BERLIN, Dec 13 (AFP) - Forget the Internet, forget booming stock markets and remember that hundreds of millions of children have been shut out of world prosperity, UNICEF said in an end-of-the-century report released Monday.

"Over the last 20 years, as the world economy increased exponentially, the number of people living in poverty grew to more than 1.2 billion, or one in every five persons, including more than 600 million children," UNICEF said.

Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Childrens Fund, told reporters Monday in presenting the report: "It is clear that we enter the 21st century freighted with many of the same dangers that have faced children in the 20th -- along with a galaxy of new and more threatening ones."

Bellamy named as dangers:

• -- poverty
• -- the fact that "preventable childhood ailments like diarrhoea, measles and acute respiratory infections are killing 12 million young children a year"
• -- that some 130 million children, mostly girls, were denied basic education
• -- child labor
• -- that children are "brutally targeted in military action."

The report said: "A vacuum of leadership has allowed the merciless targeting of children and women in armed conflict, the frightening transformation of AIDS into the number one killer in Africa and a devastating free-fall in development assistance to the poorest nations."

Bellamy said "these ongoing violations of children's rights" are "a blow for development because they mean that communities and society as a whole are deprived of incalculable human potential."

The UNICEF report said that ambitious commitments made to children by the world's governments at the 1990 World Summit for Children and other international conferences since had not been fulfilled.

Both developed and developing nations were not paying enough "for basic social services for human development."

There were gains, such as a halving of infant mortality, the effective disappearance of polio, a sharp reduction in measles and increases in vaccinations, but "the number of violations of children's rights that occur around the globe every day are staggering," the report said.

It said the 1990s had been "a decade of undeclared war on women, adolescents and children as poverty, conflict, chronic social instability and preventable disease such as HIV/AIDS threaten their human rights and sabotage their development."

For instance, infant mortality is still high in poor countries with 10-15 percent of children dying before the age of five in Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan, Pakistan, India and the Ivory Coast, while the figure is 20 percent in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 28 percent in Nigeria.

The report calls for debt relief for poor nations since "the rights of children throughout the world are not likely to be realized as long as governments remain trapped in debt bondage."

It also said globalization needed to be regulated or these forces "will continue to serve the expansion needs of global markets at the expense of equity between and within nations."

"Any attempts to regulate globalization should address the best interests of children," the report said, saying this meant seeing "whether changes in economic policies protect the rights of children to education and health services or whether changes in labour policies specifically address the issue of child workers."

Bellamy said the new millenium was "a chance to take a giant step toward making the world a safe and nurturing place for all children . . . It is an opportunity we must not let slip."

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