SARAJEVO - NOBODY CARES ABOUT CHILDREN

Elections and Election Promises

AIM Sarajevo, 13 September, 1997

If by any chance disabled children started waving their crutches in front of the building of the Presidency, or threatening that they would abstain from voting, demanding resignations, or enumerating all failures of the current authorities and in the end ask "what is the use of all this", maybe some money for their social aid would be found.

As it is, children have no right to vote, they do not circle any party on ballots, nor do they decide about the election victory. Or defeat. Their disability allowances are, therefore, delayed or not paid at all.

A child, civilian victim of war, who continues life without one or both legs, without hands, an eye, or completely paralyzed, can expect to get for the care it needs, 89.5 German marks a month at the most. The canton of Sarajevo pays this sum regularly, and the other cantons do not pay it at all since June 1996.

According to data, two thousand one hundred boys and girls on the territory of the federation are more or less disabled due to mortar shells, snipers and mines. Not at a single assembly session was it possible to hear that entrances to schools should be made accessible to Bosnian children in wheel-chairs, because they are helpless at staircases. Never have politicians in pre-election mutual accusations reproached anybody for the delay in paying children's allowances. And never have party leaders competed who would do more for the worn out Bosnian child.

In the four years of the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina, 16,854 children were killed, who were at the age from a few days to 18 years old. It is true that this number is often exploited at meetings with official and unofficial guests from abroad in attempts to illustrate how bloody the war in Bosnia was. But their unfortunate mothers and fathers are never visited. The war has ended for these parents on the day a lump of earth hit the small coffin lowered into the ground. For some, it has not been over yet.

The latest data of the International Committee of the Red Cross say that on the territory of Bosnia & Herzegovina, more than 1,335 boys and girls are considered to be missing. This is not a final number. In the state which is living in peace for almost two years already, a few meters below war separation lines, in woods around what used to be detention camps, along the Drina river valley and other rivers, there are children's graves which are forgotten. In mass graves, about remains of about fifty children have been found already, among them a four month old baby, Amina Dzaferovic. Mothers are persistently demanding, begging and pleading for their disappeared children to be found (or their corpses at least), but not in a single pre-election speech of big or small parties was it ever mentioned that, should they win, this would be at least attempted.

None of the politicians has even visited Vozuca, a small place in the north of the country, where close to each other, eight hundred widows from Srebrenica and a thousand of their children live. Orphans. Nobody has come to Vozuca to promise bread and water. They do not have even that much. Election candidates have not noticed that an independent daily has written about the hungry and forgotten orphans from Vozuca for a few days in a row. About their mothers who are living of aid which might arrive the next day. Or maybe will not. They have not read that children who live there have red faces inflamed of scabies. That they are living in robbed Serb houses. Some of them in Serb sheds. And that their stomachs are growling. They have not been to Vozuca.

The orphans from this region are not the only ones. Thirty two thousand of boys and girls under age live in the Federation without one of their parents. In the past four years they wire killed as combatants, warriors, firemen, policemen... and their wives were left behind, each with a few children. The mothers are usually half-educated or illiterate without a possibility of ever finding a job. That is how thirty two thousand children are forced to finish school in haste, or never to finish it, because they have to care how to survive the day between breakfast and supper. With the 12.8 marks (sometimes) given to them by the state, the children can buy twelve loaves of bread, or twelve litres of milk or twenty kilos of flour. And what if they want some chocolate?

From posters pinned up around towns, candidates are smiling. "I need your vote now", each of these forced smile says. Unfortunately, children do not vote. That is why election candidates do not even have the data about the number of handicapped children and how they live in their notes. Three thousand five hundred and thirty children are disturbed in physical and mental development or have combined disorders. They are the children who had a complicated birth or an error occurred in their genes, and now they cannot live without someone's assistance. They receive hardly ten odd marks a month, if deputies agree that a sum of money be allocated for them from the cantonal budgets. Two thousand seven hundred children whose development was disturbed by family circumstances are also living here, next to us, and there are another thousand and nine hundred uncared for and neglected ones. These are the data from computers and archives of various ministries and institutes, but they can never be heard in either prepared or spontaneous speeches of leaders.

For a country after a war it is not terrible if it has children who are poor, but if two hundred thousand boys and girls are in a situation in which they have a confirmed right to the children's allowance (and it is not paid to them, of course) because they are living in poor families - it is shameful to understate donations, spend money on glorious election campaigns, buy new cars, put up busts, erect new historical monuments.

In houses scattered around Bosnian villages, television sets are scarce, so that most of these children are lucky not to have to listen to offers of a better, brighter, sweeter future... They do not have the right to vote anyway.

Sandra KASALO

(AIM, Sarajevo)