From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: THE COLOUR OF MERCY
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 08:23:07 GMT

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


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