Following years of ethnic strife between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority, tensions escalated immediately after the plane of president Habyarimana was shot down on April 6, 1994. The Tutsi were designated scapegoat by Hutu extremists and subjected to a systematic and barbaric genocide. Within a hundred days, approximately 800.000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered. The killings only grinded to a halt when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel militia, seized the last stronghold of the regime on July 17 that same year.

Abstract

Background
The construct of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) has attracted much research attention in previous years, however it has not been systematically evaluated in individuals exposed to persecution and displacement. Given that CPTSD has been proposed as a diagnostic category in the ICD-11, it is important that it be examined in refugee groups.
Objective
In the current study, we proposed to test, for the first time, the factor structure of CPTSD proposed for the ICD-11 in a sample of resettled treatment-seeking refugees.

Background: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is an effective treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During EMDR, the patient recalls traumatic memories while making eye movements (EMs). Making EMs during recall is associated with decreased vividness and emotionality of traumatic memories, but the underlying mechanism has been unclear. Recent studies support a “working-memory” (WM) theory, which states that the two tasks (recall and EMs) compete for limited capacity of WM resources.