Enfance, Enfances - Asia

Enfance, enfances, 2001

Hiên Lâm Duc

When is a child a child? Until when, is he precisely a child? When can a child carry arms? What about boys and girl’s equity? What about the right for a child to express an opinion on decisions affecting it?

It has taken ten years to answer these and hundreds of other questions. Ten years for a working group formed around the United Nations Centre for Human Rights, UNICEF and a constellation of non-governmental organizations to elaborate the text of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted unanimously by the UN on 20 November 1989. Thanks to this agreement, the world starts to change. Lâm Duc Hiên’s photographs testifies to it.

Laos

Laos has been emerging for several years from deep isolation caused by decades of war, intense poverty and geographical isolation that hinders its development. Mountainous, as extended as Italy but populated by barely 5 million of inhabitants, Laos is gradually acquiring the instruments of change that will permit it to integrate the region’s economy. There is still a long way to go.

Vietnam

Darkened and crushed by thirty years of war and bombing, Vietnam is now, despite the effects of the crisis, joining the club of Asian dragons. Growth is rapid, inequalities are growing, but progress is visible, obvious, to anyone who crosses the rice fields, deltas, towns and villages, from north to south of the country.

Cambodia

After the bloody tragedy that from 1975 to 1979, cost life to nearly 3 million of men, women and children, Cambodia is still trying to go through its wounds. Little by little life is returning. The children are learning to laugh and play again, but it will take time for the immense poverty, the intense child mortality, combined with the misdeeds of easy money, to finally make room, once again, to the famous Khmer smile that was almost extinguished.

Tibet

Between 5 000 and 6 000 meters high, the extended rock lands of Chang Tang, surrounded by mountains and lakes of glacial origins, are the territories of the Drogpas. These nomadic breeders push their herds and practice barter with the sedentary populations. This millenary way of life is following its course at the Ladakh. There, the children history is not unhappy. Sons and daughters of shepherds know everything about cattle, ride horses, give thanks to the spirits of the lake and mountains and live the original life of a people still preserved.

India

One billion of human beings, equivalent to one-sixth of the global population, are living in India, lands of all extremes, violence and pacifism, wealth and misery, sweetness and crime. Children grow there as they can, under the scorching sun or the flood of the monsoon.