What is wrong with a world that would target schoolchildren? Whether it is the Boko Haram or the IS or the drones that target them, children invariably become more than just collateral targets. The suicide bombing of a school in Nigeria again brings into focus the fact that children are not only in the firing line from hunger and ignorance and poverty but also from land mines from leftover wars, bullets from current one and turned into refugees without hope from conflicts without end.
Why are these atrocities taken in their stride by a world whose conscience seems less troubled when multiple massacres occur in the developing world. It is almost a universal reaction of mild indifference, some minor sounds of commiseration and even the media lets the horror slip through the door in the shortest time possible. Fifty African children murdered at assembly and by day after it will be a footnote in history.
Take our world today. Beside Nigeria where the kidnapping of several hundred schoolgirls has been compounded by this bloodspill, children are in the crosshairs in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan, South Sudan, even the US border and the Indian subcontinent many other geographical boundaries collapse as child trafficking and drug dealing proliferates.
We are destroying a generation.
Figures given by Human Rights professor Jacqueline Bhabha at Harvard are chilling. “Wars are no longer limited to the battlefield. Civilians are absolutely targeted and there aren’t safe spaces where they used to be,” she said. “In Gaza, homes are targeted, rooftops are targeted, so the places where children just stay, whether it’s at home or playing outside their house, have become extremely dangerous.”
“The normal rules of war, the rules of civility have completely broken down. The UN reported last week that one child is being killed every hour in Gaza.”
Not only do bullets hit them, but the UN accepts evidence that over 4,000 have officially been recruited as soldiers and the real number could be many times that.
It is not just Africa where this is happening though things there are horrendous. The UN marks off Central America which is under the control of cartels, the Ivory Coast, Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Mali,Myanmar, Colombia, Philippines, Thailand and India where Naxalites have inducted six year olds into their military wing.
The situation is globally revolting and yet the only bulwark seems to be private outrage and very little action. Suffice it to say that no one even registers that Feb 14 of each year is ‘No child soldiers day.’ Does anyone unaffected by the savagery even care?
