NELSON’S CONVENIENT EYE WON’T WORK
In 1801, British Admiral Lord Nelson boldly put a telescope to his blind eye to ignore an order. It spawned the phrase ”turning a blind eye”, and resulted in an epic victory. Today, what’s also known as “a Nelson eye“ is a craven act, regenerating epic disasters.
While the eyes of the world have been focused on the U.S. and Iran groping for a way out of a blind alley of pointless destruction, what the UN has called an historic humanitarian crisis of “industrial proportion” entered its fourth year, mainly out of sight and ignored.
Fourteen million Sudanese (the proportional equivalent of 120-million Americans or 150-million European Union citizens) are internally displaced or refugees from violence measured in mass graves and blood-soaked streets, visible from space via satellite imagery.
While the world conveniently turned yet another blind eye, the open source analysis Insight Group has found that a network of Columbian mercenaries, backed by the U.S.-allied United Arab Emirates (UAE), flew drones, trained soldiers and were present, when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed what the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has concluded were war crimes and crimes against humanity across large swathes of the third largest country in Africa.
As many as 150,000 people are believed to have been killed.
The World Food Programme estimates 60 percent of Sudan’s 50-million people will need assistance this year.
Providing it will require about 3‑billion dollars.
For perspective, a monitoring group calculated that the first weeks of the war in Iran cost American taxpayers that much every three days.
Anyone not embarrassed by that might want to consider re-adjusting their conscience focus.
FROM PRIORITY TO PASSE
When Zimbabwe was white minority-ruled Rhodesia, protests and calls for sanctions and boycotts were de rigeur in the UN General Assembly, the echo chambers of liberal causes and on liberal campuses.
In their eyes, the guerrilla movements fighting for majority rule could do no wrong.
April 18 marked the 46th anniversary of their victory.
The slogan for the 88 percent of the population born after the date Zimbabwe came into being , is “the Born Free Generation”.
But as Zimbabwean journalist Angus Shaw recently wrote, most now describe themselves as “the Born to Suffer Generation”.
Opposition political parties are brutally repressed. Zimbabwe ranked 123 out of 142 in the 2024 World Justice Project Rule of Law Index.
And, as Shaw writes “… there’s crippling unemployment countrywide… industries are shutting down, hospitals are without drugs and schools are without books.”
(FULL DISCLOSURE: Angus Shaw has been a friend and colleague since we were neophyte foreign correspondents in Africa in the 1970s,)
South Africa’s system of apartheid was justifiably seen for the abhorrent aberration it was. Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and uicidally brave street activists put, and kept South Africa in the eyes of the world until it was overthrown.
The crime-ridden and impoverished land their corrupt successors have made of the “rainbow nation” now gets little more than an occasional sidelong glance.
ONLY MONEY MATTERS
Post-colonial Angola suffered a 23 year civil war, prolonged by the CIA and South Africa backing the charismatic (later revealed as rutal mass murderer) guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, whom they saw as a counter to Moscow’s aims in Africa.
Once that issue faded from view, the daughter of the then Angolan president was put in charge of the state oil company, and quickly became Africa’s first female billionaire. That the majority of ordinary Angolans remained wallowing in a mire of poverty was, in the main, looked at with a Nelson’s eye by the West.
The spinning counters on fuel pumps have been afforded a much closer and focused look than more basic and long term consequences of the Iran war. Disruption of fertiliser exports from the Persian Gulf to Africa and Asia may pose “…an even more consequential impact on the global economy and human welfare” than the oil price fluctuations.”
Further escalation “… puts tens of millions of people at risk of falling into poverty across 162 countries.”
And if that doesn’t pluck a chord of caring, look at another way. Britain has made a deal to pay France nearly $900-million as part of a three-year border security deal to curb illegal migrants crossing the English Channel,
But more poverty will drive more people to migrate illegally, making present efforts to stop the flow about as effective as a bucket brigade at a five alarm fire.
The obvious answer is making it more attractive for people to stay in their own countries. People do not risk their lives to flee places where they have a future.
It must surely by now be obvious that it is no longer convenient to choose a Nelson’s Eye to look at conflicts and their consequences.
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One thought on “NELSON’S CONVENIENT EYE WON’T WORK”
The world chooses to direct its compassion largely based on what western media leads with, I think, and that leaves many tragedies unseen. I work across the continent of Africa and my heart breaks too often to describe, yet I am very aware not to judge by western standards. I also travelled across Zimbabwe last month and while I agree that the promise of freedom in the early days has long gone sour, the amount of traffic and activity over Easter tells a more complex story than your commentary allows.
Your description of South Africa leaves me bemused. Yes we have crime and poverty, but we are not crime and poverty. In many ways we are more alive to our issues and make more progress to resolve them than many western countries. You dismiss us as though we are just another post colonial failure — but considering the damage and trauma caused by colonialism, I think we’re making something viable out of the ashes, something that doesn’t resemble the empires that constrained us, but will in the long term serve us much better.