How can so many in the West so easily ignore genocide?

Somdeep Sen

“The commander said, ‘Shoot all of them.’ And they starting firing – pop, pop, pop, like this … I left everything behind and accepted I was going to die.”

“We are being exterminated. We are being massly eradicated. And you pretend to care for humanitarian and human rights, which is not what we are living now. To prove us wrong, please do something.”

It may be surprising to some, but these two current testimonies describing active genocidal campaigns are not from the same conflict, or even the same continent.

The first witness testimony comes from West Darfur, Sudan, where the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are targeting the Masalit community. According to human rights organisations, the RSF has been going “door to door”, killing thousands of civilians, raping women and girls and burning down entire neighbourhoods. They have raised the alarm that there is a systematic campaign to entirely erase “an indigenous Darfuri group” and that the international community must stop the “genocide going on in West Darfur”.

The second testimony is an excerpt from Palestinian doctor Hammam Alloh’s October 31 interview with Democracy Now. Two weeks after the interview, he was killed in his wife’s family home in Gaza by an Israeli air strike. Alloh is among the more than 23,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military campaign in the Strip – a campaign that experts, academics and civil society organisations have deemed as “genocidal” as it has systematically destroyed all facets of Palestinian life in the besieged enclave.

But curiously, many in the West seems to ignore mass atrocities like these with ease. And Western leaders have become skilled at evading calling them what they are: crimes against humanity. Why?

In part, this is because Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact.

Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it fragile or failed state indexes, political stability rankings or development-sector devised growth and socioeconomic progress indicators – they often work to establish white superiority and the victimhood of the racial other.