Tibet, Darfur, and our reliance on face & voice
I had some pleasant chit-chat post planned yesterday--![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
grundbuch's & my trip to the movies, a review of No Country for Old Men, a praise of the mean Cosmo he mixes--but the news about the Chinese military killing eighty protesters in Tibet, the news about a 'people's war' declared against separatism, made me too sad and angry at once. And I thought about about these developments and my reaction.
Because we see citizens' uprisings and dictatorial governments brutally squashing them all the time on the news; what's different about Tibet? Maybe the level of individual familiarity and personalisation: Everybody knows the Dalai Lama, and most people are aware of his call for a completely peaceful protest against the occupation of Tibet. Shades of Gandhi, which by itself is powerful enough, but add to that the religious angle, the Buddhism element--no wonder that the juxtaposition of pictures of grim soldiers in uniforms brandishing machine guns and those of a smiling elderly monk in a humble robe evokes strong emotions in viewers.
But then, of course, we can rely on these viewers--the world is watching, not just faraway Himalayan cities but our Chancellor Angela Merkel as she welcomes the Dalai Lama to Berlin as well. Recently, the world could also watch Steven Spielberg, who brings in the second reason I started wondering: What about other atrocities in other regions; why do, Mr. Spielberg laudably exempt, so few people care about 200,000 people slaughtered in Darfur? The cynical answer is, of course, that there is next to no economic interest or other interest in the South of Sudan, where people live mainly on subsistence agriculture and which also isn't all that stable (understandably so, with the Janjaweed, Arab-speaking militia, raiding the countryside, and with 2.5 million people displaced, homeless).
But I still think there's more to it; certainly we have no mass tourism or even the precursor to that, romantic dreams of endless mountainsides and picturesque prayer mills, when it comes to, say, South American remote and almost exclusively native regions where international aid organisations, admittedly mostly through the Churches and around Christmas time, collect great amounts of charity funds each year. But then again, this is not about pictures of nameless victims with dirty clothes and desperate eyes that the camera doesn't capture for more than a moment. Instead, it's usually about lovely and adorable kids in ratty clothing. They themselves look straight at you, are sweet and hopeful even though poor, and they populate the leaflets or even glossy booklets that describe in heart-rendering detail the plight of one single family, one little girl or boy, and how helpful and needed a school, books, equipment would be. If I had a euro for every 'personal letter,' sometimes in a cursive handwriting font, for every real life story that a child in South America tells me, I could probably afford that kitchen blender I've had my eyes on for a while. (Sidenote: This may be too European a phenomenon, and perhaps even a little too Church-based, but it seems to be a candidate for Stuff White People Like.)
This is not to say I find this the real problem, I'm not even against this practice--it's manipulative and far from representative in any way, but it's certainly effective: It gives people in need of international help names and faces, distorted as they may be. They are carefully presented not as an all-too fleeting mass of people either frenzied or dulled-out by trauma, hunger, and sickness, none of which your average Westerner can relate to in the least. And that's not the issue; that's just human. What's inhumane, I think, is not trying to give the latter people, people in Darfur, for example, a voice: several individual voices--and then, of course, not to listen.
I'm not coming to any new conclusion here, I know; this has been said many times before, and by people far more knowledgeable (and able) than me. But I still think it can and needs to be said, and to come back to Tibet, I loved that the BBC interviewed a few Han Chinese living in Tibet--people whose storefronts were vandalised by a few of the protesters. As a German especially, violence against stores of an ethnic group is immediately suspect, and despite my immediate gut response completely and utterly in favour of the Tibetan people, I think it matters to see all issues not as two-sided but as multi-faceted as they are: Tibet doesn't just comprise smiling indigenous monks & farmers as opposed to violent Chinese soldiers; it's also home to migrants and traders, to civilians of varying backgrounds.
These are just excerpts, again, brief and fragmented for sure, but perhaps they're a start.
