For millions of the children in the region, this has been a year too often marked by violence, fear and abuse.Poor health care, a lack of education, forced child marriages, sexual abuse and other problems have been worsened by the conflict in many countries in the Middle East.
How big a crisis this is for the youngest and most vulnerable members of society was underlined last week in Dubai at the Global Child Forum, an annual conference that was held outside Sweden for the first time.
When asked to describe what was being done to end the suffering, forum chairman Ulf Karlberg spoke of “firefighting” the very serious, grave abuse that is happening every day in these countries to an estimated 150 million to 200 million people.
“Child work, child soldiers, trafficking and sexual abuse, prostitution, you have the whole field of abuses that you can imagine, particularly in the poorer countries,” he said.
Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s fund, says the conflict in Syria has killed 7,000 children and left more than five million in need of humanitarian support.
Three million children have been displaced, one in five schools has been destroyed or converted for military or other use, while fewer than half of the country’s hospitals are fully functioning. The amount of safe drinking water has been halved, while 1.5 million children are refugees.
In Iraq, those responsible for the terrorist insurgency have been accused of being directly responsible for the deaths and physical and sexual abuse of scores of children.
In Israel, the country’s 50-day bombardment of the Gaza Strip this past summer was reported to have killed more than 500 children, with more dying in clashes in Libya, the UN says.
“If you were to interview these children many of them would like to get away,” Mr Karlberg says.
“Some of them are prepared to lose their lives to get across the Mediterranean Sea to get into Europe.
“People they say, ‘Perhaps there should be a legal framework’. Well, there is. Almost all the nations of the world signed the Child’s Right Convention 25 years ago.
“So there is an instrument, there is an agreement, there is a global contract on actually how to look after and respect children’s’ rights.”
Although the convention is the most widely ratified in the world, three countries have yet to sign it — the US, Somalia and South Sudan.
In Somalia, Unicef says one in seven children in the country dies before the age of five, primarily of preventable illnesses, and only 40 per cent go to primary school.
In South Sudan, almost one million children under the age of five will need treatment for malnutrition by the end of the year.
But it is the inconsistent implementation of international conventions that is perhaps one of the biggest long-term obstacles facing the children’s rights movement in the Arab world, the head of the League of Arab States’ Women, Family and Childhood division, Inas Mekkawy, says.
While the League has tried to adopt the best practices advocated by bodies such as the UN and the European Union, Ms Mekkawy notes there is variation in how far the principles of non-discrimination, participation, protection, education and health have been ratified and implemented by Arab countries.
“When there is an economic problem or crisis, this prevents the children from accessing education and health services and pushes them towards work,” she says. “In many places children are the main source, or the only source, of income for the family.”
Across the Middle East and North Africa region there are more than nine million child labourers. The Arab Charter on Human rights, adopted in 1994 and ratified by the UAE in 2008, addresses various children’s rights issues.
Ms Mekkawy says there needs to be not just cooperation between the League and international bodies, but also technical support and cooperation within the Arab world and the private sector.
“The matter of protection is very important now, even for the countries who live in peace.”
While some of the deep-seated cultures and traditions of the region bring many benefits, she says others are “stumbling stones” when it comes to children’s rights.
“Issues concerning girls and women, this is one of the most important issues. We really have a problem concerning that,” Ms Mekkawy says.
“Concerning the cultural issue there’s a lot of progress, especially in the Gulf area, because the standard of education we have achieved in this area is very high and education for girls has become part of the culture – even education abroad. They have achieved a high number of working women and have integrated women into economic and political issues.”
Elsewhere around the region, the Arab world, she says, is facing a kind of “cultural terrorism”.
The Save the Children charity says a third of girls in the developing world are married before 18. In Egypt, Sudan, Morroco and Iran, more than 15 per cent of people are married before 18.
According to Human Rights Watch more than half of Yemeni women are married before they reach adulthood and 10 per cent before the age of 15. In Saudi Arabia, laws regarding age have only recently been put in place and there are still exceptions.
Underage girls who are forced to marry are sometimes sexually assaulted by their older husbands, causing serious and sometimes fatal injuries.
Such issues have been compounded in the Syrian refugee community where there are increasing reports across Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq of children being forced into labour, marriages and even prostitution.
The UN High Comissioner for Refugees says children often work in dangerous and exploitative conditions for low pay in Jordan and Lebanon, with almost half of the families reliant on the income.
Children born in exile often have no birth certificates, leaving them stateless. A survey in Lebanon last year showed more than three quarters of 781 refugee infants had no birth certificate.
Mr Karlberg says many organisations either wash their hands of humanitarian work because they think it is charity and something that does not concern them. Others, he says, “throw money on the fire”, instead of engaging with their resources.
But there are areas of hope.
Some countries in the region, including the UAE and Jordan, are praised for their changes to citizenship laws for children born to foreign fathers and domestic mothers.
In January, the UAE passed a Child Rights Law that allows child protection specialists to remove children from their homes to protect them from domestic abuse.
“By producing some examples, locally from this region, you can see that there are many ways where the various parts of society can work together and create wonderful things,” says Mr Karlberg.
One example is the Pearl Initiative, established in 2011 by leading Emirati businessman Badr Jafar to promote transparency and accountability in the GCC private sector.
Mr Jafar, chief executive of Crescent Enterprises, believes the private sector cannot match the philanthropic sector’s ability to respond to humanitarian emergencies with haste, but should instead work with it and “use the power of business to address our social challenges”.
He acknowledges that given some of the scandals that emerged after the financial downturn, some may question the private sector’s commitment to philanthropy and charitable causes.
But Mr Jafar insists: “We’ve been able to connect with businessmen and women because they understand the logic behind doing something which will ultimately benefit them as a business.”
For the region as a whole, Ms Mekkawy says: “Maybe in some of the Arab countries the case is better than in others. But concerning the areas of wars and conflicts, which kind of laws can be implemented?”
halbustani@thenational.ae
