PENCIL IN THE
CROSS HAIRS
As the curtain comes
down on yet another year, I sit back and reminisce about the passage of time
like many of my fellow earth dwellers. The year has been extraordinary in many
ways. However, nothing compares to the dramatic highs and lows that the human
civilization has reached in rapid succession.
In November, a group of
determined scientists and engineers pulled off the impossible. They landed a
small spacecraft on a comet hurtling through the space between Mars and Jupiter
at 34,000 mph, effectively hitting a bull's eye from 310 million miles afar! A
month later, another band of desperadoes found their mark at a point-blank
range among the children of Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan.
I try to draw up a list
of "most significant" events from the topics that garnered wide attention (i.e., trended for a while) on social media. Among these are two sharing a
common theme: #BringBackOurGirls (the popular Twitter handle) and the Peshawar
massacre.
Both incidents took
place on school grounds when large groups of students were busy with exams. The
perpetrators exploited the intimate relationship between educational
institutions and children to further their agendas. In each case, these
"motivated" adults have provided similar justifications for their
actions.
On November 20, 1989,
the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC), which, among other things, calls on every country to enact legislation
that will reduce both social and financial barriers to staying in school.
Today, the CRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, with
194 signatories (the United States, Somalia, and South Sudan are the lone
holdouts).
In the 25 years after
committing to protect every child's right to education, an overwhelming
majority of these 194 governments have followed through on their promise at the
primary school level. In 90 percent of the countries that have ratified the
CRC, primary education is both free and compulsory. Even those nations who do
not adhere to the guidelines of "human rights" have taken measures to
guarantee the fundamental right of children.
However, to these
desecrators of sanctity of educational institutions, a child’s right is a
far-fetched thought. Their actions are nothing but attacks on children's right to education. The United Nations
defines an attack as any intentional threat or use of force directed against
students, teachers, education personnel and/or education institutions, carried
out for political, religious or criminal reasons.
Educational
institutions are particularly vulnerable to attacks because of their curriculum
content, or because they are seen to support new or old government structures
or political ideologies. In other situations, education is attacked as a means
of stopping educational, social and economic progress for particular groups of
children, particularly girls, or to cause widespread destruction in communities
that are not supportive of an armed group.
A 2013 report by the
UK-based organization Save the Children estimated that nearly 50 million
children and young people in conflict zones face the unnerving barriers to
education every day, keeping them out of school and preventing them from
reaching their true potential. As such, fewer children worldwide are now feted
with their fundamental right than in the previous years due to war and other
acts of violence.
A study published in 2014 by the Global Coalition to Protect
Education from Attack (GCPEA), which includes the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Save the Children among others, finds
that during 2009-2012 armed non-state groups, state military and security
forces, and armed criminal groups have attacked thousands of schoolchildren,
university students, teachers, academics and education establishments in at
least 70 countries worldwide.
It concludes that
targeted attacks on education and incidents of military use of schools and
universities are occurring in far more countries and far more extensively than
previously documented. It is not known whether this reflects growing awareness
of the problem and more and better reporting of such attacks since the earlier
studies were published or an actual increase in the number of attacks.
The Nigerian militant
Islamic group Boko Haram (means ‘Western education is a sin’ in local Hausa
language) has been waging a war against the Government seeking to impose a
strict form of Sharia, or Islamic law, in northern Nigeria. The group’s
leadership has endorsed school attacks and purportedly threatened to burn down
non-Islamic schools and to kill the teachers.
On April 14, Boko Haram
militants abducted 276 mostly-Christian girls from the Government Secondary
School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria. Houses in Chibok were
also burned down in the incident. The school had been closed for four weeks
prior to the attack due to the deteriorating security situation, but students
from multiple schools had been called in to take final exams in physics.
Parents and others took
to social media to complain about the government's perceived slow and
inadequate response. The news caused international outrage against Boko Haram
and the Nigerian government. The hash tag #BringBackOurGirls began to trend
globally on Twitter as the story continued to spread. Except for the 53 girls
who had managed to escape, the abductees still remain unaccounted for. Boko
Haram subsequently claimed that the students were converted to Islam and
married off to members of the group, with a reputed "bride price" of
₦2,000 each ($12.50/£7.50).
According to the GCPEA
study, there were 838 or more reported attacks on schools in Pakistan during
2009-2012, more than in any other country, leaving hundreds of schools
destroyed. Militants allegedly belonging to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP or
Pakistani Taliban) recruited children from schools and madrassas, some to be
suicide bombers. They also carried out targeted killings of teachers and
academics.
The face of TTP’s
assault on education is the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzi,
who was shot on October 9, 2012, along with two other students on their school
bus. Apparently, the then 15-year-old was singled out for promoting values that
were secular and anti-Taliban. Malala had written an anonymous blog for the BBC
about life as a schoolgirl under the Taliban.
The Peshawar school
massacre of December 16 was allegedly carried by TTP too. The attack, which
claimed the lives of 141 people, mostly children, was the worst terrorist
atrocity Pakistan has suffered. As in previous attacks, the Army school was
identified as a symbol of government authority. Accused of “promoting western
decadence and un-Islamic teachings,” schools have proved a soft target for TTP
in their northwestern strongholds. When TTP briefly took control of Swat Valley
in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in 2012, they “banned girls’ schooling outright,
forcing 900 schools to close or stop enrolment for female pupils.” While the
rule was later relaxed to allow girls to attend school up to age 10, in Swat
district alone, about 120,000 girls and 8,000 women teachers stopped going to school.
