Dear Editor,

For two weeks straight there has been analysis and commentary in

The Spectato

r on the war in the Ukraine. It is exacting on the soul to hear and read about the Ukraine crisis and the death and destruction in the wake of the Russian invasion one year ago. It is a political and humanitarian crisis that warrants human attention, empathy, solidarity and diplomatic intervention. But the war in Ukraine also reveals how the world, especially the western world, prioritizes some areas of conflict (and consequent devastation and refugee crisis) over others.

How do we explain this divergence in approach? What we are witnessing is a world divided between “worthy and unworthy” victims. This powerful concept is usually attributed to Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic book,

Manufacturing Consent

.

Take the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter Congo). Millions of Congolese have died in several iterations of horror, beginning with King Leopold of Belgium’s reign of terror and ravaging of the territory’s rich resources (roughly between 1885 and 1908), when approximately 10 million Congolese were killed in the insatiable hunt for ivory and rubber. In fact, it was an African American journalist (and former Civil War veteran), George Washington Williams, who after visiting the Congo (then Congo Free State) and witnessing the horrors and the plunder firsthand, is credited with coining the phrase “crimes against humanity” now widely used in international human rights bodies and in the description and prosecution of genocide.

Now the very modern scramble in the Congo is for cobalt, coltan, uranium and other resources. Millions have died on account of this contemporary looting by several neighboring states and armed groups with the complicity of major Western and Chinese corporations in search of the raw materials that are essential to the production of the now quintessential cell phone and other electronic products.

The International Rescue Committee highlighted the following stark statistics: “Since 2000, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has documented the humanitarian impact of war and conflict in DR Congo through a series of five mortality surveys. The first four studies, conducted between 2000 and 2004, estimated that 3.9 million people had died since 1998, arguably making DR Congo the world’s deadliest crisis since World War II.”

The unrelenting terror continues. Six million people are currently displaced, with 26 million at present facing hunger in the Congo today. Yet there is barely a whimper from Western media, in contrast to the attention paid to Ukraine. Pope Francis recently deemed the conditions in the Congo “economic colonialism” after a visit to the country.

Is there a universal moral standard that is truly fair and enforceable? Even with international ‘law’ defined by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the more known Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the defilements of principles of human and political rights are largely ignored by the world. But this tradition of ignoring or rejecting the equality of nations in the global ‘South’ memorably extends to Japan’s proposal in the 1919 Versailles Conference to insert a “racial equality” clause (nb: the Japanese did not intend it for all colonized peoples) which was rejected outright by the western countries.

While I am restricting these comments to the Congo there are many more case studies from the global South where peoples face wars, grave human rights violations and war crimes, but where scant attention is paid by a condescending and supercilious Western world. One of these ongoing crises closer to home is Haiti. The country’s problems are rooted in its historic destruction of chattel slavery in 1804. The nation-state that emerged since that time, and until the present, has been beset by what can only be called a Western revenge psychosis of denying the country a democratic and equal role in regional and world affairs. As one Haitian academic and activist Myrtha Desulme recently wrote: “Haiti is a crime scene, where crimes against humanity are carried out every day for the past 200 years. People need to know what is going on in Haiti so they can get over the brainwashing which causes them to blame the victim.”

Therein lies the rank hypocrisy in the preponderance of solidarity and empathy with preferred Western cases (almost always white), with state resources and media in tow.

I am by no means implying that the West is the only global party responsible for the pillage and humanitarian crises of societies like the Congo. But its haughtiness in its choice of victims to highlight and support is stark. The depiction of worthy and unworthy victims also applies to refugees. It is estimated that Great Britain for instance has taken in 140,000 refugees of merit from Ukraine while at the same time assiduously deporting or preventing refugees from urgent cases in the black and brown world.

I am aware that to raise the unequal treatment of these crises is to risk accusations of “wokeness” despite the overwhelming evidence from UN documentation to testimonies of victims and refugees. I say to any potential ‘woke’ watcher interlocutors: I am unmoved as the evidence of unequal treatment is legion.

So why, then, could millions die in the Congo decade after decade and there is no international outcry on the scale of Ukraine? Why is the crisis in Haiti (and its refugees from terror and hunger) largely ignored in our own region? The reasons are not difficult to identify, but I leave it to the conscientious reader to determine.

Yours sincerely,

Nigel Westmaas

Africana Studies faculty