Whether we are talking about the crises affecting Yemen, South Sudan, Haiti or even Pakistan, these are all symbols of the same phenomenon: Western apathy in the face of the other.
The awareness of belonging to the same group, regardless of its origins, and of acting as a citizen of one and the same international community seems undermined by a selective vegetative coma. Why are we less driven by humanitarian advocacy for the inclusion of all? The action of cosmopolitanism seems less successful in the countries of the South, whose crises are so easily invisible, as evidenced by the civil war which is tearing Yemen apart.
For eight years now, this country has been plunged into a humanitarian crisis, undoubtedly the most important of the millennium. Even today, Amnesty International does not seem to see a way out. Through her testimony, journalist and humanitarian worker Jasmin Lavoie recently tried to awaken our collective consciences. But our eyes were rather on The sunflowers of Van Gogh, stained with soup after a militant action, or on the formation of the new cabinet of ministers in Quebec.
Today, just over 20 million Yemenis (out of a population of 30 million) survive thanks to humanitarian aid from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as well as that from the World Food Program (WFP) . Food insecurity in Yemen affects two-thirds of its population. It has steadily worsened as the war in Ukraine inflames food prices and complicates WFP supplies. The irony is that our attention is largely captured by the conflict in Ukraine, which we are passionate about, but not by its impact on racialized populations in the southern hemisphere.
Collective consciousness bias
The voice of the UN, which defends the idea of a single human community, is listened to less and less. It is even less so when the faces it highlights are not those with which one naturally identifies. This is the basis of Western journalism: the relevance of the news depends on the ability of the reader (that is to say us) to identify with it.
In the face of such disengagement, it is sensationalized news that wins the click war, relegating the crises unfolding before our indifferent eyes to hidden rubrics in the international sections of our media. How to put an end to this Western somnambulism and engage in a critical cosmopolitanism and above all not complacent in the face of the tragedies of non-white bodies?
One of the arguments put forward to defend the reception of Ukrainian refugees lies in the resemblance between our peoples and the Ukrainian people: “They are people like us”, they say. Yemenis and Palestinians are not part of this “we” that the West defends. They are that other who is not white. Another more “accustomed” to suffering and violence, it is still said.
This has been demonstrated in many media discourses on Palestinian resistance, strongly denounced, sometimes even qualified as terrorist resistance, whereas today people say they find the strength of Ukrainian resistance inspiring. Why heroize one, but dehumanize the other? This logic, fueled by a critical cosmopolitanism, nevertheless proves that there is no ideal victim just as there cannot be an ideal crisis.
The goal is not to make Western citizens feel guilty, but rather to awaken their conscience to the selective media coverage of conflicts in the world. So that the attention given to the “we” of Yemen, Palestine or Pakistan is equivalent to that given to the “we” of Ukraine.
To awaken a passive international community, we must open the discussion. The arts are excellent at engaging people in reflection and raising awareness about humanitarian crises and the plight of climate refugees, however distant they may be. The proof is with the animated film Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo, directed by Marya Zarif and André Kadi. At the Festival du nouveau cinema (FNC), the producer of this film, Judith Beauregard, explained her desire to raise awareness, through stories like this one, the spectators (hear us, Westerners) of the crises experienced by those who do not don’t look like them.
This film, which humanizes the suffering so often dehumanized here, is part of the solution to fight against Western indifference. Because art, by shocking, shaking and making people feel guilty, makes everyone aware of their privileges while putting an end to the selective empathy that obstructs our reading of the news.