War Made Invisible by Norman Solomon

Author:Norman Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

The heavily publicized flight of Ukrainians from their suddenly war-torn country was a catalyst for reporter Nick Turse’s vivid memories of witnessing the ordeals of refugees in Africa. “In 2018, I watched as a postage-stamp-sized camp for displaced people in Ituri Province in the far east of the Democratic Republic of Congo mushroomed from hundreds of people to more than 10,000, spilling beyond its borders and necessitating the creation of another sprawling encampment across town,” he wrote. Congo’s refugee crisis was ongoing. “Around 2.7 million Congolese were driven from their homes between January and November 2021, according to the United Nations, swelling the grand total of internally displaced people in that country to 5.6 million.”7

Turse recounted a trip to the small West African country of Burkina Faso in 2020, when he “watched an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Families were streaming down that road from Barsalogho about 100 miles north of the capital, Ouagadougou, toward Kaya, a market town whose population had almost doubled that year. They were victims of a war without a name, a lethal contest between Islamist terrorists who massacre without compunction and government forces that have killed more civilians than militants.”

With 84 million people in the world “forcibly displaced by war, persecution, general violence, or human-rights violations” in 2021 alone, Turse concluded, “The very least the world’s comfortable classes could do is throw money at the problem. The U.S. government—responsible for up to 60 million displaced people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen due to its war on terror—bears a special responsibility, but hasn’t stepped up.” We live on a globe wracked by wars and related disruptions causing vast misery, overwhelmingly for people of color, a perennial emergency that is scantily covered by the media of the wealthiest nation. “Our arbitrary borders, miserly aid, and cruel policies,” Turse wrote, “ensure that those most victimized by conflict will remain adrift, wandering the planet in search of safety, discarded by the rest of us as marginal people on the margins of an unforgiving world.”8

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