My previous column, "The Death of the Arabs," received positive and negative responses. One of the most interesting lines of criticism raised against my argument strongly emphasized the ongoing death of all humanity instead of only one group of people. Therefore, I decided to enumerate the ongoing human tragedies the world over in this column.
First of all, as the will of the United Nations is handed over to its five privileged members, the U.N. emerges as an incapable agent in resolving humanitarian crises simply because those permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are also rivals.
Moreover, thanks to the power vacuum that emerged after the end of the Cold War, the United States appeared as an uncontrolled and unchecked hegemonic power that eventually occupied both Afghanistan and Iraq on false pretenses. These occupations have led to a massive humanitarian tragedy of 1 million people dead and innumerable people permanently disabled and/or becam
e refugees, while Afghanistan and Iraq have become the most unstable countries on earth.
What is worse, those unjust occupations led to the proliferation of terrorist organizations in the region. Terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and Daesh, turned the Syrian uprising into a permanent civil war. Under the label of Islamic terrorism, those terrorist organizations aimed at destabilizing the region and prepare the ground for a military occupation. For instance, Daesh systematically left the regions they controlled in Syria to the U.S.-supported Democratic Union Party (PYD).
Regarding the Syrian civil war, the case of Eastern Ghouta proves once again that the U.N. is incapable of resolving humanitarian crises while Saudi Arabia, one of the leading powers of the Arab world, appears indifferent to the tragedy of their fellow Arabs.
In terms of the Syrian refugee crisis, EU member states tried to evade taking any major responsibility and never bothered to prepare the ground for taking Syrian refugees back to their country.
Israel, on the other hand, continues to massacre Palestinians every day. Recently, the ferocious murder of a Palestinian civilian by Israeli soldie
rs caught on camera brought to mind the ongoing humanitarian tragedy in the Holy Land.In Yemen, people are on the brink of starvation due to the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. While Iran and the Saudis follow their own interests, the civil war in Yemen does not appear on top of the world's political agenda.
In the Eastern Turkistan – the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region – the Chinese government continues to repress the Muslim-majority Uighurs. Prayer rooms are being closed, religious and Uighur-language education is being banned and any attempt to claim basic human rights is responded to with violence.
In Myanmar,
the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority appears to have ended for the present moment.
In the past, the U.N. once appeared sincerely concerned with the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. The U.N. intervened in the bloody conflict between the nomadic sub-Saharan Africans and the sedentary Arab Sudanese people. Yet today, it appears that the U.N.'s military intervention did not quite aim at ending the humanitarian crisis, but at preventing the Sudanese government from opposing the separation of the country.
Western countries always occupied other countries and exploited their resources under the pretense of advocating world peace, human rights and democracy. Today, no such veil can cover the pursuit of their selfish interests. Thus, humanity is in pursuit of justice and needs a new world order.
