LONDON: A Loya Jirga will be held later this year to address the ‘grim situation’ of millions of children in Afghanistan, special United Nations envoy Olara Otunnu said.

Otunnu, special representative for the UN Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflicts said the Loya Jirga will include children rather than be just an assembly about children.

Otunnu who toured Afghanistan from July 22 to 28 has drawn up several recommendations to be presented to the United Nations Security Council and to the General Assembly as well as other international agencies.

Several steps have been taken in Afghanistan already in line with his recommendations. The Afghan government has agreed to set up a national commission for children that will involve several departments like health and education “so that children become central in creating policies and in allocation of resources,” Otunnu said.

In an extension of the Loya Jirga idea, Otonnu has proposed a radio station to be called Voice of Children. The radio station, to be a part of Radio Afghanistan, will have humour and entertainment programmes and also programmes for raising concerns and settling disputes, Otonnu said.

“Over the last two decades children have paid a particularly heavy toll,” Otunnu said. Several facts point to the crisis children have faced in Afghanistan, he added. Among them:

- One in three children have lost either one parent or both parents.

- Two in three children have witnessed violence - More than one million children are orphans.

- About 20 per cent of all children die before the age of one, 25 per cent die before the age of five.

- Of about 200,000 victims of landmines, about half are children. And children remain about half of the 300 landmine injuries still taking place every month.

- More than two million children have been displaced by the war.

- More than half the children in Afghanistan suffer from chronic malnutrition.

- All sides in the conflict have used children as child soldiers.

- Less than a third of boys and less than a tenth of girls have had any form of primary education.

- In Kabul about 50,000 street children are the household’s primary income earners.

- Children under 18 are about half the Afghan population of 22.7 million.

“The most important step now for Afghanistan in its search for durable peace and security is to invest in children and young people,” he said. “We know that the lack of investment in the young in the past has contributed to radical indoctrination by negative forces,” he said.

Serious difficulties remain despite the announcement of heavy aid packages for Afghanistan, he said. Primary among these is schooling and education. “Teachers are still not being paid salaries by and large,” he said.

“The problem of malnutrition which is doing both physical and intellectual damage needs to be addressed,” he said. “About 95 per cent of children being brought to hospitals are showing sings of severe malnutrition.”

Otonnu has proposed a food for school programme under which families would be given food for their children. There is food like rice and lentils available in the market, but most people have no money to buy it, he said.

Most children live on tea and bread. Just some basic food to families would make sure that children can get off the streets and save themselves from malnutrition, he said.

“We know that so many children are on the street because they have run away from home, not because they are engaged in any anti-social activities,” he said. “Their families cannot afford to send them to school, and so they go out to earn what they can.”

Their families need to be helped out of chronic poverty, he said. Otonnu has proposed a series of income-generating projects for these families that would seek particularly to support mothers. “At present 25 per cent of women die at childbirth, half cannot give birth naturally, and most cannot breast-feed their children because they are suffering from malnutrition,” he said.

“I am hopeful that if the international community and the Afghan government can make the strategic decisions to invest in children, Afghanistan will enter a new phase,” he said. Children have to be at the heart of it, he said, “in part because they have suffered the most, in part because they are the future.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.