RWANDA-CHILDREN: Wounds that Take Long to Heal

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 8 1996 (IPS) - It will be years before Rwandese children recover from trauma of the 1994 genocide in their country, and unless efforts to help them are stepped up, it could take even longer, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“The percentage of children in Rwanda who witnessed multiple atrocities – killings, beatings, rape sometimes committed by other adolescents, is staggering,” Dan Toole, UNICEF’s Representative for Rwanda, said here Friday. “Their trauma must be treated now even if it may take generations for the scars to heal.”

Toole, who launched a UNICEF report on Rwandese children Friday in the Kenyan capital, said the number of children needing counselling was too large for the U.N. body to handle alone and appealed to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help.

“We are talking about half of Rwanda’s estimated six million people,” he said. “Most of these children have experienced trauma during the 1994 genocide.”

Up to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in Rwanda in 1994. “It was a genocide which was organised and executed by Hutu militias,” Toole said. “Some officials in the former government were involved. The church was involved … and the result is the trauma suffered by these children.”

Moved by the suffering of Rwanda’s child survivors, UNICEF developed a Trauma Recovery Programme (TRP) and began implementing it in October 1994, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Rehabilitation in Rwanda.

The report highlights the findings of a 1995 TRP survey in which more than 3,000 randomly selected children aged eight to 19 years from all 11 of Rwanda’s prefectures were interviewed.

According to the report, 90 per cent of the children witnessed violence and killing during the genocide, more than one-third saw other children take part in killings and beatings, and 31 percent witnessed rape or sexual assault.

“And nearly 80 per cent of children interviewed had lost immediate family members during the war and more than one-third of these children had witnessed the murder of family members,” Toole said.

Moreover, 16 per cent of the children said that they hid under dead bodies to avoid being killed. “This is a very traumatic experience which may scar them for life,” said the UNICEF official.

The report noted that there was no baseline in modern history that enabled one to compare adequately the magnitude of the traumatic events that Rwanda’s children have experienced.

“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 and inexplicable events,” said Toole.

UNICEF’s Leila Gupta, who has helped trained people in basic trauma alleviation methods in the central Africa country, said the healing process was a long one.

“Our experience in Vietnam tells us that it takes a very long time to treat trauma,” she told journalists here. “Even the second generation of the holocaust victims are still suffering from the trauma.”

“But what’s sad about the survey is that one-third of the children interviewed think they will not reach to become adults,” said Gupta. “These children have lost hope in life. And I think we can restore their sense to the future.”

Some of these children’s peers are being held in Rwanda’s overcrowded prisons. According to a recent U.N. report, they make up three percent of the 67,000 people detained for their alleged involvement in the genocide. “We met the prime minister (Rwigema Pierre Celeste) recently and he promised to look into the case of these children as a matter of priority,” Gupta said.

UNICEF has hired 10 lawyers who are attending to the cases of the detained children. “So far, 200 of these children have been released and are receiving counselling from the National Trauma Centre,” according to Toole.

An outpatients’ clinic was created at the UNICEF-funded trauma centre in July 1995 to provide intensive therapeutic care to severely traumatized children and their families.

The centre’s staff includes specially trained trauma advisors and a UNICEF trauma team, who have so far trained more than 6,000 social agents and local NGOs officials in basic trauma alleviation methods, which have been used to help upward of 144,000 traumatised children.