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- Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!rich
- From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
- Subject: THE COLOUR OF MERCY
- Message-ID: <1992Sep3.082307.13453@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
- Followup-To: alt.activism.d
- Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Organization: PACH
- Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 08:23:07 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 67
-
- The ACTivist, Volume 8 #9, September 1992.
-
- The ACTivist, Ontario's peace monthly, is published by ACT for
- Disarmament, 736 Bathurst St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2R4,
- phone 416-531-6154, fax 416-531-5850, e-mail web:act. Hard copy
- subscriptions are $10 for a year ($25 for institutions and funded
- agencies).
-
- Reprint freely, but please credit us (and send us a copy!)
-
- /** gen.newsletter: 138.3 **/
- ** Written 8:49 pm Aug 31, 1992 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
- THE COLOUR OF MERCY -- OPINION PIECE
-
- "Let the Africans and Asians stew in their tribal wars," an American foreign
- policy expert advised his president soon after World War Two, when the
- United States was casting about for a new role in the postwar world. The U.S.
- and other developed countries instead chose to use the Third World as a
- surrogate battlefield for the Cold War. But with the expiry of the Soviet
- empire, the advice has been taken to heart; today, only Europe is worthy of
- our attention.
-
- There aren't many in the West who would dare suggest a similar stance
- toward the "tribal wars" in the countries that used to be Yugoslavia. Quite
- the reverse: politicians of all stripes, from Britain's former Tory Prime
- Minister Margaret Thatcher to the traditionally anti-war New Democratic
- Party here in Canada, are falling over themselves in their eagerness to back
- military intervention in ex-Yugoslavia.
-
- No one, when they glance to the south, has launched a parallel crusade for
- military intervention in Somalia, where a vicious ethnic war has put (a
- third? A half?) of the population in immediate risk of starvation. Or in
- Peru, where hundreds of thousands are caught in the crossfire between
- murderous Sendero Luminoso guerrillas and the only slightly less
- murderous armed forces. Or in Burma, where one of the ugliest military
- dictatorships in the world practices its own "ethnic cleansing" against
- minority nationalities, and continues to hold Nobel Peace Prize laureate
- Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest four years after she won a national
- election in the country. Or in any of the other dozens of countries, from
- East Timor to the Western Sahara, where wars no less bloody than the
- war in ex-Yugoslavia are raging.
-
- The TV cameras may send home pictures in living colour, but they seem to
- see only in one colour: white.
-
- Not to say that we should forget about the atrocities being committed in
- Bosnia-Herzegovina and, to a lesser extent, Croatia. Clearly, Something Has
- to be Done. But why should this war, among all the world's human
- sufferings, be singled out for the world's special attentions? It hasn't
- claimed the most lives, or produced the most colourful atrocities, or
- displaced the most refugees. The only difference in this war is the colour
- of the people's skin.
-
- United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian
- diplomat, took UN member states to task earlier this summer for their
- single-minded insistence on military intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
- only Bosnia-Herzegovina. Boutros-Ghali said he felt the suffering of the
- Somalis as keenly as the suffering of the Bosnians. Why? "Maybe because
- I'm a wog."
-
- Maybe that's why no one paid any attention to him.
-
- -- David Webster
-
-
- ** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **
-
-