#firstworldproblems? More like #globalproblems

Photograph: Tony Webster via Flickr

It’s winter right now in the UK and everyone’s a bit chilly. It’s really annoying, actually, because one minute we’re turning up the central heating and donning our dressing gowns, and the next we’re opening the windows, gasping for fresh air, because we’ve overheated the house. Sigh. It’s so difficult to heat our homes to the right level, especially when the insulation in our walls is already doing such a good job, and we still want to watch television and switch on our lamps to make the living room look nice and Christmassy. All that electricity amounts to quite a bit of heat, you know? Eventually we just leave the heating on and get the electric fans out, and the temperature evens out nicely.

I mean, really. Never mind the fact that nearly 1.3 billion people don’t have access to electricity in the world. The other day we had a power cut for a whole hour. I missed my favourite TV show, and my microwave popcorn never progressed to anything more than rock-hard kernels because the electricity cut off ten seconds into the heating time. I had to chuck them away and grab a bag of ready-made popcorn instead. #firstworldproblems, am I right?

Well, no. Not really. The #firstworldproblems concept is a bit of an issue, actually. It encourages the idea that while us westerners are civilised, sophisticated creatures, juggling our cash-stuffed wallets and our controversial red Starbucks coffee cups while trying to fish out the keys to our London apartments, the rest of the world is living in the dark ages. Posts such as “my phone ran out of battery with an hour left of this lecture to go #fml #firstworldproblems” seems to suggest that smartphones and their frustrating habit of running low on juice at the most inconvenient of times, are only ever possessed by the citizens of Paris, London, New York and the like. That’s most likely the reason for some of the hostility against Syrian refugees over the past months. If I had a pound for every ‘But they have smartphones! They can’t be suffering that badly!’ comment I’ve heard since this summer, I could transport people to Syria with their smartphones and see if they stick with their ignorant comments after that.

The main issue with #firstworldproblems, then, while it’s founded in goodwill and an attempt to highlight the inequalities of the world, is that it tends to further the ‘us versus them’ narrative already too prevalent in society. It creates such a strong picture of developing countries as ‘alien’ that when we see photographs of refugees using smartphones, we’re outraged that they’re real people. The comment section of papers such as the Daily Mail draw in the particularly ignorant: ‘V signs, sunglasses and selfie sticks?! For persecuted, terrified refugees they’ve really mastered the art of looking cool. Wonder if they’ll be posting those pics on Facebook later?!’ It’s as if those from the Middle East aren’t allowed to look or act like our young people. Never mind that social media sites like Facebook are crucial for those contacting family back home: the West has done such a good job at the ‘us vs. them’ narrative that we just can’t imagine a group of non-Western youths owning a pair of jeans, let alone a smartphone with internet access.

I use the Middle East as an example because of the coverage it has recently received, but the argument made here is just as resonant for sub-Saharan Africa, for example, or any other part of the developing world. We should never, of course, ignore the reality that in that area of the world, for example, one person in four is undernourished; or that two thirds of the population of Asia go hungry on a regular basis. We should simply remember that while these really, really important issues exist, we should not be treating citizens of developing countries as ‘others’. We’re all humans, at the end of the day. At the same time as one person tweets a picture of their Starbucks cup lying on the floor in a pool of coffee with the hashtag #firstworldproblems, another person in Kenya spills their tea in a Java café and sighs, frustrated. While a businessman on a conference in London jokes about ‘white people problems’ with a raised eyebrow to the receptionist when he can’t connect to his hotel’s WiFi, the CEO of a company in Iraq resists punching her laptop screen for the same reason. #firstworldproblems are not confined to the ‘First World’, and nor does a ‘First World’ exist.

Originally published on The Global Panorama.

Ravages of war: when the West intervened – Iraq

Image by openDemocracy via Flickr

It seems that no one paused to think about what would happen after the death of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was the United States’ initial reason for invading the country in 2003, and western media did much to emphasise his wicked reputation. But the void left after a government suffers a sudden death was never going to be resolved quietly. Violence and disorder following the intervention of the west comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with recent world history. Take Palestine, for example, whose troubles were escalated after British colonisation. Turn also to Syria, where the actions of the west against the government have caused horrific violence on both sides of the conflict. Can western countries make claim to peacemaking when their history of intervention is littered with violence? The events of Iraq since 2003 suggest not.

