100 States Support Norway’s Initiative to Protect Schools | Dagsavisen - Human Rights Watch

The news this week that Ukraine has become the 100^th country to endorse the Safe Schools Declaration—a Norwegian initiative to make schools safer even during war—has me thinking about two schools at almost opposite ends of Europe by Bede Sheppard, deputy director in the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch

Damaged school in Nikishine. Rebel fighters deployed inside the school between September 2014 and February 2015 and exchanged intense fire with Ukrainian forces. © 2015
Photo: Yulia Gorbunova/Human Rights Watch

They are united by a common fate, yet separated by more than 70 years: Oslo’s Sagene Primary School and “School Number 4” in Krasnohorivka, Ukraine.

School Number 4 sits in eastern Ukraine, in a town close to the front line dividing government-controlled territory and the parts of the country controlled by Russia-backed armed groups. I was shown around the school in November 2015 by a group of teachers who recounted how during the summer holidays of the previous year, anti-government fighters broke down the school’s front gate and camped inside for a week. After they left, Ukrainian army soldiers entered the school, and again used it as a base, this time for more than a year.

Students were barred from the school during its occupation, and most shifted to a distance learning program. The teachers showed me the staff room with the word “Crow” painted in red on the door, presumably some soldier’s nom de guerre. The teachers listed all the property that had been looted, but most striking was that the only school desks I could see were in the two classrooms where they were bolted to the floor...

I first learned about the occupation of Sagene school from a student’s drawing from 1944. It depicts a soldier with a swastika on his helmet, standing straight, rifle slung over his shoulder, in front of a barrier of barbed wire at the school gate. I found the picture in the Oslo city archives. If the governments that have joined the Safe Schools Declaration have their way, that’s exactly how the practice of using schools for military purposes should be treated: as a piece of history, ready to be buried in the archives.
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Source: Human Rights Watch