By Taju Tijani

Africa’s most embarrassing nation, Nigeria, has once again fallen into an embarrassing hell hole. In a most audaciously embarrassing moment, blinded, blinkered and ignorant Nigerians are said to be queuing up to go and defend Ukraine in its war with the Russian forces. When I read that, I did not know what to do – cry, laugh or remain unmoved by any emotion.

Even as we deplore the violence and the loss of lives in Ukraine resulting from the Russian intervention (and the neo-fascist violence in the Donbas), it is valuable to step back and look at how the rest of the world may perceive this conflict, starting with the West’s ethnocentric interest in an attack whose participants and victims they believe share aspects of identity whether related to continent, weather, culture, music, religion or pigmentation.

War in Ukraine joins a sequence of wars that have opened sores on a very fragile planet. Wars in Africa and Middle East seem endless, and some of them are rarely commented upon with any feeling in media outlets across the world or in the cascade of posts found on social media platforms. For example, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which began in 1996 and resulted in millions of casualties, has not elicited the kind of universal sympathy the world now shows, especially in the reporting in Ukraine. In contrast, the startlingly partisan comments from political leaders and journalists during the conflict in Ukraine have revealed the grip of racism on the imaginations of these moulders of public opinion.

No one, which is to say the political and military forces in the North Atlantic states, cares about the suffering of children in Africa and the Middle East. They are, however, gripped by the war in Ukraine, but it should not be allowed to be seen as worse than other conflicts taking place across the globe that are much more brutal and are likely to slip out of everyone’s consciousness due to the lack of interest and attention given by world leaders and media outlets to them.

Charlie DAgata of CBS News said that Ukraine is not a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully – city, where you would not expect that, or hope that (a conflict) is going to happen. Clearly, these are the things one expects to see in Kabul (Afghanistan) or Baghdad (Iraq) or Goma (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), but not in a relatively civilized, relatively European city in Ukraine. War in these black and brown regions does not need to elicit our outrage. Or so it seems. 

Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze said to the BBC: “You would not expect such violence because of the kind of people who were caught in the crossfire: European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed every day.” Sakvarelidze considers the Ukrainians to be Europeans, although DAgata calls them relatively European. But they are certainly not African or Middle Easterners, people whom, if you think carefully about what is being said here, certain world leaders and international media outlets expect to be killed by the violence unleashed against them by the global great powers and by the weapons sold to corrupt politicians in these regions by these great powers. What really galled me was the inhuman and inhumane treatment of black and Asians caught in the crossfire of this war. Barefaced racism against others was on full display to the eternal shame of Ukraine and its European sympathisers. Europe momentarily becomes a dark continent!!! Then to read that some ignorant, misguided urchins in Abuja are voicing interest as mercenaries in Russian-Ukraine war despite the brutish manner Nigerians were treated made me want to come and give them dirty slaps.   

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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen rebuked this barbaric attack and said that it is President Putin who is bringing war back to Europe. Bringing war back to Europe: this is instructive language from Von der Leyen. It reminded me of Aimé Césaires Discourse on Colonialism (1950), where the great poet and communist bemoaned Europe’s ability to forget the terrible fascistic treatment of the peoples of Africa and Asia by the colonial powers when they spoke of fascism. Fascism, Césaire wrote, is the colonial experiment brought back to Europe.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, neither the United Nations Secretary-General nor the President of the European Commission came forward to make any immediate condemnation of that war. Both international institutions went along with the war, allowing the destruction of Iraq, which resulted in the death of more than a million people. In 2004, a year into the U.S. war on Iraq, after reports of grave violations of human rights – including by Amnesty International on torture in the prison of Abu Ghraib – came to light, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan labelled the war illegal. 

America as the great aggressor is yet to be made to account for the genocidal wars of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somali and other outer fringes of the non-white world. Then in February 2022 in the ongoing Russian military campaign, these institutions rushed to condemn the war. Does this mean that they will be just as quick to condemn the United States when it starts its next bombing campaign? Yawn!

People often ask me, what is the most reliable news outlet? This is a hard question to answer these days, as Western news outlets are increasingly becoming stenographers of their governments (with the racist attitudes of the reporters on full display more and more often, making the apologies that come later hardly comforting). State-sponsored outlets in Russia and China now increasingly find themselves banned on social media sites. Anyone who counters Washington’s narrative is dismissed as irrelevant, and these fringe voices find it hard to develop an audience. Meanwhile, press freedom has been set aside during the current conflict in Ukraine, with Europe and Australia suspending the broadcast of RT (Russia Today) which is a Russia state-controlled international media network. 

Cancel culture has moved from the chatter of social media to the war fronts of geopolitics and diplomacy as far as the Russian-Ukraine conflict is concerned. Switzerland has decided to end a century of formal neutrality to cancel Russia by enforcing European sanctions against it (remember that Switzerland remained neutral as the Nazis tore through Europe during World War II and operated as the Nazi bankers even after the war). 

Wars are ugly, especially wars of aggression. The role of the reporter is to explain why a country goes to war, particularly an unprovoked war. In the same way, the Russian attack on Ukraine requires explanation: the roots of it go deep to various political and foreign policy developments, such as the post-Soviet emergence of ethnic nationalism along the spine of Eastern Europe, the eastward advance of U.S. power through NATO toward the Russian border, and the turbulent relationship between the major European states and Russia. To explain this conflict is not to justify it, for there is little to justify in the bombing of a sovereign people.

Tijani lives in London.