John McGuirk wrote on the 11th March of the limitless cynicism of Clare Daly on the Ukraine, where she criticizes ‘the West’s’ obsession with the Ukraine crisis. He notes that she has form in deflecting criticism from Russia and taking a selective approach to the different western obsessions – for example, not criticising similar asymmetric focus on the situation in Palestine to the detriment of the crises she now highlights such as in Afghanistan.
I have rarely found myself in agreement with Clare Daly, and would prefer not to, but does she have a point in this instance? Perhaps her grandstanding is cynical opportunism designed more to distract than to raise a genuine point but taken on its merits, it is worth looking at.
In response to no other crisis in recent years (if ever) has Ireland – or other countries – waived immigration requirements for people fleeing conflicts across the world. The Afghanistan situation, for example, did not result in a blanket removal of covid-19 entrance requirements at Irish airports to make arrivals from Afghanistan easier. No arrivals from Yemen or Syria have been told that their teaching qualifications will be fast-tracked through the Irish registration systems. At no time did Ireland commit to receiving 200,000 refugees from any other crisis nor to providing the level of support to enable their integration.
It can’t be denied that the war in the Ukraine has generated an unprecedented sense of pre-occupation compared to all the other conflicts around the world.
In Yemen the humanitarian situation is poised to get even worse between June and December, with the number of people likely to be unable to meet their minimum food needs possibly reaching a record 19 million, suffering from years of unending conflict.
In Syria, a decade of war has left more 350,200 people dead, over 6 million refugees and 6 million internally displaced. We have heard a lot about Syria over the last ten years yet and the government has made some gestures but nothing akin to the Irish welcome for Ukrainians seeking refuge.
In Afghanistan, since the Taliban’s seizure of power in August, a humanitarian catastrophe has loomed. U.N. data suggests millions of Afghan children could starve. Rightly, there was an outpouring of shock – and fear – at what was happening in Afghanistan with the Taliban reclaiming power, yet the focus has quickly moved away from the situation.
In Ethiopia, conflicts are popping up all over the country, and this country with more than 100m people risks a literal Balkanisation, splitting into multiple secessionist regions bringing even more death and destruction than the tens of thousands of lives that have been lost in recent months and the looming hunger that comes nearly every year now, compounded by war. 27 million people are at risk of severe food insecurity. Many are already there.
Connected to the war in the Ukraine, it is not so well known that the Ukraine conflict will not only affect prices here in Ireland but have far more devastating consequences in the abovenamed places. According to UNOCHA, “Ukraine – commonly referred to as Europe’s breadbasket – is a major producer of wheat, barley, rye, corn and sunflower.
Together, Ukraine and the Russian Federation supply around 30 per cent of wheat and 20 per cent of corn to global markets. Prolonged hostilities in Ukraine, especially in the south-east – where much of the wheat crops are concentrated – could have devastating impacts on food security that will reverberate across the globe. Some of the world’s hunger hotspots, like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria and Yemen, could be disproportionately exposed to the unfolding crisis due to their dependence on wheat.”
These are just a few of the conflicts whose scale of death, destruction and displacement can reasonably be claimed to equal or exceed that of the Ukraine. And we have not yet mentioned the Rohingya displacement from Burma to Bangladesh, whose level and speed of displacement was unprecedented in recent years – with over 1.5m ran out of their country in a short few weeks. They did not arrive to a welcoming environment as the Ukrainians have in Europe but instead landed in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, a flood prone swampland where Rohingyan’s already there existed with very limited rights.
Then there is the conflict in Nigeria, previously made famous by the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign after over 700 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram. Repeats of this have not seen the same headlines. 20 years of conflict in Darfur, Sudan, is no longer the poster child of conflict with celebrities such as George Clooney championing its cause. Millions remain in camps. Conflict in Somalia is never ending but is rarely heard of since the 1994 withdrawal of US troops and Black Hawk Down.
The civil war in Mali barely makes the news but rings a bell when the name of the iconic town Timbuktu is mentioned. Next door in Burkina Faso hundreds of thousands have fled their homes. You may never have heard of its capital, Ougadougou. International Crisis Group highlights Africa’s newest jihadi fronts—in northern Mozambique – where insurgents who claim a new Islamic State province in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region have stepped up attacks on security forces and civilians. Nearly a million people have fled the fighting. Then there is South Sudan, the world’s newest country, independent since 2011, that cannot seem to escape the vicious circle of war.
