Every day, I read many articles in the Western press about the war in Ukraine, the terrorists in Syria, the state in Libya and Iraq; mostly about how many millions the U.S and NATO countries have paid to feed these wars and what are the latest arms that are going to be sent to Ukraine in order to fight the Russians on the land of Ukraine. We have all information about the latest missiles, nuclear-related issues, airstrikes, about the geography where these strikes are taking place, but we don’t have any idea about what is happening to the Ukrainian people exactly as we did not have any idea about what had happened to the Syrian people, or to the Iraqi people, or to the Afghani people or to the Libyan people during different kinds of wars which had been launched on them.
But we hardly if ever read any real story about what has befallen the people of these countries during these wars. Logically, human beings are the raison d’etre of this existence, of this life, they are the A and Z of the objectives of what we are striving to achieve. All of the work that has been done is done, presumably, for the sake of people; either to make their lives better or to make them more prosperous, or to make them more successful, or to give them better education, or to offer them better jobs.
But unfortunately, the history of these wars, particularly the wars I have lived through, beginning with the war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now the war in Ukraine, prove that the peoples of these countries do not even figure in the calculations of events at all. No one learns anything about their human suffering, their erasement, migration, or the unthinkable human ordeal they have to go through due to these wars in which they have no say whatsoever. The war narrative ignores people completely and focuses all the time on money, armaments, power, position, stronger and weaker, triumph and defeat, who is going to defeat whom, what regional blocks have been dismantled, and what other regional blocks have been formulated after this war has started.
So, the whole media literature about war, the whole narrative greatly lacks something; it has the core reason for human activities missing. The core reason for human activities is the well-being of human lives, to ensure their safety, their security, and their prosperity. To take one example: the coverage of the Palestinian issue has been for seventy years portraying what is happening on the ground as if it is a conflict of opinions, a difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians. There is not a single sentence in the active singular, it is all in the passive, there is not a single narrative that says Israelis have killed a Palestinian today. All we read is “A Palestinian has been killed, two Palestinians have been killed”. Where is the subject? There is no subject because the killer doesn’t want to appear in the narrative, he has to be hidden in the sentence so that no one would be able to accuse the killer of killing the Palestinians.
Thus, what we read every day in the Western press leaves much to be desired, and I feel it is one of the most pressing needs for humanity to chart an alternative media, a strong media that makes people its primary focus, their lives, their safety, their security, and their prosperity. One might ask: where is the free Western press, where are the articles, where are the books that condemn all these wars that stand for the rights of people?
Is it such a great thing that Europe has opened its doors for Ukrainian refugees? Is it a good thing for any human being to be uprooted from their place, from their home, from their country, from their history, from their social matrix, and then to be welcomed as a refugee? Those who are glorifying the treatment of refugees do not know what a refugee means! But I am going to try to make it simple: Any one of you who has to travel finds it most difficult to choose what he or she is going to put in that suitcase for a week or two weeks or for a month. They look at their clothes, they look at their belongings and that is the most difficult moment to decide what to take and what to leave. So, imagine that you are being uprooted from your home, from your belongings, from your pictures, from your history, from your social relations and turned into an insignificant person, hung in the air, not knowing where to go, how to establish yourself, what to do, and you can never establish yourself, you can never get rooted again after you are uprooted, you will never be a full human being again as a refugee or as an immigrant.
So, can we please stop for a moment; people of conscience, people who care for humanity, people who know what it means not to have a home, not to have society, not to have a village, not to have a city? Can we all stop for a moment and make a huge world that stands against wars? Can we begin to understand the suffering of migrants, the suffering of refugees, the suffering of people who are forced to live in any war that they didn’t start, that they do not want, that they have nothing to gain from? With people whose land had been occupied, who had been uprooted by settlers, terrorists and Zionists in order to take their land, claim their identity and throw them into a black hole in this world.
The measure of free press, free will and free initiative is how fair their stand could be with people, any people from East or West, North or South, because God created all of us, and we are all equal in the eyes of God. So, can we go back to the basics and make a real stand for the sake of humanity, so that no more people would have to be immigrants or refugees or uprooted or killed in more war zones?
*The writer is a Syrian politician and political and media advisor to the President of Syria.
(Al Mayadeen English)
December 28, 2022
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
