Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    WHEN thinking about childhood, people naturally imagine heartwarming scenes of children living happily with their parents and playing with their peers, just as Amir and Hassan in the non-fiction book “The Kite Runner” spent their happy childhood flying kites before the Afghanistan War.

    However, history always repeats itself. As the eruption of the Afghanistan War brought Amir’s and Hassan’s favorite game to a halt, the ongoing wars in countries like Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Yemen have been negatively impacting many children’s daily lives.

    With scarce food supplies, limited access to medical care and education, family separation and violence, these children are paying a high price.

    Recently, a photo taken at a refugee camp on Syria’s border went viral on the Facebook. The photo shows a 4-year-old Syrian girl named Adi Hudea “surrendering” to a Turkish photographer, her arms raised and her lips tightly pursed because she mistook the man’s camera for a gun.

    The war in Syria took away not only her father’s life, but also badly damaged her mentality. Adi Hudea is only one of the 7.6 million Syrian children whose lives have been badly affected by the war.

    According to the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund, since the Syria war broke in 2011, about 9,000 children have been killed, over 2 million children are living in isolated areas that can’t be reached by humanitarian assistances because of the constant threat of violence, and around 2.6 million children have dropped out of school.

    Apart from Syria, the situations in Yemen and parts of the Ukraine are awful as well. On March 31, UNICEF released two reports on child casualties in Yemen and Ukraine. One says at least 62 children have been killed and 30 injured during fighting in Yemen over the past week. The other says over 109 children have been injured and 42 killed by landmines and unexploded ordnances in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine since March last year.

    Adi Hudea and other pitiful children really deserve international attention. They are waiting desperately for rationed humanitarian aid. Some are helping their parents sell flowers, drinks and cigarettes to support their families while in the midst of despair and depression. In Nigeria, countless girls have been abducted just for attending school by terrorist group Boko Haram. In Islamic-State-controlled places, children are being recruited and trained to be child soldiers, firing squads and suicide bombers.

    What can be done to protect children from war violence? Despite the fact that international humanitarian assistances for children keeps growing, war violence has hardly decreased. As a U.N. official said, UNICEF and other humanitarian groups can seek more donations, but they can’t build a peaceful world for children unless war-torn countries have the political willingness to solve conflicts. Without the full respect and implementation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, more children will be victimized by wars.

    Now many children in war-torn areas are either fleeing to safer countries, as Amir escaped to the U.S. in “The Kite Runner,” or trying to build a brand-new country from a chaotic one, which Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai has vowed to do. Obviously, escape is not a permanent solution, and fighting alone by children is powerless. It is time for adults to join hands together to build a peaceful world.

    (The author is an editor with the News Desk at China Radio International.)