White Girl Missing Syndrome: why Myanmar, Syria, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen and South Sudan wars are not in the headlines like the Ukrainian war?
13. 4. 2022 / Fabiano Golgo
čas čtení
7 minut
The
Kremlin's horrific war against democratic and peaceful Ukraine has
caught our attention like no other. Being in Europe and having white
people as victims, the reason is similar to the so-called White Girl
Missing Syndrome: the press tends to see them as "front page material",
whereas the dark-skinned victims seem to be dismissed as unworthy of our
focus. Ukrainians deserve our full support and Russia certainly poses a
much bigger danger to us all, not only by their military actions but
also from the fake news factory that has successfully helped destroy the
trust in democracy all around the civilized world. Nevertheless, we
should not forget that at least 6 other countries are suffering the
horrors of war.
Everyday, dark people's lives
are taken as less important by the media and the public. Not on purpose,
but as a consequence of a subconscious higher value given to white
people's lives. White girls, often attractive under the conventions
created by the media since the last century, from wealthier societies,
get our attention and pity, while low-income women of color are
marginalized, as if their victimhood was natural and expected, thus
unworthy of our worries. The incessant interest in British blonde girl
Madeleine McCann's disappearance is an evidence of that.
A
subproduct of that intrinsec dismissal of poorer and darker victims of
all genders is made even more evident when we see how welcome Ukrainian
refugees are in countries like Poland, which until not long ago was
inhumanly not allowing Arab refugees cross from Belarus into safety. Or
how Latin Americans fleeing gang violence are treated when trying to
cross the Mexican border into the United States.
Syrians
have been bombarded for over a decade and most Europeans see those
victims who try to reach Europe as potential terrorists, job stealers
and cultural contaminators. Fallacious excuses go from the fact that
most of them are male to that they should try refuge in neigboring
countries with the same religious traditions, ignoring that Muslim
nations are not a tight brotherhood group, often being in cultural or
actual conflict with each other.
Notwithstanding
the needed support that we all should give to poor Ukrainians, who are
being savagely attacked by a militarily much stronger nation, we should
not forget that the world is currently facing other wars, just less seen
and heard about.
Kyaw is a Burmese 14-year-old
girl whose village was pillaged and burnt down by the criminal General
Min Aung Hlaing's forces after the coup that dethroned Nobel Peace Prize
winner Aung San Suu Kyi more than one year ago. She was raped by a big
number of soldiers (she tells me she can't remember how many, for she
fainted many times during her ordeal). Through a common friend whose
social assistance works used to be co-sponsored by the Czech NGO Člověk v
tísni, Kyaw talked to me this week, saying how much she laments that
her country's situation has left the headlines and the dictatorship
continues with normal relations with most other countries, regardless of
not so damaging sanctions imposed by the United States and by the ASEAN
group, which is formed by Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Kyaw
survived her ordeal but was left with a destroyed vagina and needs to
urinate through an external device, which was donated by another foreign
NGO, for her country's government has forbidden doctors and hospitals
from providing any health assistance to the victims of their military
actions.
According to conflict monitoring
group Acled (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), the
clashes in Myanmar are still happening on a daily basis, spread across
all regions of the country and around 12 thousand people have been
killed. The groups fighting government forces are collectively known as
the People's Defense Force (PDF), an informal network of civilian
militia groups made up largely by young people whose lives are still
being taken without any international reaction.
Protests
against criminal president Bashar al-Assad of Syria in 2011 turned into
a civil war that has lasted since then. The confrontation has already
left more than 380 thousand dead, more than 200 thousand missing.
Countries like Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France
took sides in the conflict, sending money, weapons and fighters.
Jihadist organizations such as the self-styled Islamic State (IS)
extremist group and al-Qaeda have also become involved. But the lives of
Syrian victims seem to mean less to most Europeans than those of
Ukrainian victims. It is obvious that the reason behind this inhumane
imbalance in empathy is related to racial and religious prejudices.
Yemen
is another blatant example of a war that doesn't seem to horrify the
media and the public enough. The conflict was motivated by the failure
of the political transition after the Arab Spring, which forced the
former president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to hand over power to his
deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, in 2011. The United Nations classifies
Yemen as the worst humanitarian situation in the world. So far, the war
has claimed 233 thousand deaths, including 130 thousand from lack of
food, health services and infrastructure. More than 10 thousand children
died as a direct result of the fighting.
South
Sudan is the youngest country in the world. It was recognized in 2011
after splitting with Sudan. But the new nation has been mired in civil
war since 2013 and is in a state of ethnic-political violence and
chronic instability. According to the International Committee of the Red
Cross, of the 12 million people inhabiting South Sudan, 6 million are
hungry and in need of food assistance. A peace deal signed in 2018 by
enemies Riek Machar and Salva Kiir remains largely unenforceable. More
than two million South Sudanese have fled the country, constituting the
"biggest refugee crisis in Africa", according to the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
A war that
has lasted more than a year has already left thousands dead in Ethiopia.
Pro-government forces and rebels in the Tigray region have been
fighting in the north of the country since November 2020, when prime
minister Abiy Ahmed sent the federal army to expel the populations from
the area, until then ruled by the TPFL (Front for the Liberation of
Tigray People), a movement that contested his authority. TPLF troops
were defeated, but in 2021 the rebels took control of the region and
have since advanced to locations near Amhara and Afar. In March of this
year, the Ethiopian government and the rebels in the Tigray region
announced a ceasefire. But a new battlefront, in the Afar region,
despite the ceasefire, led to the fighting continuing in two of the six
districts occupied by Tigray's fighters. Women are being raped and
children becoming orphans without any assistance and the world is not
watching.
After the fall of the Islamic State
in the Middle East in 2017, Islamic militant groups have increasingly
turned to Africa, where fragile governments do not have the strength to
fight their forces. These jihajist groups try to dominate various
regions in countries such as Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Congo
and Mozambique.
In Mozambique, the Ministry of
Defense sent troops to the city of Palma, in the north of the country,
to contain the advance in the region. The site has rich natural gas
reserves that are being exploited in collaboration with multinational
energy companies.
In the Democratic Republic
of Congo, the government accuses the militia known as the Allied
Democratic Forces of having murdered at least 23 civilians in recent
days. The United States considers this group an ally of the Islamic
State.
So why are we not paying attention to them as well?
The
answer is not difficult to find. Besides the natural human limitation
of selective focus - a survival skill developed for thousands of years
in the jungles of our primal ancestors to survive the dangers that wild
animals posed to them - a keenship tribal "cultural gene" also partly
excuses our discriminative choices of attention. However, the media has
the power of bringing to the surface these conflicts and doesn't do it
sufficiently because of the above-mentioned White Girl Missing Syndrome.
And we are all accomplices to that.
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