Reports | 25 05 2020
Layla Said - Beirut Najda-Now International organized the interactive sit-in "Pencils not Bullets" in front of the ESCWA headquarters in Beirut. Around 200 children from "Tomorrow Belong To US” (Bukra Elna) centre for Syrian children in Beirut participated in the sit-in to draw attention to plight of an entire generation of Syrian children deprived of education. According to the UNICEF statistics, the number of Syrian children deprived of this right has reached two million children, both inside and outside the country. According to the representative of “Najda-Now,” the sit-in was intended to drew the attention of ESCWA, the international organization responsible for building schools for the children affected by the Syrian war, to the increasingly worsening conditions of Syrian children. The sit-in focused on two issues: the ‘Right to life’ which means that all international efforts should be directed at stopping the war in Syria, protecting the children there and providing the necessary food, health care, and proper shelters for the refugees and displaced in and outside Syria. The second issue is the ‘Right to Education’ which entails: providing those children with proper schools, educational programs, books and the necessary educational resources and supplies; supporting programmes and initiatives to stop children labour; and providing them with proper psychosocial support centres. According to Abdul Aziz Al-Aydi, "Najda-Now" director, the organizers “made sure that the sit-in won’t end up as a protest, that’s why it was planned as an interactive sit-in with a variety of activities for children such as theatre, drawing , singing." At the end of the sit-in, the children handed over a memorandum to the ESCWA director to be delivered to the Secretary General of the United Nations.