Picture a neighborhood filled with homes providing comfort and safe haven, surrounded by bustling markets and shops, schools, playgrounds, hospitals, and factories. Weeks later, what is left is a collection of bombed-out structures in the middle of a war zone. All essential infrastructure and semblance of normal life have been destroyed. The use of wide-area explosives has left vast damage and destruction, causing profound and long-lasting consequences for people’s safety, livelihood, and basic needs, like food, water, and electric/fuel power. This leaves people little choice but to flee to safer regions, often exposing them to new dangers. For World Humanitarian Day on Saturday, August 19, humanitarian partners will come together to reaffirm that civilians caught in conflict are #NotATarget.
Play for Peace is an advocate of the mission set out by the United Nations. Through our programs, we aspire to help youth displaced by unfortunate situations such as war and other social uprisings. Through our network of trainers and facilitators, we promote human rights to strengthen governance and institutions and invest in inclusive and sustainable development. Where prevention fails, we must make every effort to protect the lives and dignity of civilians caught up in conflict. The Report of the Secretary-General on the protection of civilians in armed conflict lists three protection priorities which emerge across conflicts:
- We must enhance respect for international humanitarian law and international human rights law and promote good practice by parties to conflict.
- We must protect the humanitarian and medical mission and accord priority to the protection of civilians in United Nations peace operations.
- We must prevent forced displacement and pursue durable solutions for refugees and internally displaced persons. These protection priorities are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. In particular, strengthening respect for international law is a prerequisite to achieving priorities two and three.
This World Humanitarian Day, we bring attention to the millions of civilians affected by armed conflict every day. People in cities and towns struggle to find food, water, and safe shelter while fighting drives millions from their homes. Children are recruited and used to fight, and their schools are destroyed. Women are sexually abused by fighters, and then shamed by their villages. As humanitarian workers deliver aid, and medical workers treat the wounded and sick, they are directly targeted, treated as threats, and prevented from bringing relief and care to those in desperate need. From people with disabilities to the elderly, migrants, and journalists, all civilians caught in conflict need to be protected. Please sign the petition, demanding world leaders do everything in their power to protect all civilians in conflict.
