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UNICEF United Nations Children's Fund |
Feedback on the International Children’s
Day
This year, International Children’s Day was marked for the fiftieth time around the world. Regret as we do, we have to admit that the occasion is still, after so long a time, as relevant as it has been all these years.
What, in fact, worries and dreads our children? How can adults realistically respond to our children’s and adolescents’ concerns?
Internet conference was arranged on this day on line where questions asked by children first even were answered by Mrs. Valentina Matvienko, Vice-Premier of the Russian Government, Mrs. Elena Chepurnikh, Deputy Education Minister, Mrs. Galina Karelova, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Development, Mrs. Rosemary McCreery, UNICEF Representative in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus, and experts in Russian and international law from the Research Institute of Law Enforcement and Public Order under the Federal Procurator General, and from Moscow’s State International Relations Institute.
Those were blunt and, at times, awkward questions. The official guests had to admit that the law was not always complied with, as, for example, in arreas in benefit payments to the disabled. Or else ignorance of the law may lead to tragedies. Alena Dubrovina, 14, who lives in Kalmykia, had a request, "I would ask the Government to prohibit parents to force their children into becoming prostitutes." The answer was that children are not totally defenseless: the Russian Penal Code has an article to this effect and the UN had addopted an additional protocol to the Convention on Children’s Rights.
A question came from Lipetsk, "Can parents sell their apartment without asking their child first?" And listeners in Orel asked to be told about any benefits for the disabled. Asya Sharapova’s question was, "Much attention is turned today to refugees and the disabled, but then is there a programme or a mechanism for normal children to get aid?"
Vice-Premier Valentina Matvienko pointedly acknowledged the need for amendments to be made to the existing laws to focus on parents’ liability in their behaviour towards their children.
In her answer to a question concerning the Convention on Childern’s Rights, Deputy Education Minister Mrs. Elena Chepurnikh spoke about new projects to disseminate knowledge of the Convention. A new high school course in civil education is to be introduced in the coming school year and a large-scale action, entitled The Citizen, is to be launched soon.
UNICEF Representative Rosemary McCreery answered a question asked by Natalia Vladimirova in Samara about international experience in juvenile justice and efforts, if any, undertaken in Russia in this area, with reference to some provisions of the Convention on Children’s Rights. A question from Nikita Zhuravlev, 15, from Orel, "What do people at UNICEF think about children’s role in society?", surprisingly echoed the efforts by the UNICEF to promote a large-scale involvement of children themselves in the life of their societies. Sergei Kiselev from Kovilikino, a town in Mordovia, supported his peer from Orel. Sergei’s comment flashed on to the screen, "Many more social functions must be thought up for children to apply themselves to and to take responsibility for what they are doing."
In all, the Conference web-site was visited by 13,800 children. It was not always easy matter to find convincing answers to their questions – children are an inquisitive and terribly skeptical lot. The main purpose of the Conference – direct communication to find out about children’s worries – was certainly fulfilled.
UNICEF Helps Children of the North
Caucasus
A plane load of humanitarian aid to refugees in the North Caucasus from UNICEF, one in a long succession, landed in Vladikavkaz. It brought water containers, first aid kits, thermal containers and vaccine, carriers, school supplies, children’s clothing and toys. Over a thousand children living in camps for internally displaced people in Ingushetia will receive jackets, t-shirts, jeans, toys and games, and several thousand more will get notebooks and crayons. If anyone thinks toys, notebooks and pencils to be anything but first priority, he will be deeply wrong.
Actually locked up in their tent or, still worse, camps, children feel less sure of themselves and more uncomfortable with every passing day. In winter, they thought everything would be entirely different with the coming of spring and they would find themselves, by some miracle, at home again. While adults know that miracles never happen, children still hope they will, one day.
Medea Kushanashvili, a young Georgian from Grozny, has been living with her family in a carriage at the Severny camp for eight months. She turned seventeen here, in her carriage. Her world has been cramped into her carriage compartment. "It’s so boring here," she says. "I think I’m going crazy. All I want now is for life to be normal again. No matter where, in Grozny or in Georgia…. Whichever it is, I terribly want to get out of this carriage…." Medea studied French and wanted to enter the university in Grozny. And she keeps dreaming, and believing, even now, that she will begin her studies in fall. This hope gives her strength to wait.
Selim, 12, confesses he has never liked going to school. But here, in the camp, with nothing else to do, he adores classes. He shows his school-in-a-bag kit he received from UNICEF in winter. His exercise books are filled in his neat handwriting, and the top marks his teacher gave him. "I do not want the war to go on when I grow up," the boy says.
Abdulla, 14, lives with his thirteen relatives in a former cowshed. His mother ventured out to Grozny, their home town, to see if they could go back to begin a new life once again, after they had made a fresh start following the first Chechen war four years ago. Abdulla has lived through its horrors.
Selim, Abdulla, and Heda, 11, her mother
killed in 1994 and her father missing in action, and all other small residents of the
Severny camp go regularly to classes in psychosocial rehabilitation at the Starlet
children’s rehabilitation center. The center is run jointly with UNICEF. Tamara
Khadueva, its coordinator, speaks about outdoor games and individual classes in carriages
and tents, which the Starlet employees organize to entertain and motivate 530 children in
the camp in all.
Formally, the school year is over in the tent schools. Hamsat Amaeva, a first-grade teacher at the Severny camp, who has taught for 25 years, complimented her pupils for having learned to read and write their names, and much else. And added, "If only you could know how much they rejoice at every pencil they get, every pen, and every notebook…. Every little thing people give them raises their spirits and moods."
Precisely to lift spirits and moods, a drawing contest was arranged at the Sputnik camp on June 1, the International Children’s Day. Everyone was given sweets as a gift and the winners received special UNICEF prizes. On the same day, Chechen children from IDP camps and their Ingushi peers competed in chalk drawing on a macadam square in Nazran, the Ingushi capital. Here, too, winners were given UNICEF gifts.
