A global citizenship for children?

A global citizenship for children?

Santi W.E. Soekanto, Contributor, Jakarta

There should really be global citizenship for children -- one
that ensures that they get the first call for the resources of
the world, regardless of their location and background.

A special United Nations of Children to fight for their
interests would also be helpful, even without Nobel Prize
laureates at the helm.

A utopia it may be, but why should 12-year-old Sri
Wahyuningsih have to drop out of elementary school in order to
scavenge for her family, rooting around in garbage in Depok, West
Java, while 13-year-old Ulrika Almquist in Stockholm has access
to thousands of good library books, good schooling and good food?

Why should 2-year-old Iji of Aceh now have to stay in an
orphanage in East Jakarta pining for his parents who
"disappeared" and are presumed dead in the conflict zone, while
Max in Bristol, UK, gets both of his parents to take him to the
well-equipped playground at Brandon Hill?

Why should 3-year-old Dewi in a refugee camp in Poso, Central
Sulawesi, who is so undernourished that she looks like a shrunken
old woman, be unable to even go to the hospital because of the
ongoing armed clashes around her, while Takuya in Tokyo lives in
a fortified environment where every child is guaranteed the best
hospital care?

A 15-year-old Indonesian maid in Singapore attempting to
escape an abusive employer was raped twice -- and may even have
contracted syphilis -- by a cab driver that had promised to help
her seek shelter. (This took place in 1998 and the driver has
since been sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and 24 strokes
of the cane.) If she could, the girl would have preferred to have
spent her time the way her counterparts did in the Western world
-- working part-time for pocket money and vacationing on the
beach.

If possible, thousands of young girls in Indonesian
communities would not want to be perceived as marketable assets
for families with limited resources. Countless publications have
reported how in these cases, parents are paid for the bonded
services of their child whether for domestic work, work in the
commercial sex industry, or other hazardous work.

Why should the children in Maluku, Papua, Aceh, Central
Sulawesi and other places in the 22 Indonesian provinces where
the 1.3 million internally displaced people are scattered, have
to languish in makeshift tents in refugee camps, when in
Jakarta's urban centers children throw away good money at video
game arcades?

For that matter, why should children in Afghanistan and
Palestine and other part of the world be the first to suffer
because of violence they did not start?

Only those at the lower end of the scale feel the gaps of the
world.

Such is the case even in Indonesia where some 120 million
people are living in or near poverty, as the World Bank recently
revealed. Approximately 30 million children under the age of 17
here, in fact, are facing what UNICEF Executive Director Carol
Bellamy has described as a "long-term emergency".

In August 1998, she stated in Jakarta that the fate of
millions of Indonesian women and children was at stake. Then,
"Some four million Indonesian children below the age of two are
already severely malnourished and more than 30 percent of the
country's children are at risk of failing to complete primary
school."

The various loan packages offered by the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and other lending agencies may not be
enough to turn things around. "It will take years for Indonesia
to recover," she stated, "and sustained international aid is
critically important to saving the lives of children.

The world community must do what is necessary to rescue the
potential of Indonesian children through good nutrition and
schooling that will enable them to participate in the competitive
world of the 21st century."

How fortunate for the world population that those children are
often the most resilient beings. Life knocks them about and
throws one abuse after another at them, yet they grow up into
strong adults. The child victims of numerous natural or man-made
disasters in the past have grown up to become community leaders
-- one does not have to look far to find such people.

One such person that comes to mind is Nani Nurahman Sutoyo,
who witnessed the assassination of her general father in the 1965
coup attempt blamed on the now-banned communist party.

She suffered the trauma for decades and yet she grew up
strong. She became a psychologist and recently led a movement to
"forgive but not forget" the atrocity.

It would be inappropriate, however, to ever take this
resilience for granted because, with the progress of time,
children are facing even more complicated challenges. According
to USAID, there is an increasing worldwide demand for girls in
the lucrative industries of sex tourism, commercial sex, cheap
sweatshop labor, and cheap and compliant domestic workers.

In Indonesia, there is demand nationwide and in well-known
tourist and entertainment areas (i.e., Bali and the Riau Islands)
for young girls and women for the commercial sex industry. The
demand is also increasing for the cheap labor of Indonesian women
and girls in the Middle East.

There is also an increased demand for ever-younger (and thus
disease-free) Indonesian sex and entertainment workers in nearby
Singapore and Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Currently, it
appears that organized trafficking networks of Indonesian and
Chinese-Indonesians is a large and very lucrative business
venture involving low risks. Koalisi Perempuan, a woman's group,
estimates that as many as 150,000 Indonesian women and children
are trafficked internationally per year.

In many cases, the girls' youth and virginity are sold at a
price cheaper than the price of a goat.

It is a good thing that Indonesian lawmakers are now working
on the child protection bill that would detail the obligations of
parents, families, community and the government toward children.
The suffering of countless children both here and elsewhere,
however, tells us that the responsibility rests with every one of
us across states and borders.