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Children in Georgia undergo psychosocial rehabilitation. Credit: UNHCR/A.Hollmann Today, there are around 300,000 youngsters who were kidnapped or coerced into becoming child soldiers and sexual slaves. Children in nearly 90 countries live in permanent danger of death or maiming from 60 million land mines. The number of children violently uprooted from their homes and either ‘internally displaced’ within their own countries or forced to flee as refugees to surrounding states, may be as high as 25 million—the equivalent of the population of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden combined. The original Machel report noted that for many young people their world “is a desolate moral vacuum devoid of the most basic human values in which nothing is spared, held sacred or protected.” Nothing much has changed in the interim. In a recent follow-up report, she noted that “modern wars are exploiting, maiming and killing more callously and more systematically than ever before.” Mary Phiri, the editor of a monthly newsletter for teenagers in Zambia wrote poignantly, “If we are the future and we’re dying, there is no future.” We walked for days, for months, thousands of miles. We slept on the ground and often had to eat leaves to survive. People shot at us. Many boys were killed. What happened to my parents? I don’t know. But now we are here, to a new life. And I have seen snow for the first time. One of several thousand “Lost Boys” from Sudan who was resettled in the United States after a horrendous journey lasting years. In September, a Special Session of the General Assembly will review developments since a 1990 Summit on Children and will set priorities for the next decade. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, said progress in tackling children’s issues could be viewed from one of two perspectives—either optimistically as “a glass half full” or pessimistically as “a glass half empty.” There had been major progress, she said, in forcing children’s problems onto the international agenda including that of the U.N. Security Council, achieving the near universal ratification of the children's convention and developing more flexible humanitarian assistance programs for children uprooted from their homes by war and other causes. Nevertheless, the reality also appears to be that many of the crises engulfing children today are getting worse faster than resources become available to tackle them. Olara Otunnu, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on children in armed conflict, said that in the last decade “in many areas such as Sri Lanka, Colombia, Angola things have gotten much worse for children” and the international community had not yet come to grips with the problem. “We spend a lot of time at meetings,” he added. “We have been good at making lots of rules, but much less so at implementing them.” The next 10 years therefore will be just as challenging as the last decade, especially for an agency like UNHCR, which under new High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers, is re-examining its worldwide role, including a six-month evaluation of its children’s programs. How far, for instance, should an agency like UNHCR specialize? How many resources should be allocated to particular problems? Are some projects detracting from UNHCR’s core function of international protection? What exactly is the right balance between available resources and competing projects, all of them worthy within their own context?

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