Arno Polegato
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Injustices

Bombardment

Aleppo was completely destroyed. For years, its citizens have been the losers of a conflict that endlessly bounces back without any clear end in sight. The fragile nature of the alliances and coalitions active in Syria and Iraq is bound to result in resentment, revenge and more atrocities. It is not by condemning it within parliaments that we are preventing the horror occurring on the ground from happening. Now, we are slowly starting to realize that something horrible is happening, and we feel guilty. We don’t even deserve to feel guilty about a situation we knew about and decided to look away from. While we all bear a part of responsibility for failing to properly mobilize and push our governmental policies towards a human relief structure for civilians, I don’t understand how our political leaders can sleep at night. The symbolic duty of a politician is to represent their population and improve their conditions. However, when the improvement of their condition comes at the cost of human lives in a war zone, that’s not acceptable.

Hypocritical media cycle

Let’s take a step back. What happened in Aleppo is tragic, but is it the only city currently under siege in Syria? We’re hypocrites. A few weeks ago, media coverage of Mosul intensified as western-backed forces consisting of pro-government and Kurdish troops were seemingly leading an offensive that would bring back the city away from the influence of Daesh. It only took a few days to understand that the expected goal would not materialize so easily. Now, the contrary happened, Daesh actually captured significant territory and the conflict has become a shadow across mainstream western media. Nobody is talking about it anymore. Even more blatant is the treatment of Yemen.

It’s relatively simple though, the same atrocities are occurring over there, the same tragic civilian causalities in Saana from coalition bombings. Yet it seems that we are more inclined to condemn Syrian government bombings, backed by Russia, our traditional enemy than Saudi bombings backed by the Sunni Arab coalition, which have historically been assigned as allies by the United States. How can we morally focus our sole attention to one conflict, as if our gauge of indignation was so low that we, the good people, could only focus on a fragment of the issue at once. Just look at the trends and you will see what the public and its watchdogs are monitoring over the last 90 days.

The relievers, pleading not guilty

There will always be those people who argue that one should not condemn this hypocrisy because “at least, we’re doing something to help”, be it donating money, talking about it, contacting public officials and so on. But I think it’s a fallacy. You have no right to relieve yourself from the guilt you owe the world for the entirety of these tragedies. Your material actions do not compensate for the moral attachment you owe the people who are dying. Most of the material actions we can undertake, if not their entirety, are not contributing to fixing the issue at its source. While the geopolitical strategies remain the same, there will always be war zones, genocides, tragedies that we orchestrate from our developed lifestyles. Change needs to occur firmly, in a drastic restructuration of the global politics, and although I can’t see how this could possibly happen in the short time, I believe the only way we will avoid a pure disintegration of humankind is through such a global movement.