The United States’ reasons for invading Iraq were never selfless. Saddam Hussein was deemed an immediate threat to US security, and the validity of the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction is questionable. The invasion was fuelled by a hatred incited by the events of 9/11. One only has to look at the vast increase in Muslim hate crimes across the US to recognise that this was an issue not addressed by the American government before they attacked.

Unfortunately, the actions of an extremist minority, and the resulting intolerance by the west, took its toll on the people of Iraq. A website tracking the public record of violent deaths in the country since the 2003 invasion reasons the death toll to be at 224,000. Civilians died of bombing campaigns as much as militants did, and many more were permanently disabled or otherwise wounded. The bombs weren’t just from the west, either: the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam Hussein’s government led to heavy sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis in a struggle for power that has lasted up to the present day. But civilians were also the target of other attacks, some direct and others incidental, that reached beyond the immediate impact of a bomb and continue to haunt Iraq today.

Western war crimes were made possible by the dehumanisation of Iraqi people. One such example of this is the gang-rape of fourteen year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her and her family in an Iraqi village to the west of Al-Mahmudiyah. One of the five US soldiers convicted of the crime later confessed that he ‘didn’t think of Iraqis as humans’. Britain, too, has been held to scrutiny after increasing accusations of war crimes in the country during the occupation. The men who raped, tortured and murdered Iraqi people are the same men who were celebrated at home for their heroism. Being a soldier does not make someone a hero, and nowhere is this clearer than in the ever-mounting evidence against western soldiers in Iraq. Nevertheless, the impact of the Iraq War on US and British soldiers is well-known. Recovery centres and dedicated charities provide help for those returning from Iraq and other countries with psychological and physical wounds. Awareness of ex-soldier suicide rates and the increase in violent behaviour amongst men who served in the war is on the increase. Help is available for those suffering from PTSD and physical disabilities.

But what of the people of Iraq? For the remaining family of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and others like them who suffered directly at the hands of western soldiers, the psychological scars left behind will not heal. But western intervention affected Iraq as a whole as well as those individuals. Since the 2003 invasion, more than four million Iraqis have been displaced, many of them families. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, around 4.5 million children have become orphans, 70% of them since western intervention started. Iraq’s healthcare structure has been torn apart, and half of Iraqi doctors have left the country. All of these factors have a serious impact on the mental as well as physical wellbeing of those affected. Combined, they create a health crisis that is being seriously under-reported – while the fate of western soldiers continues to take priority.

If people are not shocked by the plight of the Iraqi people as a whole, they must at least consider the west’s impact on the children of Iraq. A report by Joanne Baker in 2013 detailed the suffering of Iraq’s youngsters in statistics. Of the four million people displaced since 2003, for example, up to two million were children. Around 20% of these children were reported missing by their families since 2003, amounting to around 93,500 children. Moreover, many of those displaced are suffering further from malnutrition, lack of shelter, and lack of basic healthcare and education. Around 18% of people over the age of nine are illiterate. Because of poor nutrition and water quality, only one in five children will reach their fifth birthday. A report by the World Health Organisation found that 70% of Iraqi children were suffering from trauma-related symptoms. It is worth considering, too, that these figures are from two years ago, and one year before the re-entry of western forces into Iraq.

This report does not begin to cover the entirety of the west’s impact on Iraq. The long-term economic consequences of the war are still developing, and the growing crisis in Syria continues to worsen the situation of Iraqi people. With western intervention restarting in 2014, three years after the withdrawal of troops, the world is beginning to see other consequences that will engulf the Middle East before moving beyond its borders. One such consequence, of course, is ISIS, a product of American intervention that will further the destruction of Iraq and the Middle East for the foreseeable future. We cannot know the fate of Iraq if the west had not intervened, but it can be said with certainty that many of the country’s current problems may have been lessened, or might not have existed at all.

Originally published on The Global Panorama.

Hidden history: the plight of Palestine

Image by Wall in Palestine via Flickr

In the light of news stories and photographs from the Gaza Strip, the plight of Palestinians has been firmly catapulted back into the public eye. The country’s side of the Israel-Palestine conflict has been largely publicised, provoking sympathy and criticism in equal measures. Palestine’s history of suffering, however, remains obscure. Few who read the news stories and watch the television programmes realise that the plight of Palestine extends beyond the country itself, beyond Israel and beyond the Middle East, to British colonial rule and the failure of the United Nations to solve every crisis with which they were faced.

