Pause for Thought

  

African and Asian migrants stranded on Ukrainian border
(courtesy of bbc.com)

5 min. read

At the time of writing, it’s been over a fortnight since Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine. In the European context, at least, it is in the backdrop of the everyday. Further afield, my West Africa-based father sends me a panicked email, asking how I am and worrying about the threat of nuclear Armageddon. 

Hearts understandably go out to the millions of refugees fleeing the war-torn region. 

An Ukrainian technician comes round to inspect my broken down boiler, on the behest of my landlord. I ask how he is and about his family back home. He’s preparing to welcome his ex-wife and their daughter. He eventually has to forego the works, his time taken up with hosting his newly-arrived relatives.

It’s good to see the Church rising to the occasion. Numerous prayer meetings are called in various nations. Pope Francis proposes a global day of prayer for peace on Ash Wednesday. 

Closer to home, a predominantly Nigerian Belgium-based church organises an emergency Zoom prayer call. My own church in Brussels arranges for members to donate urgent medical supplies. 

It’s right for there to be such an outpouring of solidarity for people dragged into war, for reasons over which they have no control; the ethno-nationalist whims of a mercurial autocrat and the imperialist expansion of NATO.  War is inhumane. If it's not injury and death in Ukraine, it's ordinary Russian citizens suffering under gruelling sanctions.

And yet I’m increasingly uneasy over the seeming partiality of this support and news coverage. This is not about playing Oppression Bingo. I'm just not about to customise anything with Blue & Yellow, if I wasn't previously conscientious about showing affinity with other populations suffering under warfare. It would be disingenuous and selective.

I don’t recall such a widespread groundswell of support for devastating conflicts in Yemen, the Sahel region or Ethiopia (where civil war has seen a similar number of inhabitants displaced as Ukraine). Nor at the start of disastrous NATO-led expeditions in Libya and Afghanistan. That aforementioned Nigerian church group have not, to my knowledge, organised similar intercessory meetings for wars taking place in the Motherland. Maybe their focus has narrowed since moving to Europe.

I can't remember PayPal or WeTransfer fundraising for various other geopolitical crises. Or Soundcloud changing their logo to the ban-the-bomb sign for the numerous conflict zones around the globe.

Don’t even get me started on the hierarchical treatment of refugees. In the lead up to another significant French election, Right-wing politicians in the country actively promote discriminating between which refugees to accept, based on nationality, ethnicity and/or religion.

I’m both impressed and relieved when an English member of my church house group points out the appalling treatment of darker-skinned refugees escaping the war in Ukraine. There are reports of African and Asian students being insulted, harassed, even hauled off vehicles to let indigenous Ukrainians board and flee, only to be left stranded. 

On the second week anniversary itself of the invasion, I attend a discussion which three guests with a connection to Ukraine join via Zoom. One is a Nigerian who settled in Ukraine over 30 years ago. After the outbreak of war, he crossed the Hungarian border with his family.  He claims that Western media has exaggerated the extent of discrimination against non-European refugees. Ukraine isn't racist compared to Russia, he asserts. According to those he's spoken to, these 'misunderstandings' come down to administrative errors or foreign students not having enough of the language to navigate the system. He insists it's not a systematic problem and that these 'isolated' incidents of racism have mainly happened on the Polish border. 

Another panellist - a Russian-speaking Ukrainian pastor who previously ministered to foreign students - reiterates that those who experienced hostility weren't singled out because of their ethnicity. Everyone was stressed given the circumstances, he argues. 

This exchange frustrates me. Whilst their comments provide an alternative perspective -and from the ground-I remain sceptical and for good reason. Wilfully or not, both speakers have a naïve understanding of how racism works. The Nigerian guest appears to have spent so much time assimilating, he's forgotten - or not aware - that racism doesn't have to be overt to be systematic. And just because one nation is less flagrantly racist than another, that doesn't mean it doesn't also have a problem. Like the rest of the world, Ukraine would not be inured to White Supremacy.

Elsewhere, there's suddenly much indignation over the bureaucracy that Ukrainian refugees are facing in European states, including the UK.  Tell that to the hundreds and thousands of mainly African migrants I meet at the Red Cross Centre near central Brussels, some of whom have been stuck in the quagmire of the dehumanising migration system for years. Where is the outrage in the mainstream on their behalf? There is none. Brown bodies are naturally more dispensable.

Then there’s the frankly racist media characterisation of this conflict as being somehow more tragic because it’s not taking place in a ‘third world country’ and that those being killed have ‘blond hair and blue eyes’. 

God help us. 

White Supremacy manages to taint humanitarian endeavour. When it underpins so much of the current world system, how could it not. The Church has sadly, if unconsciously, been at times complicit in this prejudice. We can't simply be swayed by Western mainstream media's whimsy. Situations don't cease to be concerning just because they're no longer top of the news agenda (cross-reference Afghanistan roughly six months ago), if part of the agenda at all.

All this is depressingly familiar, as are the arguments that justify the biases. "...Ukraine is geographically closer..." " ‘We’ have more in common culturally..." 

I once commented on similar responses to other incidents of violence taking place on European soil. These justifications were not convincing then and they still aren’t. Anything that tries to rationalise that some lives are more valuable than others never could be. 

One of the potential blessings in disguise of this horrifying situation is that it is already the impetus for well-needed dialogue. The hope -albeit tentative - is that long-term lessons will be learned and implemented, not conveniently forgotten.