Photo: Aftermath of an airstrike in Mekele, capital of the Tigray region of Northern Ethiopia, Oct. 20, 2021. (AP Photo, File)
There is no doubt that the war is causing suffering in Ukraine. The Russian invasion has led to 953 civilian deaths, 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced and the Russian Defense Ministry reported almost 10,000 deaths of Russian armed forces. Ukraine is being leveled.
There are other hot spots worldwide where people are suffering and dying that are not getting the same mainstream media attention as this tiny European country.
Conflicts in non-European countries including Ethiopia, Iraq, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Myanmar have also resulted in millions of people being displaced.
Algeria, for example, has “very similar economic and human development indicators’’ as Ukraine, BBC reported. Both countries have populations of just over 40 million. Ukraine is 55th in the world for nominal gross domestic product, while Algeria sits at No. 58, according to World Vision.
While Algeria is not at war, it is considered a dangerous place to be due to conflicts involving Islamist terrorist groups, trafficking, kidnapping and government crackdowns on protesters. Algeria is considered an upper-middle income country but its national rate of poverty is as high as 23 percent with 1.2 million people undernourished. Why isn’t the suffering in Algeria being treated with the same compassion as Ukraine in the mainstream media?
Writers at various major news outlets have slammed Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine as racist. A CBS correspondent, for example, had to apologize after calling Kyiv in Ukraine a “relatively civilized” city. A reporter for Britain’s ITV claimed that Ukraine is not “a developing third world nation”. An Al Jazeera news anchor described Ukrainian refugees as “prosperous, middle-class people,” not “people trying to get away from areas in North Africa,” Columbia News Review reported.
Some media coverage has cast Europe as too civilized for war. Race is at the root of this. Although ideally there shouldn’t be, there is a bias when reporting on people who look like you. So white mainstream media report on Ukraine from a white lens.
“Generally speaking, it seems reasonable for any society to care more about conflicts that are geographically closer, share a social identity (which could include race and religion), share a language, or share an imperial or colonial history, wrote” Christopher Blattman, an economist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace,” in an email to NPR.
There are consequences when wars don’t receive the same coverage as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It goes beyond creating public awareness, said Martin Scott, a senior lecturer in media and international development at the University of East Anglia, in an NPR report.
Media coverage — or the lack of it — can impact the world’s response to wars and conflict. Global attention can lead to greater humanitarian aid.
While the mainstream media is hyper-prioritizing suffering in Ukraine, here are five suffering and death hot spots outside of Europe.
Conflict in South Sudan, which lasted from 2013 to 2020, caused one of the largest refugee crises in Africa, according to World Vision. Some 1.6 million people were displaced within the country, and another 2.2 million are refugees who fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda. The ramifications of the conflict are still being felt with 2021 projected to be the worst year yet for food shortages, according to UN officials. More than 8 million people in Sudan were in need of food.
Yemen’s civil war started in 2014. More than 18,400 civilians have been killed and injured, according to Human Rights Watch. Yemen is considered the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with the world’s worst food security crisis — 20.1 million people (about two-thirds of the country’s population) needed food assistance at the beginning of 2020.
The Somali Civil War has been going on since 1991 and an estimated 3 million people within the country are displaced because of insecurity, according to World Vision. Most Somali refugees– some 800,000– have settled in Kenya, Ethiopia, or Yemen.
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The Syrian civil war started in 2011 and after more than a decade of war, thousands of refugee children have been living in a state of limbo, World Vision reported. There are 6.8 million refugees and asylum-seekers, and about 6.7 million Syrians remain displaced inside the country. Nearly 11.1 million people in Syria need humanitarian assistance.
Conflict has been ongoing since 2007 and food insecurity has caused about 5.2 million to be internally displaced. About 1 million people have fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as refugees and asylum-seekers. Poverty in DRC is high. In 2018, it was estimated that 73 percent of the population (or 60 million people) lived on less than $1.90 a day, the international poverty rate, according to the World Bank.
Photo: People are seen in front of clouds of black smoke from fires in the aftermath at the scene of an airstrike in Mekele, the capital of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia on Oct. 20, 2021. (AP Photo, File)
