Nepalese Youth Respond to Call to ‘Plant Flowers, Not Landmines’
By Purna Shova Chitrakar, Nepal Campaign to Ban Landmines
For the past few years, mine incidents have been on the rise in Nepal. Rukum, Rolpa, Salyan, Jajarkot, Kalikot, Surkhet, Gorkha, Kavrepalnmchowk, Sindhupalchowk, Dolakha, Ramechhap and Sindhuli are the districts worst affected by mine explosions. Including sporadic incidents of explosions in various other number of mine infested districts come to be around 50 districts. Tens of hundreds of innocent people have been killed maimed and injured. The situation of law and order has become weaker. A great number of families have been forced to leave their homes and are living as refugees in other comparatively less tense areas. Migrating from the mine-affected areas to other parts of the country has been escalating everyday.
The young people who are really innocent and do not know what will the war do, what will be the people’s life during and after war. I do not know the number, but some big number of young people below the age of 16 has joined the war group and some of them are force to join. Some of the young are targeted from the police side and some from the non-state actor side. They are shot, maimed by mines, raped, jailed, hijacked, and killed.
We believe that the young are our future, our strength and our hope. If the young are in the right trap they can create a new, peaceful and hopeful world. If they are in wrong trap they destroy everything and people lose every thing. So, the big responsibility of our generation is to learn from youth, to teach the youth to save them from the effects of war, to stop war and to work for peace. So, the Nepal Campaign to Ban Landmines organized the Inter-School Painting competition on the theme "For the Friendship and Goodwill, Let's Plant Flowers, Let's Not Plant Landmines" on 20-21 September 2001.
Young people from the schools expressed their excellent ideas to make peace through pictures. We believe that it can be one of the strong voices, which we have to raise, and we hope that we can continue to raise voices through different ways. For this we should organize youth to make them strong and to make them able to stand on their own ground and make their own voices.
