Too soon for twilight, too late for dawn: the story of children caught in conflict.

• Position: Includes related articles on the UN General Assembly's stand on child-related issues, participation of children as soldiers, and recommendations for the protection of children during armed conflict - Cover Story

In the last decade more than 2 million children have been killed, more than 4 million have survived physical mutilation and more than 1 million have been orphaned or separated from their families. All as a result of war.

Joy unblemished as they play outside school, tumbling through the grass with friends, running under a gushing stream of water on a hot evening or down hills stung by snow. Laughter and love.

These are the memories of the more innocent times evoked in the minds of many of us as we reminisce about our own childhoods. Where we had time to grow up and only slowly learn the darker ways of the world.

But such memories are unimaginably distant from the reality that millions of children, caught up in the deadly games of adults, must confront. Instead, for the increasing numbers of children living in war-torn nations, childhood has become a living nightmare.

A just-released United Nations study on the impact of armed conflict on children paints a truly devastating picture of untold suffering and cruelty, of a world increasingly "being sucked into a desolate moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality."

The report was the outcome of a two-year investigation that included field visits to battle-scarred areas, dramatic case studies, input from eminent personalities and experts, and consultations with Governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), armed opposition movements and children themselves.

Some of those children were present at the ceremony on 8 November United Nations Headquarters in New York when the study was officially presented to the General Assembly. It is they whom Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had in mind when he told delegations: "Between the lines of this detailed and serious document, we can hear the cries of the 2 million children killed and the 15 million disabled or traumatized in conflicts over the past decade, calling out to us for urgent redress."

The report was a warning to anyone grown accustomed to the business of patching resolutions and planning programmes, said General Assembly President Razali Ismall. "Instead, it is vital that the United Nations move beyond the prescription of solutions, and seize the ground to force political will to implement actions that will halt such brutal treatment of children. It is my belief that action to protect children's rights in armed conflict will only be successful if it is accompanied by universal and sustained outpouring of moral outrage."

Normally fodder for by-the-book statements, the United Nations expert study which prompted such an emotional response from the most seasoned diplomats was prepared by Graca Machel, former Minister of Education of Mozambique and the expert appointed by Mr. Boutros-Ghali in 1994 to study the situation of children in conflicts, with support from the United Nations Centre for Human Rights and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

It exposes in detail the sweeping extent of the mistreatment of children in the nearly 30 armed conflicts now raging around the world. "Millions of children are caught up in conflicts in which they are not merely bystanders, but targets. Some fall victim to a general onslaught against civilians; others die as part of a calculated genocide. Still other children suffer the effects of sexual violence or the multiple deprivations of armed conflict that expose them to hunger or disease. Just as shocking, thousands of young people are cynically exploited as combatants."

Mrs. Machel told the press on 8 November: "We normally hear from adults, from politicians, but rarely from children." It was important that her study looked at the situation through the eyes of the smallest victims. In its preparation, she had spoken with a nine-year-old girl from Sierra Leone who had been raped by soldiers and then forced to watch her family slaughtered. She had heard also from a Cambodian mother who had seen her children destroyed by a land-mine in the family fields just after they had made it safely home after years as refugees. And she had listened to a 15-year-old "soldier", racked with remorse and mourning his lost childhood, who had told her how he feared going back to his family and community because he did not know how or if he would be accepted.

Deliberate targets

Why are children so brutally exposed during modern warfare, not just accidentally, but as deliberate targets? The report points to the changing character of modern warfare, where wars are being fought not between States, but within them, and are marked by increasing brutality. And in many cases, religious and ethnic affiliations are manipulated to heighten feelings of hatred or aggression - against children, as well as adults. Battles are fought from village to village and street to street. As a result, the proportion of war victims who are civilians has leapt in recent decades from 5 per cent to over 90 per cent, and at least half of these are children. Increasingly, children have become both targets and perpetrators of violence.

"Involving children as soldiers", Mrs. Machel explains, "has been made easier by the proliferation of inexpensive light weapons." The international arms trade has made assault rifles so cheap and widely available that even the poorest communities have access to the most deadly of weapons - weapons which can transform local, low-intensity conflicts into bloody slaughters.

In the view of Assembly President Razali, the arms trade should be singled out for its role in catalyzing aggression, and perpetuating and profiting from violence and suffering. It was "distressing that, despite moral outrage, Governments were more concerned with supporting the rights of arms...