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Human
Rights & Social Justice
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Nepal:
Displaced children face hardship
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IRIN,
8 November 2008
"When
can we go home?" is Furma Lama's constant refrain. The 10-year-old has
spent the last eight years displaced since her family fled Ramechhap District,
100km east of the capital, in fear of former Maoists rebels.
The
rebels, who had accused them of being government spies, seized their farm
and livestock, leaving nothing to live on and forcing the family to move
to Kathmandu to find work and help.
However,
her parents work as daily wage labourers in local construction sites and
factories earning barely US$2 per day.
Furma
and her four siblings are forced to sleep on the cold floor, share their
clothes, and eat only one meal a day.
"There
is never enough to eat. We're eating less nowadays to save for the coming
months," said her younger brother Gautam.
''Most
of the displaced children need humanitarian support. Sadly they have been
ignored.''
Problems
worsening for children
Despite
the end of the decade-long armed conflict in 2006, more than 50,000 displaced
persons, many of them children, are still unable to go back to their villages
due to fear of the former rebels and their refusal to return their farmlands.
Thousands
of displaced children such as Furma and Gautam continue to live under difficult
circumstances with their impoverished relatives or parents in the capital
and other cities.
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| "Most
of the displaced children need humanitarian support. Sadly they have been
ignored," child rights activist Karna Bahadur Shahi, who runs a shelter
for orphans and displaced children, told IRIN.
"Their
situation is really bad, especially in the capital, where getting aid support
is more difficult," said Shahi, explaining that most aid agencies told
him their programmes were more focused on areas outside the capital.
Now
Shahi is appealing for help for displaced children through religious groups,
both Christians and Hindus. |
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His team also regularly approaches households
in the capital for donations of food and clothes. For
children of the displaced in the country's urban areas, prospects look
bleak.
Education
support needed
"The
government should at least show some sensitivity towards the plight of
the displaced children," said internally displaced person (IDP) rights
activist Gopal Bahadur Shah from Maobadi Pirit Rastriya Sangharsa Samiti,
a national committee of conflict-displaced families.
"It
should introduce education programmes so that they can regularly attend
school," he said.
Yet
government officials, requesting anonymity, blamed the lack of updated
information for a clearer picture of the displaced children's situation.
Aid
agencies explained that since displaced children were scattered around
the capital, conducting research was difficult.
However,
IDPs explained that all the aid agencies and the government had to do was
announce their presence and they would gather anywhere and at any time
with the children.
"I
want to study. I want to go to school," said seven-year-old Hukum Prasad
Oli in the capital, where he is living with relatives, who were also displaced
from the remote Rukum District, nearly 500km northwest of Kathmandu. Oli's
father died while his mother disappeared after leaving him with his aunt.
Some
local community schools have tried to help sponsor the education of the
displaced and orphaned children such as Oli but have to provide evidence
from local government officials in their native villages that both parents
were lost in the conflict.
Credit
IRIN 2008
Copyright
© UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2008
[
This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
Integrated
Regional Information Networks (IRIN), part of the UN Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). |
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