After a brutal war, the women of Sierra Leone are having to deal with their sexual abuse, writes Declan Walsh

The war is over in Sierra Leone, at least for now. Dazed and bloodied by a decade of savagery, a nation is struggling back to its feet: the rebels have handed in their guns, villagers are flooding home. But for thousands of sexually brutalised women, the battle has just begun.

The rebels of the Revolutionary United Front were notorious for hacking off limbs and abducting child soldiers during the war. But they also gang-raped women, many of whom were dragged back to bush bases to be skivvies and sex slaves. Some were held for years. They became known as the rebel wives.

Baindu still weeps softly when she recalls her hellish life with one of the rebels. It started in 1995, when the front attacked the eastern village of Jaweii. After burning and looting, the rebels rounded dozens of families into the village square.

"They stripped me naked and raped me in front of my husband," she says quietly. "They told him to laugh in front of the children or he would be shot." It didn't matter. They shot him anyway, and their three children.

Baindu was marched off to a bush clearing, where the captured women were parcelled out. She was taken by a man known only as Me Dirty Rebel, whom she can only describe as "a little boy - black, tall and very ugly". They were to live together for the next four years. Dirty Rebel and the other rebels would roam the countryside, murdering, raping and getting high on cocaine. Baindu would provide the sex. "I was not cooking, I was giving them sexual entertainment. Whenever they want it, I give it to them."

In 1999, Baindu escaped during a fight and made it to Kenema, a town where the International Rescue Committee offers help to victims of sex crimes. For months she could not even speak to another person; she also suffered from gonorrhoea, a debilitating sexually transmitted disease. She has been cured and received counselling, but she still has severe problems menstruating.

The International Rescue Committee has treated 500 other women in a programme that is expanding rapidly. "I don't know how organised [the rape] was, but it was certainly systematic," says Heidi Lehmann, the programme's director. "There was an intent to really rip apart the communities, and it worked."

With the war officially over since last month and elections looming in May, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah tells Baindu and other survivors to forgive and forget. But it's not easy. "Let God punish them for what they have done," she says. "There is no forgiveness."

Instead there may be justice, but not a lot. A UN-sponsored war-crimes tribunal, known as the Special Court, is being set up. It will prosecute the 30 people "most responsible" for the war atrocities. Foday Sankoh, the detained leader of the Revolutionary United Front, is tipped to top the list, but all sides, including the Sierra Leone army and the pro-government Civil Defence Forces militia, committed terrible abuses.

Separately, a truth and reconciliation commission is in the works, modelled loosely on the post- apartheid South African model. Perpetrators and victims will tell their stories, both to establish a record of the conflict and to heal the national trauma.

But if there will be truth, there will be no punishment. Under a 1999 peace deal, perpetrators such as Me Dirty Rebel will enjoy an amnesty from prosecution. It could be overruled by a court challenge, but that may take years.

So as the wheels of international justice turn, it is unlikely that any of the rank-and-file rapists - or murderers, thieves or diamond smugglers - will be caught in its cogs. Instead, the former combatants have received a 300,000 leones (€153) "re-insertion" payment to encourage them to hand in their weapons. According to President Kabbah and the international community, this is the price of peace.

But there are disturbing signs that the cycle of impunity has not yet been broken. Even since hostilities ended, aid workers and police have been reporting high levels of rape and abuse of children, some as young as two. Many of the perpetrators are former combatants.

Jitta, an 11-year-old girl, was raped recently near her house in Kenema. Her attacker was a 17-year-old called Aron, who used to fight for the Civil Defence Forces. He beat her face in. "I went home and cried for two days," she whispers. "I could not stop." By the time relatives got Jitta to a hospital, one eye had become so badly infected that doctors had to remove it.

Aron was arrested, but only after strenuous representations from the International Rescue Committee. He is now in jail but will probably be released soon. Sierra Leone has just 10 judges, two of them outside the capital, Freetown, in a country of about five million people.

Its police are afraid of confronting the former fighters, even though they have largely disarmed. The rule of law is tenuous, at best.

