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Queen Noor Honored by Marshall Legacy Institute and UNICEF for Work With Landmine Survivors

Champions for Children Awards Gala

Presented by the Martial Legacy Institute and the US fund for UNICEF, the award is designed to recognize the critical role of individual leadership in identifying and alleviating the plight of children in landmine contaminated countries.

May 17, 2002

Remarks by Her Majesty Queen Noor

Thank you for this award, not for myself, but for the real champions in the fight against landmines: the unnamed and unrecognized heroes the world over who find landmines and destroy them; or supply maimed children with new limbs and training to walk again; or work tirelessly to ban this cruel weapon and promote global compliance with the Mine Ban Treaty. These heroes come in all different shapes and sizes. Some, who know their subject all too well, have lost their sight or hearing or limbs; and some here today have as many as four legs and tails as well. We are indebted to the Marshall Legacy Institute and UNICEF for their leadership, uniting us in common cause to protect children and families terrorized by landmines.

Every day, children in heavily mined countries are hobbled by the dangers that lurk underground. Through no fault of their own, they are prisoners of a war that may have ended before they were born, and their every step is circumscribed by crippling fear. The land itself is the enemy, for in the fields where they work, or the playgrounds where they run, with every step there is a chance of death or dismemberment.

And how much greater the agony for the children, and for their mothers and fathers, when the landmine does explode.

I have visited mothers in Southeast Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East, and South America, nursing their sons and daughters in hospitals and rehabilitation centers. I have seen beautiful yet scarred young people bury their faces in despair over what kind of life will they have. Who will care for them? Who will love them?

There are so many of them. . . too many.

Children like Eskedar, who is 10 years old and lives in Ethiopia. She was out playing one day and stepped on a landmine. Though most children don’t survive the blast, she did. After her amputation and recovery, her mother took her on crutches on her first trip to the Capital, Addis Ababa. She was excited, thinking she would have stories to tell the other village children when she returned. Only, she never returned. Her mother left her there, hoping some family might adopt her. After all, no one will marry her and the family feels they cannot support her any longer.

Landmines blow entire families apart. In Afghanistan, Zainaba and her family were nomadic sheepherders. They had pitched camp near Kandahar. Early one morning, there was a loud, deafening explosion… Zainaba heard her eldest daughter screaming in the early morning darkness. Her granddaughter ran to help. Another explosion. The darkness began to lift. Zainaba saw her daughter and granddaughter lying on the ground, screaming, and covered with blood. She could see that each had lost her legs. By sunrise, both daughters were dead. Zainaba then discovered that twelve sheep had also been killed. Small butterfly mines were lying all over the ground. She screamed, and in her anger and grief, Zainaba picked up one of the mines lying near her tent to throw it into the field. It exploded in her hand. Zainaba is now blind and has no fingers on her right hand.

And imagine the parents, family and friends who stood helpless on the perimeter of a field on the outskirts of Sarajevo, where three ten-year-old girls had stepped on a mine. The field was so heavily mined that not even the deminers could reach the children in time. All anyone could do was listen in horror to the screams of pain and terror until they faded into silence.

I could recount thousands of stories like these. They keep coming, like the stuff of nightmares, but worse, because they are real. Each day, every hour, new victims. Every time a mine explodes under a child’s step, the child suffers, and a family suffers, but society suffers as well. Their trauma maims our future, as well as theirs.

Ninety-eight percent of disabled children living in developing countries are denied formal education. Nearly all live in poverty and fewer than one in ten have access to the medical care and rehabilitation they need.

When we let children down, eventually they stop believing. They lose hope, trust and confidence in the future — not when their limbs are amputated, but when their chances are. Mine-injured children spiral downward and inward, defeated by landmines and the adult world that planted the cruel weapon in the ground.

We must never give up on the children who need us. We must, however, be willing to give up the weapons that kill and dismember children by the thousands each year.

We must continually strive to leave the world a healthier, safer, more peaceful place, if we can. All of us in this room, I believe, share that commitment. Many of you are on the frontlines of this work: UNICEF, Marshall Legacy Institute, Landmine Survivors Network, UNA, the Red Cross …and of course, our brave canine partners! You all deserve commendations as heroes, and I salute you.

Thank you.


Posted: Wednesday, May 22, 2002



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