��������

For almost four weeks, the war between Russia and Ukraine has shown the reality of human rights in Western societies.
The language being used by Western media outlets to describe Ukrainian suffering involves conspicuous racism and double standards, refusing to compare the situation to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria on the basis that the Ukrainian people are “civilized” Europeans.
No wonder Arabs, Africans, and Asians are forbidden from entering Eastern Europe, even though Ukrainians now seek asylum in their hundreds of thousands in Poland and Slovakia. The UK’s position on the crisis is not fully understood, having withdrawn from the EU at least in part over immigration from Eastern Europe.
The UN approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948. At the time, Africa, half of Asia, the Middle East and South America were European colonies. The French Revolution, which installed the first charter of human rights in 1789, killed tens of thousands of people, and prompted much of that aforementioned colonialism. The current French President Emmanuel Macron to this day does not accept French responsibility for the occupation of Algeria, and the resulting deaths of a million people.
The US, the champion of human rights, engaged in a war in Korea that killed between three and five million people from 1950-53; a further 1.353 million are known to have died in the Vietnam War, and there were numerous victims of wars in Cuba, Cambodia, Grenada and elsewhere between 1961 and 1989. Along with its intervention in overthrowing the Iranian government in 1953, its incitement against the president-elect of Chile, Salvador Allende in 1973, and even its withdrawal from UNESCO because it accepted Palestinian membership in 2017, there are also, of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to consider.

The language being used by Western media outlets to describe Ukrainian suffering involves conspicuous racism and double standards, refusing to compare the situation to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria on the basis that the Ukrainian people are ‘civilized’ Europeans.

Dr. Bader bin Saud

Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is known for its repeated violations of human rights, documented in the “Black Book of Pushbacks,” published in 2020, which contained information collected by 15 Western human rights organizations. There are thousands of documented cases in it of violence against refugees in the Balkans, which is the main route for refugees from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East into Europe. However, the international community has done little to intervene.
All this tells us is that “Human rights” is a flat expression. It does not accept fixed definitions, and is often employed purely in the pursuit of Western interests. Responses to violations of human rights usually include sanctions that fail to achieve much, such as with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
As they failed then, today they did not prevent President Vladimir Putin from annexing Crimea in 2014. In fact, they have not succeeded with many countries they have been imposed on. What is evident in this latest crisis in Ukraine is that Europe will pay the price for this approach.

• Dr. Bader bin Saud is a weekly columnist for Al Riyadh and Okaz, a media and knowledge management researcher, and the former deputy commander of the Special Forces for Hajj and Umrah in ��������.