Try explaining the necessity of war to a badly injured child

Our major shared global responsibility should be protecting vulnerable minors caught up in adults’ bullyragging wars. Often deliberately targeted, hapless child refugees are routinely murdered, bound, raped, starved or humiliated by authorities charged with looking after their welfare. 

The UN reports that, of the 35 million people who have had to flee their homes in the face of violent persecution and armed conflict, more than 17 million are children. One in seven children in Afghanistan won’t live to see their fifth birthday. More than 1,000 Syrian youngsters have been brutally murdered. There are an estimated 250,000 child soldiers in the world today, approximately 40 per cent of them girls often forced to become “sex slaves”. 

Western governments have been complicit in targeting the only secular governments in the Middle East – Iraq, Syria and Libya – thereby instigating and undermining fear, hatred and sectarian divisiveness. 

Imperialistic, oily vested interests have devastated the lives of children across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The shameful reality, however, is that the US and UK governments, whose actions were a root cause of the humanitarian crisis, refuse to accept responsibility for their devastatingly immoral misdeeds. Displaced children are particularly susceptible to exploitation, kidnapping, abduction and forced recruitment by both sides into the heavily armed conflict, but pleas for supportive assistance remain unheard or ignored.

No Holds Bard 

Charles Frederickson