening up and fight their rights in and outside Somalia!

Rape stalks refugees in city camps

William Maclean

Nairobi, November 22: When Somali refugee Amina shut her legs and refused to submit to gangrape, one of her four attackers resolved matters by plunging a knife into her crotch.

 

The gangrape of the 19-year-old — 10 metres from the main UN refugee agency office in Nairobi — then proceeded. ‘‘He pushed me down and pulled up my dress. They were all going to rape me — but I refused to open my legs. I kept them together. So then he took his knife and sliced my thigh. ‘‘They started raping me. I passed out eventually.’’

 

Amina’s story is recorded in a Human Rights Watch report published on Thursday about the abuse, persecution and neglect of refugees in the Kenyan capital and the Ugandan capital Kampala.

 

The US-based organisation says thousands of refugees suffer mistreatment when they flee bad conditions in Kenyan and Ugandan refugee camps and settle in their capitals.

 

Abuse comes from governments hostile to their presence, from securitymen sent by home countries to crush exiled Opposition and from overburdened, underfunded aid workers, the group says.

 

It was not Amina’s first rape. She had been violated repeatedly in a refugee camp in northern Kenya after fleeing violence in Somalia in 1994 when she was only 12.

 

She was sent to Nairobi by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for treatment for tuberculosis and afterwards refused to return to the camp, preferring to sleep outside the UNHCR offices. It was there that the attack occurred in 2001.

 

According to a researcher who examined Amina, her knife wound stretched from the edge of her vagina to her knee.

 

Refugees from one of the world’s most turbulent regions often flee to relatively stable Kenya and Uganda where they are required by local law to stay in camps. Many of the refugees find conditions in camps so terrible — plagued by violence, food shortages and unsanitary facilities — that they try to settle in Nairobi and Kampala.

 

‘‘Once in the city, refugees encounter overburdened agencies with neither the resources nor the ability to help all of them,’’ the report said. ‘‘Others find something much worse: governmental hostility to their presence in urban areas, vulnerability to rape or other forms of physical attack, police abuse and harassment by agents from their countries of origin.’’

 

Kenya has 220,000 refugees in its camps and another 60,000 are believed to be in Nairobi. Uganda has about 200,000 refugees in camps and 50,000 living mostly illegally in Kampala. Both countries justify their limits on the refugees’ freedom of movement by saying they are a threat to national security.

 

But Mahret, an Eritrean woman, said she was raped and her house burned down in Uganda’s Nakivale Camp by Ethiopian refugees acting out of hostility towards her. ‘‘I decided I had to go to Kampala.’’ (Reuters)