Mr. Speaker, the newspapers have been reminding us recently that there is a terrible hidden side to all wars: the mass rape of women and the abandonment of thousands of children.
In the village of Gisenyi alone, over 4,000 Rwandan children were wandering the streets in search of their parents, whom they may well never find.
At the same time, in the same region, aid workers were distributing large numbers of "morning after" pills to Rwandans raped in Zaire, so as to avoid a repetition of the births that followed the rapes of thousands of Rwandan women at the time of the 1994 genocide.
Over the ages, the rape of women has always been a corollary to war. In a different way, but just as dramatically, children see their future disappear forever. Our so-called civilized world must do everything it possibly can to end these horror stories, which are devastating on a personal and on a social level.