Some People (Europeans) Matter More Than Others...

By Savo Heleta
Published in Blogcritics Magazine on April 04, 2008

If you are in a war zone and you are a European and your country is small, poor, not so important on a global scale, and unable to sustain itself without outside help, you will still receive a lot of attention from the international community and they will do everything to help you.

If you live in a war zone and you are an African and your country does not have oil and mineral reserves, the international community will simply ignore your suffering and pleas for help.

If this is not true, then why did the international community ignore the Rwandan genocide and why is it ignoring the ongoing conflict and suffering in Darfur, while sending tens of thousands of troops to Bosnia and Kosovo and spending billions there?

In 1994, around 1 million people died in Rwanda in only 100 days. Philip Gourevitch writes that "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

While everyone knew about this, no one did anything to stop it. Some, like the Bill Clinton's administration, even prevented others from intervening.

The United Nations, under the pressure of the United States and Britain, demonstrated that no one was interested in stopping the Rwandan genocide by ordering a reduction of UN troops in Rwanda from 2,500 to only 270 soldiers in the midst of the brutal slaughter.

A week after the reduction of UN forces in Rwanda, the UN Security Council, under the pressure of the United States, authorized an increase of international presence in war-ravaged Bosnia, adding 6,550 soldiers to about 24,000 troops already there.

It didn't matter that after only 22 days of the genocide more people had been killed in Rwanda than during the entire Bosnian war, where about 100,000 people died in four years, including civilians and soldiers on all sides.

Joseph Biden writes that one of the most important foreign policy issues facing the U.S. Congress in the 1990s was the American involvement in Bosnia and other war-affected parts of the former Yugoslavia. "Helping Bosnia create a viable multi-ethnic, free-market democracy sends a critical message to other would-be 'ethnic cleansers' that a repeat of such carnage will not be tolerated elsewhere in Europe."

We cannot tolerate wars in Europe, but we can ignore millions of innocent victims in Africa. Talking about Rwanda, the French President Francois Mitterand said that "genocide is not too important in such countries." He explained that brutal killings are a way of life in Africa, an African tradition.

In the documentary film Shake Hands with the Devil, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, says that "superpowers had no interest in Rwanda. They were interested in Yugoslavia."

"Thousands upon thousands soldiers were sent there. And here [in Rwanda] I had barely 450 troops. The guiding principle was that in Rwanda it was tribalism, it was history repeating itself."

"In Yugoslavia, it was different - it was 400 years of historic conflict between great religions of the world. It was European security. It was whites! Rwanda was black. It was in the middle of Africa. It had no strategic value," says Dallaire.

In 1999, Western countries claimed that up to 10,000 Albanians were killed in Kosovo by the Serbian security forces and that the world had to intervene immediately.

They quickly decided to launch air strikes, using over 1,000 airplanes in their bombing campaign.

After the short war, 2,100 people were confirmed to be killed in Kosovo by the Serbian forces before the air strikes, while another 2,000 were still missing.

Back in 1994, 1 million dead Rwandans in only three months were not enough to influence Western countries to intervene.

Today, the UN and aid agencies estimate that around 200,000 people have died in Darfur since 2003, while over 2 million people are living in refugee camps after fleeing fighting in the region.

For almost a year now, the UN Secretary-General has been asking the world powers to provide the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur with 6 attack helicopters and 18 transport helicopters so they can start protecting civilians in Darfur.

Helicopters are essential for any success of the mission in the remote region the size of France.

Even though NATO members together possess over 18,000 military helicopters, to this day, no country has supplied even one helicopter.

It was easy to find 1,000 fighter jets to punish Serbia for killing a few thousand people in Kosovo, but it is impossible to find 24 helicopters to start protecting people in Darfur.

Currently, the European Union is deploying 2,000 officials to run an independent Kosovo. The costs of maintaining the EU's mission alone are expected to be at least $2.4 billion between now and 2010.

This is in addition to 16,000 NATO soldiers who are already in Kosovo.

The ongoing NATO mission in Bosnia costs the U.S. taxpayers around $2 billion and in Kosovo $1.9 billion annually. At the same time, the World Food Program is having trouble finding money to continue delivering food to more than 2 million refugees in Darfur. Monthly costs of food delivery are $6.2 million.

While people in Bosnia and Kosovo suffered greatly in the 1990s, they seem to be lucky that they were born in Europe. The world sent troops, aid, and money and showed and is still showing compassion and care in the Balkans.

Even though the killings in Rwanda and Darfur were on a much larger scale, they were and still are ignored by those who could make a difference. Poor Africans and their suffering simply don't matter.

It is an ugly world we live in.