It is a sobering thought that half the world’s 50 million refugees are children. As many as 55 percent of these refugees come from only five countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Sudan. But another twenty odd nations make up the rest.
If you see a film called The Good Lie about Sudanese children compelled to become refugees and their several thousand kilometer trek to safety you will be staggered by the vulnerability of these kids to the horrors of internecine war.
Like them in this cruelly honest cinematic adventure are 25 million more, all of robbed not just of the innocence of their childhood but facing a future dark with hopelessness. And it is no adventure, more a nightmare which never ends.
And these are refugees who have been accounted for under the UN charter and the UNHCR, the body which monitors the rising graph of displaced people. Last year 77,000 children made asylum applications through NGOs. This year the number will rise.
Think of it. We have on this planet 25 million children who are so easily picked up by traffickers and sold into the modern equivalent of slavery.
These traffickers have now spotted a new potential market — militancy.
This frightening dimension now facing the world is the easy prey they are becoming for militant groups that ironically function in much the same places from where these teen and pre-teens originate.
It, therefore, makes it plausible that frustration and lack of option makes many of them retrace their footsteps and return homewards, only now armed with the same guns from which they escaped.
The chord that is struck is they belong and have an identity, both of which have no meaning in a camp. Consequently, their trek to sign up with terrorists and do their bidding is something that will grow if we collectively do not take preventive steps.
There are currently 250,000 child soldiers with guns and grenades ready to kill. The definition is for them to be below 18 years but some of them are years younger. As many as 100, 000 of them are in Africa alone brainwashed into believing that raping and pillaging is a macho thing to do.
While many of them are ordered to go to the fight others are used for cleaning, as human shields, suicide bombers, messengers, spies, servants, porters, cook’s helpers and couriers.
The efforts of Child Soldiers International to fight this scourge are laudable but they are overwhelmed by the enormity of the numbers which keep swelling.
The need for now is to band together under the UN and see this as a global issue that demands attention and a solution. Children have to be taken off the firing line either as targets or fingers on the trigger.
That most of the world is untouched by this flow of panicked humanity is a given. It is one of the truths of our times that statistic fatigue has robbed us of any deep feelings and that is why most peoples and nations do not see it as their problem.
But the cause and effect is an ever increasing circle and once the disaffected pick up weapons any part of the world can be their target.
