Find out who the ‘billion babies’ are and why the UN will not repeat the choice in the 8 billion

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When he was born in Sarajevo, at two minutes on October 12, 1999, the 6 billionth baby weighed 3.55 kg and was doing well. But the first child of the couple Fatima Helac and Jasminko Mevic did not yet have a name.

By coincidence, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was on a two-day visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country still suffering the consequences of the war that ravaged the region between 1992 and 1995. By another coincidence, UN projections for the population to reach 6 billion people took place precisely on that October 12th.

So Annan went to a maternity ward and allowed himself to be photographed with the child who had been born earlier that day. The act was received with celebration and gratitude by the family: because of the UN leader, the little boy was named Adnan and became known as the 6 billion baby.

Years later, things changed a bit. Adnan grew up in a modest apartment in Visoko, just outside Sarajevo, where he still lives with his mother. At 23, he graduated in economics, but he is unemployed.

In 2011, when the world’s seventh billionth person was about to be born, reporters visited the Mevic home. At age 12, the boy liked geography and said he wanted to be a plane pilot. But the family was living poorly, the father had health problems and the only income from the house was a social pension paid by the government, on condition that Adnan continued to attend school.

Jasminko Mevic complained that the UN had not worried about the boy’s future. “We saw Kofi Annan as if he were a godfather to Adnan”, he told the British The Guardian at the time, adding that he had received virtually no communication from the entity after the day of birth – let alone financial help or some kind of support.

Fatima Helac was 29 years old when she gave birth to Adnan, but today she doesn’t have such good memories either. “I realized something was off because doctors and nurses were meeting but I didn’t know what was going on,” she told the BBC. “I was so tired, I don’t know how I felt.”

That day, in the hospital, Kofi Annan justified the symbolic choice: “The birth of the sixth billionth person on the planet —a beautiful boy in a city that comes back to life, with a people rebuilding their homes in a region restoring a culture of coexistence after a decade of war—must light a path of tolerance and understanding for all people.”

But his spokesman, Douglas Coffman, poured cold water: “There are no political or any other reasons behind this decision. If the secretary general had been in New York, it would have been a New York baby.”

The truth is that there is no way for the UN to know for sure who the 6 billionth baby actually was in 1999 – as there is no way to pinpoint the 8 billionth baby this Tuesday (15). Either because of the quality of world information, which varies from country to country, or because about three children are born every second in the world.

So, Mevic was the second and last “billion baby” nominated by the UN. In 2011, for example, the institution said that all babies born around midnight on October 31 of that year could feel like the seventh billionth. And indeed, several countries elected theirs, with TV crews being sent to maternity hospitals across the globe.

The first nominee was in 1987, and that 5 billion baby’s story of disappointment is similar to Mevic’s. Croatian Matej Gaspar, now 35, was chosen because the country was hosting a sporting event at the time — but he seems to have hated the choice; or, at least, the fact that the UN never paid attention to him, with the exception of the media circus he promoted on the day of his birth.

Adnan Mevic and Matej Gaspar did not respond to requests from Sheet to give interviews. Both have Facebook pages and are friends with each other. According to a recent BBC report, the two “billion babies” basically have a single issue: what they see as unfair treatment by the UN towards them and their families.

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