Children in Darfur are enduring "unspeakable acts of violence and abuse" in the region's escalating four-year conflict, human rights groups said today.
The Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict accused the Sudanese government of "apparent deliberate efforts . . . to suppress information and prevent agencies from collecting and disseminating details on attacks against children and their protection needs, particularly in Darfur" and eastern Sudan.
But it said humanitarian agencies had documented cases of armed groups shooting, mutilating and torturing children, abducting and gang-raping girls, and recruiting youngsters as combatants.
While the Sudanese armed forces continue to deny the presence of children in their units, the Watchlist said representatives admitted that children from other armed groups had recently been incorporated into the government's military forces.
Reports indicate that most armed groups in Sudan, including government-backed Arab militias known as the janjaweed and the two largest rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army, "recruit and use children", the Watchlist said.
In addition to killings and maimings by armed groups, it said: "Sudanese girls have been trafficked within and out of Sudan to serve as commercial sexual workers while others have been trafficked to work as domestic servants."
The report said boys as young as four or five had been trafficked to Arab Gulf countries to work as jockeys and beggars.
Despite the January 2005 peace agreement that ended a 21-year civil war between Sudan's mostly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south, "Sudanese children are not faring any better than they were four years ago," Kathleen Hunt of the Watchlist said.