Children born in the wrong place
Children do not choose their birthplace or parents, they do not start or lead wars, and yet, these innocent and strange little creatures are always the biggest victims of war and bad political and social circumstances. Children die in wars in tragic, inhumane and downright brutal ways. Their earthly journey ends in the ruins of the buildings that were their home until yesterday, their remains remain scattered in mass graves. It is already impossible to count how many child victims there are in Gaza, and around 5.000 tragic child victims are being bid. We all know that there is absolutely nothing to blame for the children, but at the same time, the international community proves to be absolutely impotent to save the lives of the smallest among us, except for humanitarian aid at the drop of a hat. The episodes from Gaza are a glaring example of this, but they are by no means the only ones: in many parts of the world, children continue to die unjustly for one reason or another.
In Africa, children are dying due to war conflicts, lack of infrastructure and terribly poor health care. The World Health Organization states that on that continent, almost 45% of child deaths are related to malnutrition. Translated - children have nothing to eat, and if they do, it is food that not only has poor nutritional value but also causes countless health complications. Children there die of diarrhea, pneumonia and all those diseases that in more developed parts of the world are treated with a simple visit to the pharmacy. While developed countries struggle with how to prevent their children from enjoying expensive energy drinks and TikTok challenges, their peers, say in South Asia - with chronic malnutrition and high mortality - work in makeshift factories, in the fields, earning a pittance, which is for them and their families, to make the tragedy even greater, very much needed. In India, data show, there are about ten million underage workers between the ages of five and fourteen. They work a lot and in inhumane conditions, the consequences for health are therefore devastating. Some die directly, others experience work-related injuries that are as cruel as all that pre-industrial machinery is powerful and raw.
Children's bodies are subject to sexual exploitation, human trafficking, forced underage marriages and other social deviations. In the West, synonymous with the more developed world, it is different. In the first five years, it is important to develop and enhance children's cognitive potential, offer them holistic education, teach them at least one foreign language, make them computer literate. It is necessary to instill in them the norms of social behavior, elementary etiquette, and also to adapt them to the demands of the market, directing both upbringing and education towards this goal. We do not dispute even a partial benefit of all of the above, but, having in front of our eyes the current pictures of children from Gaza, everything seems so unfair and offensive, especially the inequality that children around the world experience, just because they were born in different parts of the country.
An insult to humanity
These are devastating facts that, as Albert Camus will write, will never cease to be an insult to humanity. The French author will say that "children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society", and man "even with his greatest effort can only arithmetically reduce the world's suffering". Our world does not diminish, but by potentiating and orchestrating conflicts, it increases the world's suffering. When the conflict escalates, then all those realities like humanitarian and human rights simply do not exist. International institutions, such as the UN Security Council, are unable to pass even a resolution that would even suggest a ceasefire, a humanitarian pause or something similar. After that, how can you trust those institutions?
In the sea of analysis of the events that followed Hamas' terrorist act, which itself was directed against children, the reflection of the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the author's article for The Guardian seems to us somewhat different, serious but with a human face. He states what is more or less known to everyone: that our world does not have adequate mechanisms to combat the violation of children's rights. It reminds us of the episodes from Israel and Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar and Ukraine, in which the international community failed by showing almost nothing to protect the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable, namely children. If we fail to create "safe spaces and make sure children are protected," writes Brown, how will we be able to protect children in wars that are being fought and not in the public eye. All religious traditions agree on the need to protect children's lives, all the achievements of civilization are also on this background, international humanitarian law both theoretically and practically proposes measures, but all this is painfully insufficient and casts a shadow on the entire century of which we are a part. By the way, Gordon Brown and his wife lost their daughter Jennifer Jane, who died just seven days after birth, due to complications caused by premature birth. Perhaps that is why, we have the impression, he sincerely sympathizes with children's suffering and proposes a radical change in the system of child protection in every storm of war.
However, even if the system were to change, the lives of children in all those parts of the world affected by wars have already been irretrievably lost, and the reputation of the international community, which has never been respectable, has been further damaged. The entire construct of human and humanitarian rights slowly collapsed before the eyes of the world at that moment when it proved to be completely powerless to protect the lives of the smallest among us, the innocent children - the most tragic victims of war.
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