Children in war: The lost millions looking for a voice
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UNITED NATIONS — Among all the UN accords, protocols and mechanisms that seek to defend the estimated 13.5 million children lost in conflict around the world, none mentions the right to feel a parent’s love.
And that is just what Joseph and Alima said they had missed when they appeared before a very official UN panel on children displaced by wars.
Joseph is one of the army of “Lost Boys” of Sudan. After escaping a burning hut he became separated from his mother, carried a gun before he was 10, saw many people killed, ate bats and rats to survive.
Alima was growing up in the Taliban’s hardline Afghanistan of the 1990s when her family decided it could take no more and ended up penniless in a refugee camp in Pakistan.
“We had very different experiences but we grew up with the same fears and traumas,” Alima, now 21, told AFP in an interview after her appearance at the United Nations headquarters..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101111com3.html
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