Seminar on the disabled
Yesterday (25th Feb) I attended a seminar on Disability Rights in the light of UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that Bangladesh has signed and ratified. Many luminaries attended the seminar from government, diplomatic missions, judiciary, law, media, members of local and international disabled peoples organisations as well as a professor of law from Harvard University. The seminar was a brilliant enunciation for promoting the rights of the disabled to rights-based from the existing welfare-based approach. It gained huge support from all, as it should.
As I am one myself, partially, I have kept abreast of disability issues for the last 3 years. However, once again I came away from this seminar with some disappointment. There are two main causes of disability First genetic/medical, over which we have little or no control yet. The second is man-made, which includes conflicts of all sorts and accidents.
This letter deals with the conflict aspect. Only about 20 countries have well-entrenched armaments industries churning out 'weapons of mass destruction' (pardon, the pun) in huge numbers which are sold to the rest of the world to be used in their petty quarrels, power struggles, acquisition of resources and outright aggression. The sellers are wealthy while the buyers are poor without exception. Poverty in turn also produces more disability. The military-industrial complexes keep turning out sophisticated weapons to kill thousands and maim many more (proudly shown on Discovery and Nat Geo Channels) that are the largest single cause of disability in the world. Result - Disabled people are being produced through wholesale use and misuse of easily available armaments on almost assembly line basis recent examples, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo, Ruanda-Burundi, Darfur and now Iraq.
Yet except for a passing reference to war, not a word was spoken against this basic abuse of humanity's basic right right to life and sound limbs. No reference is also available in the mountains of paper regularly produced on this subject. I would bet my bottom taka that it is also not mentioned in the UN Convention documents. Moreover, genetic/medical after effects usually cause only one type of disability, while conflicts are all encompassing causing multiple disabilities.
Why is this so? Should not the disability organisations work together to curb this ever-growing menace in all its manifestations and forms? Why do the disability organisations in developed countries not take up 'arms' and say this far and no further to the arms producers, sellers and exporters? In the poor buyers' countries, such organisations can press their governments to spend scarce resources on development, not arms.
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