'Preventable' Genocide In Rwanda?

A scathing new report titled The Preventable Genocide, commissioned by the Organization of African Unity and issued Friday, says the U.N. Security Council, the United States, France, Belgium and the Catholic church all share blame for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that left over a half million people dead.

As CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey reports, for the young people of Rwanda, ethnic slaughter is an experience they can never outgrow.

Ask any Rwandan child what happened and most will say they can't remember— a subconscious repression of unimaginable horror. Eighty percent of children here lost family members. Virtually every child witnessed violence, including rape.

The 90-day genocide was orchestrated by a small group of Hutu extremists against the Tutsi minority, and then many others joined in. Up to 800,000 people were killed in a slaughter that ended when a Tutsi-led army seized power.

"It is, of course, true that there would have been no genocide had a small group among the Rwandan governing elite not deliberately incited the country's Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority," the report said.

"But this terrible conspiracy only succeeded because certain actors external to Rwanda allowed it to go ahead."

Much of the violence was perpetrated by other Rwandan children. But the crimes occurred when they were too young to be charged, so now they are being released— teenagers who are feared and hated.

Issa Ntahompagaze was 12 when he was arrested. "They said that I took part in genocide," he says.

He denies it, but it was his own neighbors who turned Issa in. Before he came back, social workers spent months counseling both Issa's mother Judith and the local community.

"When he came home it was like a dream for me," Judith says. "Issa is the only one of my five children who is alive."

Judith worries that neighbors still don't trust her son. Issa says all he wants is to be treated like other children.

Silas Wayisabe committed no crime, but violence still robbed him of his chance to be a child. At age 12, he became both mother and father to his four younger sisters and his brother. "I am only frightened when there is nothing to eat. Then I worry a lot about the little ones," Silas says.

Now 17, Silas is one of up to 80,000 children who are heads of households in Rwanda. "I don't think about my parents much because there is nothing I can do," he says. "They have died. They won't come back."

Being on their own means everyone in the family works. Thirteen-year-old Kampundu must walk two hours to sell a bundle of wood for thirty cents -- if she's lucky. The children insist that no matter how hard it is, they will stay together.

But in Rwanda death, not determination, has bound families together. Uncounted thousands of Rwandans, including children, have been slaughtered, simply because they were born into the wrong etnic group.

"Just as there is no statute of limitation for those guilty of genocide, so is there no statute of limitation on genocide's memories and consequences,…" the report said. "Rwanda today is not simply another poor African country. Many of its present problems have either been created or seriously exacerbated by the genocide,… "

In a country where tens of thousands of skulls are a monument and a national holiday is called The Day of the Genocide, the wonder is not that children have problems, but that they have any hope of a future at all.