The TTP campaign
against education has been “alarmingly efficient,” the GCPEA report concludes:
hundreds of thousands of children have been bombed or terrorized out of school,
while violence against teachers has had a devastating effect on recruitment.
According to the International Crisis Group, more than nine million Pakistani
children are not currently receiving a primary or secondary education. The
country’s own Human Rights Commission concedes it has the second-largest
proportion of children not attending school in the world after Nigeria.
Although the Chibok and
Peshawar incidents were marquee-grabbing news in 2014, they are hardly the only
ones. In early December, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) declared
2014 as being “devastating” for some 15 million children caught up in violent
conflicts around the world. Most of these children are from the Central African
Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and in the Occupied Palestinian
territories – including those displaced in their own countries or living as
refugees outside their homeland, according to UNICEF. And an estimated 230
million children live in countries and areas affected by armed conflicts, it
said.
In 2014, UNICEF said
children have been kidnapped from their schools or on their way to school,
recruited or used by armed forces and groups:
·
In the Central African Republic, 2.3 million children are
affected by the conflict, up to 10,000 children are believed to have been
recruited by armed groups, and more than 430 children have been killed and
maimed – three times as many as in 2013;
·
In Gaza, 54,000 children were left homeless as a result of the
50-day conflict during the summer that also saw 538 children killed, and more
than 3,370 injured;
· In Syria, with more than 7.3 million children affected by the
conflict including 1.7 million child refugees, the United Nations verified at
least 35 attacks on schools in the first nine months of the year, which killed
105 children and injured nearly 300 others;
·
In Iraq, where an estimated 2.7 million children are affected by
conflict, at least 700 children are believed to have been maimed, killed or
even executed this year;
· And in South Sudan, an estimated 235,000 children under five are
suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Almost 750,000 children have been
displaced and more than 320,000 are living as refugees.
The children’s agency
went on to say that 2014 has also posed significant new threats to children’s
health and well-being, most notably the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which
has left thousands of children orphaned and an estimated 5 million out of
school.
The armed conflicts
around the world are having a devastating impact on the lives of children from
those regions. Youngsters are dying in growing numbers and childhood itself is
being destroyed. At the height of Israel's Gaza offensive in July, the United
Nations noted with alarm that a child was dying every hour. In a punishing war
now in its fourth year, even the youngest of Syrians are in the snipers'
sights. Instead of learning to read and write, children are learning about all
types of weapons. Most know the names of bullets, tracers and rubber bullets;
many spend days on empty stomach. Such is the new and troubling
"normal" for children living in war zones.
In the words of a nine
year-old refugee in a camp in southern Turkey, a world steeped in the Free
Syrian Army, "I'm only a child in age and appearance, but in terms of
morals and humanity, I'm not. In the past, a 12-year-old was considered young,
but not now. Now, at 12 years, you must go for jihad." He has a teenage
brother who's already joined the fight across the border.
The physical damage of
attacks against schools is quantifiable – destruction of educational
infrastructure represents a financial cost for a government. But it is the
human cost that is greatest.
A single attack on a school can
keep hundreds of children out of the classroom, potentially destroying a
community’s only place of learning and a principal hub. In the worst scenarios,
a combination of attacks on education and wider conflicts can potentially
deprive an entire generation of children of a good-quality education. Moreover,
attacks on teachers deprive children and schools of teachers – essential actors
in children’s learning, and role models.
Girls and female teachers can be
at higher risk of sexual violence, including rape, committed by armed actors.
In several conflict-affected countries, this risk has proved a deterrent to
female participation in education, both by teachers and pupils. Furthermore,
girls and female teachers subjected to sexual violence, including those who
become pregnant as a result of rape, are often prevented from attending school
because of stigma.
In Syrian refugee camps of
Jordan, there is an alarming rise in the number of girls being forced into
early marriages, according to the United Nations. Almost one third (32%) of
registered marriages involve a girl under 18, while the same group constituted
only 13% of marriages in pre-war Syria. Although some families marry off their
daughters because of tradition, but the UN says most are driven by poverty.
Organized trade in young girls,
driven by clientele from the Gulf States, is sprouting up outside the refugee
camps. They
prey on refugee families, living in rented accommodation, who are struggling to
get by. Local sources say the going rate for a bride is between 2,000 and
10,000 Jordanian dinars ($2,800/£1,635 to $14,000/£8,180) with another 1,000
($1,400/£818) going to the broker. The 14- and 15-year old girls appear to be
in highest demand, though 12- and 13-year old are also
being sought. Most clients are 30-50 year male. Many of these girls are being
abandoned as soon as they become pregnant.
According to
psychiatrists, children exposed to traumatic events like war, often have
distorted views of incidents. For example, they might blame themselves or their
neighbors and the consequences are very detrimental to their mental health.
Every child of age six years and above living in Gaza has experienced at least
three wars.
In 2000, as part of the
Millennium Development Goals, the world set itself the ambitious target of
ensuring that every primary-age child in the world would be in school by 2015.
Well, the world is on the doorstep of that chosen date. In spite of the significant
progress made in the new millennium, it appears that the international
community will fall short of this goal. In 2011, 57 million primary-age
children worldwide were reported to be out of school.
With pencil in the
cross hairs, the millennium goal now appears far-fetched.
[SUBHODEV DAS]
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