considering whether to hold funerals to mourn their loss, UN education
envoy Gordon Brown said Thursday.
"It's a Nigerian custom that if people are missing for four months or
more, then closure is required, funerals take place, a period of
mourning happens," the former British prime minister told reporters at
the United Nations.
"And this, tragically, is what is happening to parents in Nigeria who
are giving up hope that the children will be returned to them."
In April, extremist group Boko Haram abducted 276 girls from their
school dormitories in Borno state in northern Nigeria. A total of 219
are still missing.
The mass abduction triggered global condemnation and a social media
campaign that forced Nigeria into accepting foreign help to locate
their whereabouts.
Brown said he did not want the funerals to take place and as there is
every hope that the girls will one day return to their parents.
"All the information we have is that they are likely to be alive," he said.
The Nigerian government had been "unfairly criticized," Brown said and
was "doing everything in their power to recover the girls."
Brown, who wants to make education compulsory for children all over
the world, said 58 million children are out of school and that 10
million girls are married off each year as child brides.
He called for additional funding of $6 billion to help achieve 100
percent universal enrollment by the end of 2015.
Educating children would deprive extremist organizations of a fertile
recruiting ground, he said.
Brown said the world had failed to marshall resources to get nearly
400,000 Syrian children in school this term in Lebanon, leaving them
prey to extremist recruitment, trafficking, child labor and marriage.
Yet he said there was a global youth movement emerging to secure a
right to an education. "I think people 100 years from now will see a
global civil rights struggle underway," he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment