Rwanda: a case study.

Children have not been spared by the events in Rwanda which caused the serious human rights violations of April 1994 and particularly the massacres; they have been involved both as perpetrators and victims. During the hostilities, both sides made extensive use of children as instruments for committing crimes against humanity, either as civilians or as soldiers.

The massacres were a mass phenomenon; this was deliberate and intended to involve all the strata of the population, including children, as killers "manipulated" by their handlers, often with the encouragement of their parents or members of the militias. Some received the same training as the militia members and behaved like them during the massacres; some, on the contrary, were urged on by adults (parents, neighhours and friends) to kill.

Under arrest

This is why at the end of the hostilities many children were arrested and accused of taking part in the genocide. As of 9 December 1995, 1,711 children were under arrest, accounting for nearly 2 per cent of the entire prison population, which is considerable. Apart from the numbers, something which inevitably gives rise to concern is the age of these children, varying from 17 to 10, or even 7 years of age; worse still, many of them have asserted that they do not regret what they did and are ready to do it again. The concern is all the greater in that their victims were other children; according to a UNICEF report, 47 per cent of the children questioned said they saw other children killing or wounding youngsters. The same was the case among the child soldiers.

Even before the massacres of April to July 1994, many children had been recruited by the two parties to the conflict - the Rwandan Patriotic Army (APR) and the former Rwandese Armed Forces (FAR). "The number of these child soldiers (kadogo) is impressive; it is estimated at approximately 4,820, of whom some 2,000 are in the APR and the rest members of the ex-FAR. Their ages are equally impressive and range from 5 in the case of the youngest to 17 for the oldest. Among the APR child soldiers, 1,500 are aged 10 to 12, and 500 are aged 13 to 17. Where the ex-FAR are concerned, the ages vary: 187 between 5 and 10, 252 between 10 and 15, and 257 between 16 and 18 (based at Bukavu), in addition to 500 to 800, aged 10 to 17 (in the Goma camps)," Mr. Degni-Segui observes.

There can be no doubt of the participation of child soldiers on both sides in the conflict in Rwanda. All participated actively to a greater or lesser extent in the killings and summary executions carried out since 6 April 1994. The ex-FAR child soldiers in particular took part in the genocide to a greater extent than the others, who rather undertook acts of reprisal, taking advantage of the fact that their own parents or relatives had been massacred during the genocide and the hostilities.

In order to deal with the traumas and social consequences resulting from the participation of children in military activities - something in flagrant conflict with international rules, particularly those stemming from international humanitarian law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989 - UNICEF has undertaken various actions, in collaboration with UNHCR and other bodies. These include the project to demobilize and reintegrate into society Rwanda's child soldiers, including those of the former FAR.

UNICEF assists

This is an appropriate context for the project initiated by the Ministry of Defence of Rwanda, with assistance from UNICEF, to demobilize and provide vocational training for the child soldiers of APR in the former non-commissioned officers' college in Butare. At the same time, a similar action is taking place in the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire, particularly in Goma. Certain NGOs, such as CARITAS, are associated with them.

Although many children took part in the massacres and other abominable crimes, most of them were rather the innocent victims, either as eyewitnesses or targets of the massacres.

Many Rwandan children who survived the hostilities, and in particular the massacres, witnessed the cruelties and atrocities perpetrated against men, women and other children. This dismal and terrible spectacle certainly affected and traumatized the children who were not targeted by the killings, and all the more so those who were so targeted. The trauma experienced by the latter is aggravated by two tragic circumstances. The first is that they themselves only just managed to escape death by finding a chance hiding place. The second is that from this hiding place, they were powerless witnesses of the torture and massacre of parents, relatives or friends. According to an investigation by the NGO "Emergency Project for Orphans' Care", 66 per cent of the children witnessed the violent death of their parents and other family members; 88 per cent witnessed the killing of other known persons, carried out by armed militia members; and 82 per cent were threatened with weapons. Other bodies give even higher figures. According to the latest annual report of UNICEF, 87 per cent of children lost their parents, while 96 per cent were the witnesses of massacres. Many more children, however, met the same fate as their parents.

Infant victims of massacres

The Special Rapporteur had stressed in his first report in 1995 that the massacres spared neither children nor infants. Unfortunately, there are no figures for the number of children who were victims of the massacres. What is certain is that many of them died in appalling circumstances. Some babies had their throats cut and others were hurled against walls in the presence of their parents before the latter were themselves executed. Some children were even killed by their parents under threat from militia members. This happened in the case of many children born to mixed Hutu-Tutsi couples.

The luckiest children escaped with wounds, sometimes very serious and often to the head. The survivors often escaped only by hiding under the corpses of older persons or in the forests adjoining the sites of the massacres. After the massacres at Kibungo, a priest who survived the genocide informed the Special Rapporteur that a number of children had been found alive, although injured, under the heaps of bodies lying in the courtyard of the Bishop's Palace, where the executions took place.

According to the "Emergency Project for Orphans' Care" report, 25 per cent of the children were beaten with sticks, 26 per cent were wounded with firearms or cutting weapons, and 6 per cent are war-wounded, injured by the explosion of mines or by machetes.

The children who escaped the massacres are in a state of trauma, which is expressed in sadness, insomnia, nightmares, a permanent fear of being killed, mistrust of those around them and depression. The orphans and unaccompanied children are also faced with the crucial problem of who will provide for them. This problem is all the more acute because there are so many of them.

On 31 December 1995, there were 47,000 individual children (orphans or unaccompanied children); 30,000 were in foster homes, 8,303 in 66 centres or orphanages. Children with no parents have been placed in orphanages. As for children separated from their parents, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other organizations are involved in searching for their families so that they may be reunited with them. However, many other families are obliged to take in these children. According to UNICEF, the family average, which was 5.5 children before the massacres, has increased to 7. It is particularly difficult for some families to bring up several children, and energetic measures are therefore needed to provide efficient assistance to the families and the organizations responsible for looking after these children, if necessary by giving them financial or material assistance.

RELATED ARTICLE: Reuniting Children

The use of photography to help reunite unaccompanied Rwandan children with their families began during the second wave of the 1994 Rwandan crisis, following the brutal civil conflict in April of that year, which left more than 500,000 dead. Of the 1 million Rwandan refugees who crossed into Zaire near the town of Goma in July 1994, some 20,000 were children who were lost or separated from their parents during the exodus, or as a result of subsequent illness. Many of these children were too young, too sick, or too traumatized to provide information that would aid in their reunification with their families.

Together with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is responsible for coordinating the tracing of families of Rwandan children, UNICEF initiated a project to create identification photographs of 12,000 children being cared for in centres organized and run by UNICEF and its partners. Although identification photos had been used previously to trace families, the Rwandan project is thought to be the largest-scale use of photographs for tracing to date. It has subsequently been expanded to other tracing efforts inside Rwanda and in refugee camps in neighbouring countries.

The portraits of individual children, often holding white boards on which their identification numbers are written, are linked to the ICRC centralized database. By referring to the identification numbers, their identities can be traced and protected until family relationships are verified. By mid-1995, identification photos displayed in Goma area refugee camps had contributed to the reunification with family members of more than 2,000 children. Given the unprecedented numbers of babies and other children under the age of five who were separated from their families in this crisis, photographs are considered to have a key role in helping family tracing for this age group. While photography is only one part of a complex process, it is hoped that continuing efforts to integrate it into tracing programmes will increase the numbers of reunifications. More than 20,000 unaccompanied Rwandan children, both inside the country and in refugee camps in Burundi, the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire, have been reunited with their families through various tracing efforts. These efforts continue for an additional 47,000 children in that region.