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human rights conundrum: Where are voices of the Third World?

Hadebe Hadebe | Monday, 7. March 2022

Some people, especially Europeans and Americans as well as their liberal friends, tend to react
angrily towards anyone who refuses to admonish Russia for their actions in Ukraine.

The ‘tacit’ support is based on neither dogma nor ideology but lived experiences of the people in the
Third World, which is something that certain individuals tend to trivialize.

That is what people don’t get.

It comes natural, we yearn for human rights and progress as well as peace and stability like
everybody else. We hate war like everybody else and this means means we feel for Ukrainian people
as they face what we have grown accustomed to as the Peoples of the South.

Inasmuch we want human rights and peace, our experience with the people and institutions that
want us to stand with them and criticize Ukraine is different, an unique and maybe quite difficult to
understand.

As Fuzile Mavundla asks, “How can l be expected to march with people who deny apartheid
existed?”

This question sounds simple but yet complicated at the same time. Put direct, we have an issue that
the very same institutions that promote human rights have been behind wars and suffering in our
countries.

The same people who want to support their rage towards Putin are the same ones who opposed a
resolution to kick out apartheid South Africa from the UN in 1974. They have also sponsored,
through their governments, destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria.
US economic sanctions against Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and Iran have been running for many
years to date, yet the Israeli barbarism against Palestinians has been tolerated to continue for 70
years.

No one is supposed to criticize Israeli apartheid.

Can the noisiest amongst show the same energy for the Israeli occupation and destruction of
Palestine? Probably not! Then, human rights rights a damn prejudiced against certain people.

And the Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara, on behalf of the US and Europeans, and its
sustained atrocities are equally allowed to continue, and nobody wants to stop the carnage.

These are just few examples out of a string of incidences where the rights of ‘sub-humans’ have
been trampled from Serbia and Khartoum to Panama. ‘International’ law and its community have
been silent throughout this time when it snowed on us, but now we are supposed to scream against
Russians.

Even worst, people are silent as Poland, a member of the EU, is blatantly discriminating against
refugees of war, and refuses to call the fleeing Ukrainians such but it condescendingly embraces
them as “Christians and civilised people like us…”

At that time, scores of destitute people from the destroyed Middle East and African countries are
desperately waiting for their names to be called.

The Ukrainians that we are supposed to feel sorry for are also reportedly refusing Africans and
others to use transportation to take them to safety, which is still racist Poland by the way.

For that reason, the position of the Peoples of the South regarding the Russia-Ukraine war has to be
understood within the historical contexts of similar situations that directly affected them.

It is therefore ahistorical to expect Peoples of the South to side with NATO and gang, no matter the
circumstances.

Voices of the Third World!