File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1999/postcolonial.9904, message 240


From: "George Petros" <g_petros-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE, PLEASE!
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 22:01:52 PDT


A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE, PLEASE!

Journalists almost outnumber refugees at the Kosovo border.  Over the past year, when 2,000 Serbian-sponsored murders allegedly occurred, newsmen belatedly woke up to "genocide".  Since NATO bombing began last month, hundreds of
journalists have swarmed over the victims looking for evidence of
massacres, lost relatives, people shivering in the rain, sound-bites of
crying tots.  "Anyone speaking English who was raped?" cried out the frantic story-sellers at the refugee camps.

Meanwhile, over a single week-end of March 15-16, 10,000 Ethiopians died in battle, un-noticed by the media.  Was it racism that caused this-the world's largest war involving 400,000 combatants-to slip off the radar screen?  Or was it hysteria over the very idea of European genocide, with scenes reminiscent of Dachau and Buchenwald haunting our selective memories?  Could it simply be abysmal ignorance that forces the locusts to
seek out the most photogenic and accessible conflicts, letting all others disappear into the mist?

Recent magazine articles have listed nearly 30 conflicts involving U.S. diplomats or military forces over the past 10 years.  Some, such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, or the lingering Persian Gulf crisis, claim disproportionate headline space.  Others, such as Somalia,
Rwanda and Kosovo, are "flavors of the month", covered with such intensity
that we can scarcely cram in another horrific detail.  Yet most conflicts,
like the trench war along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border or the
100,000 frozen deaths in Chechnya, just simmer out of sight, a shame too
deep for our collective conscience to bear.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" was the first excuse given to fratricidal
conflict, yet it remains our evasive answer to violence in Indonesia,
Ireland, Sudan, Tibet, Sierra Leone, Spain, Mexico, Algeria, Turkey, Congo,
Guatemala, Iraq and two-dozen other running sores.  The U.S. government is
far more likely to intervene to help friendly governments  than
anti-American regimes  - but even among friendly regimes, U.S.
intervention fails more often than it succeeds.

Intervention - or the lack of it - also creates "orphan" regimes, mostly in Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and Somalia) that have become governments only in a hollow sense, "ghost nations" rather than "ghost towns" .  The largest human loss and greatest number of interventions have occurred in Africa - 38% of the total.  Despite NATO's preoccupation with stability in its field of operations, European interventions comprise only 13% of total interventions over the past decade.

According to Time Magazine, regions with the heaviest human losses (Angola,
Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Tibet) received medium to light US
intervention.  The only exception was Somalia, which -- like the other 8
interventions in Africa -- was a failure.

Religious and ethnic conflict is clearly visible in 90% of interventions -
all except 3 (Somalia, Argentina and Haiti). Notwithstanding "intelligence"
offered by U.S. security agencies, not all conflicts involve Islamic
fundamentalism. Muslims or Islamic politics are involved in 16 of the 29
conflicts (55%), but several conflicts involving Muslims (Kosovo, Bosnia,
Indonesia) pose no threat to the U.S. or Israel.

The majority of conflicts that were active during the past decade (58%)
have been resolved in success or failure; the rest are continuing - some
for decades or centuries.  The number of lives lost in the 7 failures
(4,381,200) is greater than the lives lost in the 10 successes (853,100).

Humanitarian interventions have largely failed.  Of the 8,671,300 lives at
stake in 29 conflicts, only 853,100 fatalities (9.7%) occurred during
successful interventions.  THIS IS THE STORY THAT IS BEING MISSED WHILE WE ARE FIXATED ON KOSOVO!   Enough victims in the post-Cold War Decade for
nearly two Holocausts - yet we barely notice when we see them a few
thousand at a time flickering like mirages on our TV screens.

We are losing the battle for a peaceful planet, while we ineffectually
decry (and bomb) the perpetrators of Balkan massacres.  We are like Cain:
Let someone else take care of the brother we can't see, while we obliterate
the one we can.  An updating of Cain's evasion might read: "Am I the keeper
of a brother who never appears on the 6 o'clock news?"

George

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