Today, the administration in Afghanistan is in the hands of those Afghans who have been fighting each other for years. Only a fresh generation that grows up in peace and harmony and is more educated can move Afghanistan out of the grave instability and backwardness it is facing.
It feels like the high government authorities, parliamentarians, senators and influential political and non-political intellectuals have lost their eye sight as they cannot see poor Afghan children who reach vehicles on almost every traffic signal and start cleaning them with a hope to receive some pennies to kill their hunger. The number of such children is on the rise; as no measure is in place to address their plight. In the last ten years millions of dollars have been poured into Afghanistan with which every Afghan family could get $15,000. With that amount all families would send their children to schools rather than to works. Nonetheless, all those aids to Afghanistan have gone futile filling the bank accounts of corrupt individuals inside and outside the Afghan government.
In Afghanistan the children are deprived of their basic rights, they are subject to serious mental and physical violence, they work hard dawn to dark whether it is scorching summer or freezing winter and are utilized for launching terror attacks or sexual abuse. Despite that, Afghan children have not forgotten to smile. They use the shortest opportunity they find to play and chill without thinking of tomorrow. This is the responsibility of government to think about the present and future of children of Afghanistan but the government seems to be sleeping like log turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the grave sufferings of children.
Today, the children of Afghanistan need to nurture in a peaceful environment. But peace is going to remain a dream for Afghanistan as no end to the ongoing conflicts in here is visible. The entire key to the success in Afghanistan is education of the young towards tolerance, understanding and respect for all faiths and cultures and empowering them with basic aid, school supplies and economic opportunities, while providing security from the bad guys.
Nonetheless, the lingering war and poverty would never let the dreams of a prosperous Afghanistan come true. This year on Children's day, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Work and Social Affairs (MoLSA), Ali Eftekhari, said, "The situation of children in the country is not satisfactory, currently there are 6 million vulnerable kids in the country, we have sheltered and covered two million up to now. Most of these kids are without any shelter due to family violence."
Endemic violence is inflicting considerable psychological trauma and distress on children in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) says that many Afghan children have witnessed acts of violence, seeing people being killed in bomb attacks or seeing dead bodies on the streets. At the same time a 2009 study by England's Durham University, the first large-scale survey of Afghan children's mental health, reported that one in five children suffers from psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
On the education side, there has been notable development as millions of boys and girls are attending schools but we must not forgets that poverty and insecurity are keeping millions of children away from schools. In 2000, when the situation was under the Taliban only 21 percent of boys and less than 1 percent of girls were enrolled in schools, there has been a handsome increment in enrollment since the fall of Taliban though. Today more than 5 million children go to school despite that, according to UNICEF, more than 30 percent of children of elementary-school age are working on the streets in Afghanistan and are often their family's sole breadwinners. That means that millions of children are not going to school.
The problem of child labor is extreme in Afghanistan with 21 percent of children working to feed their families. Although they are involved in all sorts of works, a noteworthy number of children work in coal mines for hours without any proper protection. The wage they receive is about one dollar per day. It has been reported that some of the children working in these mines are below the age of ten. The government is lacking any proper policy for these children although it knows they work in the most hostile condition in the country.
Laws about laborers are quite vague and contain certain pitfalls. According the laws in Afghanistan, every teenager whose age is above 14 can work 35 hours a week. But in the view Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) the laws about labors are not implementable. Seeing that children of different ages are involved in various sorts of works, in regards of children affairs there is lawlessness in Afghanistan. Based on the figures from AIHRC, there 200 children that work in coal mines located in Bamiyan province.
They work in different shifts and because the mines are at quite a far distance from the homes of these children, they have to remain at mines day and night. The same condition is deemed to be prevailing in other 33 provinces of Afghanistan. Working in coal mines has the worst consequences for the children especially for their health. Hundreds of child laborers in informal and/or illegal coal mines in Bamyan and Sar-e-Pol provinces, in central and northern Afghanistan respectively, have respiratory and eye infections and are exposed to other dangers, according to health officials in both provinces. Regular inhalation of coal dust can cause serious respiratory and lung diseases, such as asthma-causing anthracosis. Harmful bacteria and dirt in coal dust can also damage the eyes, health experts say.
Children are the future builders of a country. Today, the administration in Afghanistan is in the hands of those Afghans who have been fighting each other for years. Only a fresh generation that grows up in peace and harmony and are more educated can move Afghanistan out of the grave instability and backwardness it facing. Therefore, optimal efforts should be in place to counter the growing troubles of children in this country.