Decade of Wars Claims Lives of 1.5 Million Children Worldwide : Violence: Global conflicts take heavy toll on the most defenseless. Young survivors face shattered lives, loss of innocence.

From the battlefields of Bosnia to the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda, more than 1.5 million children around the world have been killed by wars over the past decade.

The millions who survive face an often uncaring world that cannot cope with their wounded hearts and shattered lives.

They cry out for parents who are dead or missing, for homes that have been blasted into rubble, for stolen childhoods filled with gunfire instead of laughter.

Mohammed Ajmal, 12, was trying to forget Afghanistan’s civil war and indulge in one of the joys of childhood--flying a kite--when a rocket exploded in the yard of his house in Kabul, ripping his chest with shrapnel.

For more than a month, he has lain in the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, which was hit by 62 rockets this year. There is no chest surgeon and his family has no money to go abroad for an operation.

When Nejra Sprzo was 15, her mother put her, her brother and five cousins on a bus from Sarajevo, Bosnia, to Zagreb, Croatia, where their grandmother lives. Her mother promised Nejra they would be back in a week and she would get a new dress. That was more than two years ago.

Last April, when telephone lines to Sarajevo were finally restored, Nejra told her mother: “Mummy, I’m not your little girl anymore. Don’t worry about us. We learned how to take care of ourselves.”

Beata Uwimana, 11, is one of an estimated 100,000 Rwandan children who are separated from their families. The youngest of six children, she lost her parents and five brothers and sisters in the chaos at the Rwanda-Zaire border when 1 million Rwandans fled the civil war in July.

Ruth Nyirandenzi, 29, found Beata wandering on a road near Goma, a Zairian border town, and took her to the Mugunga Refugee Camp to share a tiny hut with her two children. Shyly, Beata said she wants to return to school--but most of all she wants to find out if any of her family survived the cholera epidemic that killed an estimated 50,000 refugees in the Goma camps.

“Nine out of 10 casualties of war are civilians, and children are very often the main casualties,” said Mike Aaronson, overseas director for the relief group Save the Children.

Four million children have been disabled, maimed, blinded or brain-damaged in over 100 conflicts during the past decade, the group said in a recent report, “Children at War.” Twelve million have lost their homes. Five million are living in refugee camps. One million are separated from their families.

During rebel sieges of cities in Angola, relief agencies were so flooded with starving children that only the severely malnourished--”those a step away from death,” said Ronald Fourcaud of Doctors Without Borders--could be given a bowl of corn meal a day.

About 7,000 children live on their own on the streets of Angola’s capital, Luanda, scrounging for food and falling prey to drugs, sexual abuse and disease. “We’re seeing 14-year-olds turning up with gonorrhea,” said Barbara Reynolds, an official with UNICEF.

In Afghanistan, where children have one of the world’s lowest literacy rates and most schools are closed, many youngsters take terrible risks to survive. Some have taken on adult jobs at metalwork shops. But running food and other supplies across the front lines is the main way to make money in besieged Kabul, and up to 3,000 people, many young boys, risk their lives daily.

“I am always afraid of the rockets and mortars, but my father does not make enough to feed the family,” said Shiralam, 13. He works with his friend, Aziz, 12, so they can carry more on their bicycle, which was laden with a huge bag of flour.

Shiralam can make the equivalent of $2 a day. His ambition is to go back to school, but if he had more money he would like to buy a kite and move his family somewhere safe.

Many Afghan teen-agers become soldiers, and most military checkpoints around Kabul are manned by illiterate youths.

Child soldiers have been reported in 35 countries over the last decade. Estimates put the number at more than 200,000, including thousands of girls.

In Liberia, UNICEF estimates 6,000 children under age 15 are among the 60,000 combatants in the 5-year-old civil war. They are used as cooks, front-line soldiers, executioners and spies.

Human rights groups say most of Liberia’s child soldiers were forced into combat roles. The rebel groups deny that, claiming they help youngsters by giving them meals, clothes and protection, but children tell of being flogged, raped, drugged and tortured to ensure obedience.

Magne Raundalen, a child psychologist who is president of the Norwegian UNICEF Committee and has been visiting war zones for 10 years, said children in southern Sudan are traumatized by long separations from their families.

For six years, at least 20,000 Sudanese youngsters have trekked long distances across the vast African nation to escape fighting. Lions and crocodiles devoured some. Bombs and bullets killed others. Many starved to death.

Gideon Gatpan Thoar, one of the Sudanese wanderers now in a refugee camp in northern Kenya, said in a book written for UNICEF that he saw people killed and heard the sound of guns constantly. “When I am asleep, they come into my head like a dream or cinema. That is my suffering,” he said.

Save the Children estimates 250,000 children have died because of the war in southern Sudan since 1983.

Raundalen said victims of land mines in Angola “may be the most traumatized children I’ve seen all over the world.”

Suddenness is a key element in trauma, and those children were suddenly wounded and handicapped for life, he said.

“Many of them were numb or paralyzed. When you talked to them, they said, ‘I feel nothing.’ This numbness masks all the horror,” he said.

According to Save the Children, 1 million people have been killed by land mines in the past decade, many of them children who are more vulnerable because of their size and curiosity. Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia have the most land mines and highest casualties.

Mediha Imamovic, a psychiatrist who works at the Doctors Without Borders guidance center in Sarajevo, said every child in the Bosnian capital is traumatized.

“Our children have suddenly grown up. They became adults too soon; they began thinking only in terms of reality. The war overshadowed or completely destroyed their imagination,” she said.

When asked what they would like, children in Sarajevo never say chocolate, nice toys or clothes, she said. They want to survive, to have heating and something to eat at home, and not to become invalids. They fear sniper bullets.

In Rwanda, countless thousands of children were among the half-million or more victims of genocide. Some children, assumed by their attackers to be dead from machete wounds, survived for days in a pile of corpses before being found. The Red Cross has registered 32,000 children who are either lost or orphaned.

“There are many, many infants. Someone just found them and carried them where they are and we can’t get any information about where they came from,” said Sarah Hill of Save the Children in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. “Some children come unable to talk about what they experienced. Others can’t speak or have gone mad or are confused.”

In most countries at war, children name one or two close family members who have died, but many Rwandan children can name 20 close family members who were slain, said Raundalen, the UNICEF psychologist.

“What was worse was that 56% of the 207 children we interviewed in Nyamata had seen children participate in the killings . . . and 42% had seen children killing children,” he said.

UNICEF’s Reynolds said it is impossible to help most of the estimated 1.5 million Angolan children traumatized by years of combat because many have fled to the bush. Some of those she has seen are withdrawn into stupor, others into hyperactive aggressiveness and violence.

“Children in almost every major Angolan city have been subjected to weeks of artillery bombardment, seen their parents killed, watched a sibling starve to death,” she said.

Helping the children of war takes time and training, Raundalen said.

Children who have lost trust in the adult world need to know “there is a last father left, the international community,” he said. They must be allowed to unburden their grief, and those who are alone need “kind adults who can represent stability and continuity and commitment to the child.”

In dealing with Iraqi children after the Gulf War, Raundalen told Muslim religious leaders to urge parents to put their children on their laps and tell all their worries and bad memories to Allah.

“We get feedback that now the children are sleeping better,” he said.

Imamovic, the psychiatrist in Sarajevo, said she talks to children and has them draw about their experiences and hopes.