The Palestinian state had been in the control of the Ottoman Empire prior to the First World War, but following Turkey’s defeat, colonial Britain absorbed the region as the British Mandate of Palestine in 1917. Palestine soon became a forcibly-established ‘haven’ for Jewish people, with Britain and Europe as a whole ignoring the cries of protest from non-Jewish Palestinian inhabitants. Large numbers of Jewish people migrated to the region, peaking in the 1930s during the Nazi-era anti-Semitic movement. This influx led to a three-year national uprising in 1936 against British colonial rule. Although beginning as a largely political protest, a peasant-led resistance marked a more violent second phase in 1937. In British colonial fashion, the revolt was brutally suppressed. Statistics vary, but the death toll for Arabs was estimated at around 5,000, with a further 15,000 injured.

It is the United Nations’ response to this growing crisis of aggression that set the tone for their failures up to the present day. As Britain struggled to control the violence erupting in the region, the UN proposed to partition Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and one Jewish, although the latter later proclaimed its independence as Israel. Ultimately, this decision allowed for the absorption of Palestinian land by Israel on one side, and other Middle Eastern countries on the other. The fracturing effect of the division was aptly demonstrated by the mass exodus of indigenous Palestinian people expelled from their homes into neighbouring countries in the late 1940s.

The further absorption of Palestinian territory by Israel in 1967 resulted in another exodus of around half a million people. The fight for Palestinian liberation and the retreat of Israel continued, politically and otherwise, throughout the 1970s. A UN decision to grant the Palestinian Liberation Organisation observer status led to hostility towards the Palestinians from other areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, in which a large number of Palestinian refugees had settled since the exoduses of the 1940s and 1960s. In 1982, a militia close to the right-wing Kataeb Party massacred Palestinians sheltering in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut under the eyes of Israel, despite the latter’s guarantee of Palestinian safety in the region in the same year. The number of deaths in this massacre is disputed: some reports claim around 460 died, but the reality could be anywhere up to 3,500.

The pattern of massacres and mass emigrations has continued into the last few decades of Palestinian history, and has been focused largely on the Israeli-Palestinian region. Attempted and successful Israeli occupations of Occupied Palestinian Territory in 1987 and 2000 led to further heavy losses of life amongst Palestinians as Israelis fighters used brutal force, not limited to extra-judicial killings, suicide attacks and mortar fire. The political and ethical complexities of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to wholly support either side, but figures on the conflict since September 2000 show a huge difference in fatalities between the two: at least 1,198 Israelis have been killed since 2000, whereas in 2015 alone, more than 2,000 Palestinians have died, with overall numbers reaching 9,000 or more.

The plight of Palestine has not lessened in the 21st century, but a large part of recent Palestinian suffering has been significantly neglected by world media. News organisations relish in the controversy of the Israel-Palestine narrative, but rarely jump on stories about internal Palestinian conflicts resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. The struggles between Hamas and Fatah for control of the Gaza strip, unresolved despite international intervention, remain a key cause of internal tension in the region. The political discordance of Palestine has directly translated into violence and death, with over 600 fatalities since the conflict began in 2006.

It is largely Israeli violence against Palestinians that receives media attention, and indeed Israeli violence makes up a large part of Palestine’s recent history. The huge numbers of Palestinians living under Israeli military rule since the uprisings of 1987 and 2000 continue to suffer under the strict governance of a power bigger than themselves. But while the Israel versus Palestine narrative has dominated media coverage of the conflict, it is important to remember the history that led to this point. The conflict now might be focused inwardly, narrowed down to Israel and Palestine and the regions directly surrounding them, but European countries and international organisations had a significant role to play in the creation of the fragmented region. This history has largely been forgotten, or at least suppressed, and the conflict has been reduced to an ‘us-versus-them’ standpoint between the two countries directly suffering from it. Both are perpetrators and both are victims, and it is impossible to discuss the plight of one without mention of the other. Looking at the long and complex history of the region, though, the failed involvement of other countries and the United Nations should be just as integral to any discussion of the region’s suffering as the Israel-Palestine narrative itself.

Originally posted on The Global Panorama.