Teenage Girls Help Open U.N. Special Session on Children

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, May 09, 2002

Teenage Girls Help Open U.N. Special Session on Children

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Two teen-age girls on Wednesday helped U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan open the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on Children by harshly criticizing grown-ups for creating a world where too many young people face poverty, war and disease.

Audrey Cheynut, a 17-year-old from Monaco, and Gabriela Azurudy Arrieta, a 13-year-old from Bolivia, read to the General Assembly from a statement adopted by nearly 400 youngsters from around the world at a forum earlier this week.

"We are not the sources of the problems," read Cheynut, her voice breaking with emotion. "We are the resources that are needed to solve them."

"We are the victims of exploitation and abuse. We are the street children. We are the children of war," Arrieta said. "We are the victims and orphans of HIV/AIDS. We are denied good quality education and health care."

The statement the girls' read was the only time that children will address the three-day special session of the U.N. General Assembly.

The pair followed Annan's keynote address, which opened the three-day summit with a challenge to officials to invest the money and effort to ensure that the 2 billion young people growing up today can live in a peaceful world free of hunger and get a quality education.

"We, the grown-ups, have failed you deplorably ...," Annan told the world's children, noting that 33 percent of youngsters suffer from malnutrition before the age of five, 25 percent are not immunized, nearly 20 percent don't attend school and far too many "have seen violence that no child should ever see."

The statement read by Cheynut and Arrieta was adopted at a three-day Children's Forum that ended Tuesday.

"We want a world fit for children, because a world fit for us is a world fit for everyone," read Arrieta, whose face could barely be seen over the podium. "We are children whose voices are not being heard: it is time we are taken into account."

Cheynut said children want protection for child refugees, free quality education, free HIV testing, environmental conservation and cancellation of their countries' debts -- whose payment diverts money from children's programs.

"The children of the world are misunderstood," she said. "We are not expenses; we are investments. ... We are united by our struggle to make the world a better place for all. You call us the future, but we are also the present."

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