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Children suffer amid violence and poverty in Myanmar

by Justin Forsyth | UNICEF
Tuesday, 23 May 2017 12:56 GMT

A boy walks among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine State near Sittwe, Myanmar May 3, 2016. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Conflict, poverty and under-development are weighing down the lives of children in Myanmar

On May 24, Myanmar will host a national peace conference as part of the Government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts to end a series of long-running ethnic conflicts in different parts of the country. UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director Justin Forsyth, who recently visited Myanmar, says that as well as achieving peace, the country should make sure no child is left behind. 

It’s only when 10-year-old Min Thiha unfastens the buttons on his shirt that you see the jagged scar beneath: an ugly welt of raised skin running vertically up his belly.

Min Thiha’s injury was caused by an explosion two years ago, which killed two other boys from this village in the remote south-east of Myanmar. He still struggles with the memory of what happened.

“We were playing in the forest. My friend threw something he found but it didn’t explode.”

The next boy who picked up the metal object wasn’t so lucky. The force of the explosion threw his body into the grounds of a nearby monastery.

“I saw him die,” says Min Thiha, simply.

Myanmar children in conflict-hit areas risk getting left behind - UN

Local people say that the object the boys found that day was probably a grenade left over from fighting that had engulfed the area some weeks earlier.

In this contested corner of Myanmar, clashes between the army and forces of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army are such a regular recurrence that every home has a bunker underneath where families take shelter when fighting flares.

Such realities jar with what one sees in Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon, with its high-rise buildings, traffic jams, and other signs of rapid economic development.

When you travel to remote parts of the country you often meet children whose lives and prospects are weighed down by the combined effects of conflict, poverty and under-development.

Children like 10-year old Zu Zu Mi who lives with her father and five siblings in one of the many displacement camps in Kachin State, close to the border with China. A total of 87,000 civilians in Kachin live in similar camps after fleeing their homes due to intermittent clashes between the army and various ethnic armed groups.

“Our village was right in the middle of the fighting,” Zu Zu Mi told UNICEF recently. “During the night we were told to move, so we did. I was so scared.”

Driving through Kachin State you see villages like Zu Zu Mi’s – empty and abandoned by their inhabitants and steadily being enveloped by the surrounding jungle.

While in Myanmar I visited Rakhine State, where an estimated 120,000 Muslims – including many Rohingya and other ethnic minority children-- live in displacement camps and are barred from returning to their home communities as a result of intercommunal conflict that erupted in 2012.

Children from both ethnic communities suffer the consequences not just of the violence, but of the under-development that makes Rakhine one of the poorest and most isolated parts of Myanmar.

I met two 11-year-olds – Myo Thein, a Muslim boy, and Ma Ya Tu, an ethnic Rakhine girl. They both love learning, but neither of them will be able to move on to middle school next year.

Services like schools and clinics are lacking in Rakhine, a state where up to 78 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, and where half of children under the age of five are stunted due to malnutrition.

Tackling these underlying issues were among the recommendations put forward recently by the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan – a call that UNICEF endorsed. The good news is that these recommendations are supported by the Government.

This week, we are issuing a Child Alert on Myanmar, a report that sheds light on the enormous challenges that children face and highlights the opportunities being opened up by the Government’s reform programme.

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