The list goes on. Haiti. Israel-Palestine. Libya. Western Sahara. Civil war in Cameroon. Before the latest iteration of the Ukraine conflict, already over 800,000 were displaced from their homes because of the simmering conflict that has continued since 2014. Little was heard of this in the last five years until Russia started sabre-rattling.
Globally, in 2022, 274 million people were anticipated as needing humanitarian assistance and protection before the conflict in the Ukraine. More than 1 per cent of the world’s population is now displaced, about 42 per cent of whom are children. 1% sounds small. 1% is 70 million people. 30 million children. Hunger is rising and food insecurity is at unprecedented levels. Globally, up to 811 million people are undernourished. Famine-like conditions remain a real possibility in 43 countries around the world according to the UN 2022 Global Humanitarian Overview.
So, maybe Clare Daly has a point, irrespective of any inconsistencies in her priorities. It is, if nothing else, an interesting question worth asking ourselves. It is a question that Syrian refugees in Europe have asked: why are Ukrainians getting preferential treatment as non-EU refugees? It is a question that is not going unraised in other conflict affected countries. After a week of fundraising, Irish people donated close to 20m euro to agencies responding to the crisis. Many also started collections and have travelled toward the Ukraine with truck loads of goods. Over 20,000 pledges have been made to house families fleeing Ukraine. No other crisis has received a similar response from the public.
There have been criticisms in some of the more ‘politically correct’ that there is an element of sub-conscious bias in the asymmetric focus on the Ukraine – because they look like us, live like us, eat like us – even go to the toilet like us – that is close to accusations of racism. It is an interesting discussion in a world where we are all expected to be global citizens – cosmopolitans – to use the philosophical term – being more worldly, having equal connections, empathy, concern for all citizens of the world irrespective of who they are, or where they are.
But the reality is that very few of us are cosmopolitans in the purest sense. There are many who will signal their virtue as such through social media platforms where there is no cost or real commitment needed and the citizens of the world can unite in 164 characters. But even the Ukraine conflict has shown that virtual e-cosmopolitanism is exceeded by a communitarian spirit with #ukraine and blue and yellow flags on people’s status more prevalent than any amount of #Syria nevermind #Rohingya.
Although some try to make the issue about skin-colour and thence about race, the reality is much simpler. We have spheres of interest. Circles of interaction. We have responsibility and concern for our direct families first and foremost. Those of us who remain the ‘somewheres’ in this world are attached to our community and our neighbours. Modern living in ‘the West’ has seen a growth in the ‘anywheres’, people with few if any physical connections to their community, whose circle of concern are those who share their same worldview, their intellectual peers and their work colleagues, rather than the melting pot of community living.
There may be an element of ‘they look like us’ to the response but the reason they look like us is because they live nearby us, at least in the relative sense. Ireland is part of Europe as is the Ukraine. The conflict brings back memories of the Cold War and brings the spectre of war to the edges of the EU. The Ukraine may not be an EU member but it is as European as any member of the EU from a geographical sense. The Ukraine is historically and culturally more closely tied to Europe than the places mentioned above.
When it comes to human suffering, many would say that this should not matter. No life is more important than another. No person’s suffering is any less than another’s. And this of course is true. But my family’s suffering is of more importance to me than a stranger’s. My neighbours is more important to me than a stranger’s. Does this make me cold or indifferent? It does not.
No one has the mental capacity to be equally concerned about everyone else as that would mean loosing the ties that bind family, community, tribe, and nation. To be concerned about everyone in the same way is to be tweet about your sister’s plight instead of helping her out; to post a status update about your granny being robbed instead of defending her.
And I am sure that someone in one of these far flung places is equally agreed: they would do the same. We rightly do not expect a Kenyan to be as equally concerned about the war in the Ukraine as they are about the war in Ethiopia or the chaos in Somalia. And no doubt, nor would Clare Daly. The expectation of cosmopolitanism is the consequence of having too little to worry about for the last 30 or 40 years relative to years past or to the majority of those living under the shadow of conflict, severe poverty, hunger and many other issues that the vast majority in Ireland no longer have to genuinely worry about – probably since the end of World War II and certainly since the end of the Cold War.
But it is not unreasonable to debate whether there is an excess or obsession with the Ukraine, for whatever reasons, nor to remind people that the war in the Ukraine is not the only conflict going on at the moment, and right now possibly not the worst.
But in a world of only angels and demons, there is little space for nuance or context when it comes to whatever the trending national obsession du jour may be.
David Reynolds