The youngest victims
A stark look at how wars jeopardize children
The fact that so many of the world’s conflicts include the killing of children or the blighting of childhood is criminal.
Apart from the cruelty involved, it is also the moral equivalent of a subsistence farmer eating his seed corn. Not only are we consuming the present, we are also setting the stage for a catastrophic future, peopled by children being tormented out of normality now.
It is also worth noting that American forces are involved in some of the worst international instances of abuse of children by war, displacement and denial of normal health care, education and bodily safety. Venues of U.S. involvement in warfare that hits children include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, West Africa and Yemen.
There are even indications that American government doesn’t care much about the state of American children. Congress has not yet funded the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is rapidly running out of money across the country, and is considering funding the budget shortfall produced by the new tax bill by cutting into Medicaid, 50 percent of which is spent on the welfare of children. There is some indication that Congress will fund CHIP and not gut Medicaid, but the decision-making remains to be done.
The overseas part of the problem is harder to fix, because so many other players are in the picture. A report of the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund released last month spelled it out for the countries whose children are jeopardized. Data include 135 children used as suicide bombers in Nigeria and Cameroon. Sixty percent of the half-million Rohingya people forced out of their homes in Myanmar into poverty-stricken Bangladesh were children. Some 2,300 children were killed or wounded in South Sudan’s meaningless tribal fighting. Some 15 percent of the numerous child soldiers recruited into fighting forces in Somalia are in the Somali national army, trained and equipped by American forces. Some 220,000 children are estimated to be living in the war-torn eastern part of Ukraine.
America has leverage, either through U.S. military involvement, other U.S. aid or political weight in all of these conflicts. Since the socalled collateral damage in all of them is in large part to children, the world’s future, would it not make sense to put U.S. influence to a good use, seeking to end the conflicts in the name of the children? They are paying the immediate price for adults’ folly. Couldn’t we end this, or at least some of it, in the name of saving our own future? Schoolbooks and square meals cost a lot less than drones and bombs in any case.