A HORRIFYING report into children's suffering in Rwanda was unveiled in Nairobi yesterday by Unicef, as UN peacekeepers began pulling out of the tiny African country.
The children of Rwanda suffered unprecedented levels of exposure to traumatic events," the UN children's organisation said.
"The percentage of children in Rwanda who witnessed multiple atrocities - killings, beatings, rape, sometimes committed by other adolescents, is staggering," said Mr Dan Toole, the Unicef representative in Rwanda.
His organisation found that a third of children who had survived the 1994 genocidal civil war believed there was no point planning for the future as they did not expect to live long.
More than 76 per cent of children had at least one family member killed in the violence. Almost 46 per cent had lost their mother, 55.8 per cent their father.
About 60,000 children have still not been reunited with their parents, two years after the civil war 81 per cent of orphans said they saw their dead parents in dreams.
The report says: "There is no baseline in modern history that enables one to compare adequately the magnitude of traumatic events that these children have personally witnessed during the recent genocide.
"Not only are they haunted by horrific sensory impressions that intrude upon their daily lives while inhibiting their concentration span and depriving them of adequate sleep, they also face the formidable task of trying to make sense of these incomprehensible events."
Unicef researchers talked to 3,030 children, from all regions, and across the ethnic divide, aged between eight and 19.
Ethnic violence in Rwanda erupted into full scale civil war in 1994 when mainly Hutu extremists slaughtered more than 500,000 men, women and children before being defeated by a rebel army of the minority Tutsis.