KUALA LUMPUR – As nations celebrate International Youth Day on Friday (Aug 12), youths all over the world are urged to embrace the humanitarianism values for the betterment of mankind.
Malaysian Red Crescent Society’s (MRCS) National Youth Council chairperson Michelle Chew says it is important for each and every youth to be equipped with the fundamental principles of humanitarianism, as it sparks positive behavioural or attitude change and encourages young people to be more aware on human wellbeing.
“From social issues to crisis, disasters and conflicts, we want the youth to be able to look at these occurrences through a humanitarianism lens or perspective. Some of them might seem distant from our day-to-day realities, but we need to realise that the occurrences will be affecting us even if indirectly,” said Chew in an exclusive interview with Bernama at MRCS headquarters here, recently.
Chew who has a 10-year volunteering journey with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement notes that in today’s increasingly polarised world, humanitarianism can be a unifying tool to cultivate solidarity and ‘remind us that we are all human’.
Meanwhile, the undergraduate of Economics and Business Analytics at Monash University says she and her team have been actively promoting the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to youths across all ages ranging from children to young adults through a variety of interactive mechanisms.
The mechanisms used include organising multiple in-person and virtual workshops, online sessions and quiz competitions to attract the attention of youngsters besides raising awareness on this important subject matter to cultivate more young humanitarians in Malaysia.
She says Malaysia has done much in promoting International Humanitarian Law (IHL), where a handbook on IHL for Malaysian parliamentarians was jointly launched by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the MRCS at Parliament building, recently.
“Besides that, Malaysian government has incorporated IHL in its national education syllabus since 2007 for Form-three students in secondary schools.
“It was a chapter in the Civics and Citizenship subject from 2007 until 2018. From 2019 onwards, the IHL topic is part of the moral education,” she said, adding that humanitarian education is at the core of what MRCS is actually doing with its strong presence in schools.
IHL is a set of rules that seeks, for humanitarian reasons, to limit the effects of armed conflict. It protects persons who do not, or no longer, take part in the fighting (including civilians, medics, aid workers, wounded, sick and shipwrecked troops, prisoners of war or other detainees), and imposes limits on the means and methods of warfare (for instance, the use of certain weapons).
Chew says MRCS is slowly moving away from the traditional perception of it being active only in first aid, health promotion and foot drill but more towards providing the society’s youths with more opportunities and possibilities to increase their exposure within the Red Cross Red Crescent ecosystem.
“This is important as youth make more than 70 per cent of our membership and we recognise them as our future leaders,” said Chew who is also the Asia Pacific’s Representative in the Youth Commission of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
