Neingulo Krome
“The ‘best interests of the child’ are universal. They include the right to survival, to healthy development, and to protection from abuse. These things are agreed. They are international standards. But what value do they have in a world which turns its back on hunger and want, on torture, rape, and the exploitation of children? Children’s lives cannot be put on hold while adult society mulls over its obligation towards them”, says an extract from Children’s Rights and squandered opportunities.
Another extract from a statement to the Children’s World Conference on Human Rights says; “The children of the world are young and innocent but they possess something many adults forget at times. And that is, they act through their hearts and emotions which means that they come into this world without prejudice. It is only as they grow older and through the teachings of their parents that they begin to hate”.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the 20th of November 1989, exactly 20 years ago on this day, as the first legally binding instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights – civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, to say that children have human rights too. This Convention sets out these rights in 54 articles and two Optional Protocols, spelling out the basic human rights that children everywhere have, based on the universal belief that “respect for the rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. However, I am not going to discuss what these international standards says about the rights of the child as an integral part of the Universal declaration of human rights, which I am sure, will be addressed in the Technical session that follows. In any case, there is absolutely no dispute that the Child’s Rights is Human Rights, notwithstanding the rationale that the Child deserves more rights than the adult, so to say.
I just want to say that most importantly; I am impressed and encouraged to know that we have The Nagaland Child Rights Committee, which is organizing this one-day seminar to say that children have human rights too, as an organized initiative towards this very particular issue of concern. According to UNICEF, there are two clear identifiable types of emergencies that demands equal attention. They are; ‘loud’ emergencies encompassing natural disasters and armed conflicts, which displace and disable millions of children. And the other is the ‘silent’ emergencies, resulting from entrenched poverty, sickness, lack of knowledge and inadequate services, which cause many more deaths than from famine, flood or war, but which seldom make the headlines. And so how relevant some of these or even all of them are, to our context, could well be the issues to note while seeking to address those problems according to their perspectives.
However, keeping aside all these procedural terminologies, I want to briefly recollect what childhood use to be in the context of our own selves? And Am sure if we search our hearts, every one of us will agree that we too had undergone frustrating childhood at one point of time or the other. To me, it was like a life-time of frustration, in a sense where we could not live or act through our hearts and emotions. And that every day of our life was conditioned by the circumstances surrounding us. But no matter what, the past cannot be re-lived as a matter of fact.
Nevertheless, life in itself provides opportunities in many ways and many means. Therefore, if we as adults desire to re-live our lives to fulfill those we have missed in our childhood, I think we have this opportunity through the Child in our own time. Why don’t we in that case, give our children what we wanted and could not have, according to their needs of their time? Even in our individual and personal lives, we certainly can do that if we really want to translate the cause we profess to espouse into practice. Collectively, we also have the moral responsibility as a socio-political structure to give them their dues what we have borrowed as their preceding generation.
It is also true that while children are the worst victims in any conflict situation, all of us grew up in a conflict situation all our lives, given the fact that our political conflict is more than 60 years now, and almost everyone of us sitting here are much younger than the conflict in terms of the number of years. And what we have learned from this history of our own life-span is hatred, anger, pain and one that deny us to be ourselves. Today our children lives in the midst of internal contradictions filled with agonizing fears from within our own families that can’t differentiate between the enemy and the friend.
To illustrate an unusual, yet self-awakening experience of storytelling; I want to share what I did in the United States last year in March, 2007. And as you may be aware, America is now faced with the problems of immigration particularly from the borders of Mexico. So when we were interacting with the students of Sante Fe High School at Sante Fe the Capital City of the State of New Mexico, the students started talking with so much hatred and violent anger against children of those immigrants, who did odd jobs and studied in different schools of Sante Fe. My job as an International Visitor to the U.S. on Conflict Resolution was to share my experiences in conflict situations as well.
So I started narrating about how we Nagas have suffered for 60 years under military occupation, and how every Naga villages were burnt to ashes, innocent civilians tortured and killed, women raped and so and so forth…. But I ended up by saying, that now we are trying to resolves this decades of political conflict through peace talks that have now taken almost 10 (ten) years at that time, because, both the Naga people, who suffered untold miseries and deaths in hundred thousands, and the Indian soldiers who invaded our lands and perpetrated all kinds of atrocities, were both/all victims of circumstances. In a sense that even the Indian soldiers did not like doing what they did just as much as the Nagas who did not enjoy dying and suffering, but that all these things happened because of compelling circumstances, making both the oppressors and the oppressed - victims.
Perhaps, if we come back to the ground situation, this notion would be more far from the truth as far as we know. And I just don’t know how those thoughts came to occupy my mind at that point of time. And if I were to say them again, I guess it will be not only difficult but even impossible to say them again in another situation. But this was to tell them that they too must learn to love those children by trying to help them to understand the compelling circumstances which drive people out of their homes for their basic need to survive.
All said and done, coming to our own situation and context, we have to teach our children to stop hating, for reasons that are beyond their control and which are neither their creations. But to convince them, we must acknowledge our own shortcomings where we have been wrong because of our insensitiveness to the sentiments of fellow human beings, whether it is in the case of the larger political conflicts, or in the internal contradictions both of which we are now battling with.
Therefore, to talk about the Child’s rights as human rights as a subject for discussion, we can go on and on. But to live and let live the rights of the Child only need to begin from you and me, as an adult, a parent and as responsible citizens of the society. And let me end on another abstract that says; “When the adults begin to act as children and love one another, then and only then will this world be exactly what the creator intended it to be”.
Thank You.
Member, Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights,
Dated the 20th of November, 2008, Zonal Council Hall, Kohima, Nagaland.