The disturbing rise in sex crimes does not surprise the magistrate of Kenema Court, Sam Margai. "The impunity of 10 years away from the law does not wash off overnight," says the judge, who was educated at University College Dublin.

But the ordeal of enslavement and sex is not over for many of the rebel wives. More than 47,000 soldiers have demobilised, but aid workers say many women are still with their "husbands". Some fear being killed if they try to leave; others are worried their families will reject them as "soiled goods".

Still others have had children with their captors or been forced to fight alongside them. They have formed bonds based more on dependency than on love.

And escape from the Revolutionary United Front does not mean escape from sexual exploitation. At night, the streets of Freetown are lined with prostitutes. Some are serving the sailors and unemployed soldiers in slum areas; others work in the relative glamour of bars and casinos frequented by UN peacekeepers and international aid workers. What the two groups have in common is wartime sex abuse.

"In some ways, life is not much different now than it was in the bush," says Heidi Zweick, who manages a programme run by Goal that aims to help the sex workers.

Pamela used to work in Government Wharf, a desperately filthy, crowded slum near the city docks. A tangle of alleyways is criss-crossed by lines of sewage and lined with shacks that serve as shops or cupboard-sized brothels. She was held by the front for four years. "Bad things" happened in the bush. "They told us that anybody who was against us deserved death. We were told to kill. My friend Fatma refused to open a pregnant woman's stomach and was shot," she says.

After the war, afraid to return home, Pamela ended up on the wharf. She sometimes met customers in the "cinema" - a rough shack with a television showing Nigerian pornography - then slept with them for as little as 5,000 leones (€2.50). There might be 10 or 15 in an evening. It was a bitter irony that many were former rebels. "They treat us rough. Sometimes they refuse to pay. They say that we betrayed them because we left them in the bush," she says.

Pamela recently reunited with her family after a long mediation process through Goal. But it is slow work: of the 300 sex workers in the programme, just 10 have gone home.

Freetown's other prostitutes rely on the world's biggest peacekeeping operation to make a living. The combination of 17,000 UN soldiers, thousands of aid workers and the world's poorest country has spawned a massive local industry.

Lines of expensive white four-wheel drives cruise along the beachfront at night. Further up the road, some expatriate bars seem to have more sex workers than customers.

But although some women have chosen prostitution, others have found themselves catapulted into it by war. Vivien, an outgoing, attractive 18-year-old, was a schoolgirl before the war, whenshe was taken captive by the Revolutionary United Front.

Now she lives with a Danish expatriate worker but still goes to the bars at night. She wants to earn enough to support her sister, perhaps go to Europe.

But it usually ends in disappointment. One time, a British soldier who had promised to bring her to England left without a word. She ended up aborting his child. "I don't want to do this life," says Vivien. "I would rather meet someone that loves me. But they just keep making promises."

It is difficult to rationalise the scale and viciousness of the crimes against women in Sierra Leone.

The rebels of the Revolutionary United Front started the war with some justifiable complaints - government corruption and mismanagement of resources, particularly diamonds.

Those were soon lost in the orgy of destruction and violence.

The Special Court is likely to explore whether the systematic rape and enslavement was organised or just a natural consequence.

It is not an African phenomenon - the wars in Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s are proof of that - but the political objectives of such savage treatment are difficult to discern.

One thing is certain: rape was common but largely unreported in Sierra Leone, even before the war. That, at least, may be changing. In Blama camp, 15 miles from Kenema, a group of middle-aged women have learned to share their experiences in order to deal with the trauma.

One of them, Hawa, says it is a process of overcoming stigmatisation. "When I came to this camp I was so ashamed. Nobody knew about my plight. I pretended I was sick."

After being brought into the group she discussed it openly; now she speaks to the community about rape and helps bring offenders in the camp to justice.

But some things are beyond rationalisation. "We are still wondering how men could behave that way," says Batu, who was raped with the barrel of a gun. "But we don't have an answer to that question."

Some peoples' names have been changed