Ukraine: A conflict soaked in contradictions: There are wars in Africa and Asia and some are rarely commented on in the media, so why is Ukraine different?
Surprise and horror have defined the reaction to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. That’s probably because, although the intervention has followed the contours of a modern land war, it has also marked a break with the past in a number of ways. The world has become used to military interventions by the United States. This is, however, not a US intervention. That in itself is a surprise — one that has befuddled reporters and pundits alike.
Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of life in Ukraine resulting from the Russian intervention , it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West’s ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they believe they share aspects of identity with — whether related to culture, religion, or skin colour.War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a very fragile planet.
, which grew out of the capture of the bounty of natural gas by TotalEnergies SE and ExxonMobil and led to the deployment of the French-backed Rwandan military in Mozambique. At COP26, I told a group of oil company executives about this intervention — which I had covered for— and one of them responded with precise accuracy: “You’re right about what you say, but no one cares.”
No one, which is to say the political forces in the North Atlantic states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and Asia.
But they are certainly not African or Asian, people who — if you think carefully about what is being said here — certain world leaders and international media outlets expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global great powers and by the weapons sold to the local thugs in these regions by these great powers.
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