{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Assad is killing his people quickly, our African leaders are killing us slowly - Comment
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Assad is killing his people quickly, our African leaders are killing
It is easy to get bored by the misery of other people when they are at a remove from your comfort zone, especially if their misfortunes are played out before your eyes on a daily basis.
Images we see on telly every day of desperate migrants from Africa and the Middle East belong to the category I am talking to. It is a daily diet we are being fed on, and it has now taken on the tone of the commonplace, the mundane, the unsurprising.
The spectre of thousands of people turning up dead on the shores of the Mediterranean and others being rescued in extremis at death's door, having voyaged for several days in dangerous dinghies in a desperate attempt to get to Europe, no longer shocks us.
Indeed, we are settling into the mode of watching these pictures and listening to the harrowing stories of the survivors as though they were spectator sports.
Glued to our TV screens, we tend to overlook the political nature of the origins of so much suffering, and we may even blur in our minds the faces of the people who cause so much pain.
In the immediacy of the so-called migration crisis, with hundreds of toddlers clinging onto their parents' shoulders in a Budapest railway station, you may be forgiven for not seeing the sinister face of a Bashar al Assad, the man who is causing it all.
You may even choose to forget that the man's own father, Hafez, is organically linked to this crisis.
In their warped minds, from father to son, Syria is their own fiefdom, which they must rule over or destroy. What Bashar has been doing to his people over the past few years his father did before him, back in the 1980s during the so-called Hama massacre, when thousands of "Ikhwaan al Muslimiyya Fii Syria ( the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria) were killed during a brief rebellion.
Between the murderous embrace of Assad fils and the bloody clutch of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), there is enough incentive for people to run for their lives.
Hitherto they were seeking refuge in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, but now they are going farther afield — to Europe.
Unsurprisingly, the Europeans are more than a little worried at the influx of asylum seekers. Bickering has started among members of the European Union over what they must perceive as an invasion by people from a different culture, a threat to their Christian identity. This point has been repeated ad nauseam by different European voices, and it can hardly be so novel.
Still, we have been able to spot isolated pockets of charity in places, such as the Hungarian volunteers who have been providing blankets, food and water, and the German government, which has shown itself to be more than ready to receive a number of these desperate people.
In the background, we are called upon to keep in mind the asylum seekers from elsewhere, especially from the African continent. Here, too, we find "push" conditions that are forcing Africans, especially youngsters, to flee their countries to go in search of better living conditions.
Not all of these are running away from wars, though there are real wars in places like South Sudan, Central African Republic, Mali, Libya, Somalia and parts of Nigeria and Cameroon.
A more insidious war is being waged in almost all of our countries, and it is this war that is causing the shooting wars in the countries I have mentioned.
As long as the living conditions of Africans in their countries continue to be subhuman and their rulers do not seem to know what to do to better the situation, there is an undeclared war going on in which thousands of people lose their lives in slow motion and over which nobody risks being summoned to the Hague International Criminal Court because that tribunal does not try economic crimes that kill people.
It is probably time for someone to establish a court that will do analyses of situations and determine whether some of our rulers are responsible for killing their people in this way.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: ulimwengu@jenerali.com
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