Such silk-tie sanctimony: How the UN, and the West, acts on Rohingyas, Saudi Arabia — and Kashmir
You don’t traditionally think ‘bazaar language’ when you imagine the United Nations (UN). But UN Human Rights High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein seems determined to change your polite impression and perhaps introduce some of the heat and dust of the bazaar into the polished air of the UN. Earlier this week, while addressing Myanmar, Zeid reportedly told a senior diplomat from the country to ‘have some shame’.
The provocation for this rather bizarre bazaar-type chiding (have some shame – ‘sharm kar, oye’) was Myanmar apparently assuring the UN Human Rights Council gathering that it was committed to the defense of human rights. The statement, coming after many months of the alleged ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Rohingyas in Myanmar, reports stating several Rohingya villages have been attacked, pillaged and burnt at times apparently by Myanmar’s armed forces, men killed, women raped, entire communities forced to flee in terror, provoked outrage.
But the most outraged seemed Zeid, who told the Myanmar representative that, in fact, despite Myanmar’s agreement on the repatriation of Rohingyas, not one Rohingya had officially returned to the country, and those who tried were either interred in prison or kept in a ‘reception centre’ where living conditions were apparently far from the UN’s standards.
Rebuking the Myanmar representative thus, Zied apparently hissed, ‘Have some shame. Do you think we are fools?’
But of course not, honorable Commissioner Zeid.
We know you are not fools.
Far from it.
If you had been fools, for instance, you would have held your meeting, to discuss the plight of the Rohingyas, in this squelchy, melding monsoon which turns the loveliest silk ties into sodden rags, in the most foolish place possible – a Rohingya refugee camp, say, in Cox’s Bazaar or wild outer Delhi, where hundreds of displaced human beings live, reportedly, in cramped claustrophobia, struggling for even the most basic access, to water, sanitation, food, light, dignity.
But you are not fools, Commissioner Zeid.
So you wisely held your meeting, on the plight of the Rohingyas, in lovely Geneva instead.
That is simply one instance of how we know you – and the West, whom you represent, with that zeal for human rights that must always start in the neighbour’s house – are definitely not fools.
But here’s the thing. According to you, we in the non-West apparently are fools. And barbaric brutes too.
Myanmar, for instance, has already been tagged a savage ethnic cleanser of the Rohingyas by your own reports, which mention with urgent, emphatic frequency that the state’s forces might not stop at massacring the Rohingyas, were they ever to return.
Then why do you ask Myanmar to take them back?
You know what could happen – you, after all, are not fools.
Similarly, why does the West constantly demand that India take charge of the Rohingyas, all of them? After all, it is the West that has so frequently decided that India is a basket case itself. We, as per the West’s impassioned reports, are the worst country in the world for women – and not much better for men either. We are the iconic nation for lynchings, rapes, censored press, starvation, poverty, discrimination, pollution and violence, simply bursting with small hearts and narrow minds. Clearly, we cannot look after our own people too well.
So, why ask us to take on the Rohingyas too?
You, after all, are not fools.
You know the best solution to the Rohingyas’ problem.
That you, the enlightened, prosperous, empathy-laden and highly intelligent West, should take the Rohingyas to your own nations.
You should open your doors – gilded with the gold of centuries of looting the 'Third World', pillaging its people and stuffing velveteen pockets with the jewels of our hard work, tossing us famines and chains in return – to the Rohingyas. Welcome them, host them, heal them, educate them, feed them, clothe them, uplift their state to yours and show us what being human, and being humane, truly looks like.
Oh, but we forgot.
You are not fools.
The doors of your West thus open to the most vulnerable, the poorest, the most miserable, the wretched, those fleeing grave cruelties and utter violations, only when the West basically needs cheaper-than-dirt labour. The same doors clang shut as soon as those numbers are met.
So, one moment, Angela Merkel can open the great doors of Germany to bedazzled refugees fleeing bombs falling from the skies, courtesy the West, upon them. The next moment, those same doors can sharply shut, even leaving migrants struggling on tiny, rickety boats mid-choppy seas, sometimes drowning in strange depths, thus giving the West something new to sigh sadly over as it has its evening blue cheese and deep red Sauvignon.
Yes, Commissioner Zeid.
You are not fools.
And you personally are certainly no fool.
How can you be?
For you, Commissioner Zeid, are in fact Prince Zeid, an aristocrat of the royal house of Jordan, no less. First in line to the throne of Iraq. Royalty in a land that has close ties to Saudi Arabia. Whose own record of human rights is far from a delight.
But why should that come up for discussion by you and your UN Human Rights Council?
Why should you be bothered about the women who fester in Saudi jails for committing the terrible crime of wanting to drive cars? Why should you care about the inhuman conditions in which Filipina maids often work in Saudi – at times, raped and killed by their employers, who throw a wad of oily notes at their families? Why should you be bothered about Raif Badawi, the free-thinking 34-year-old Saudi writer-blogger who has now been imprisoned for six years and sentenced to 1000 lashes, to be delivered in public – the first installments of which made Badawi collapse in his incarceration?
Why, Prince Zeid?
You are not fools.
Indeed, your not being a fool was on full display as we read your recent report on Kashmir as well.
You documented ‘decades’ of human rights abuses committed reportedly by the Indian government. But you ignored cross-border terrorism which has ruined the lives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. You ignored the separatists who order stone-pelting strikes and paralyzing closures, ruin educations and businesses, even overlook a security officer being brutally lynched by their fanatic followers as they apparently pray in a mosque. You ignored the terrorist groups which abduct, behead or shoot dead unarmed soldiers and policemen, going home for Eid, attending their sisters shaadis, trying to see their old parents off as they embark on the holy Haj.
You ignored all these people in your report, not because they are not human and they don’t have human rights.
You ignored them because you are not fools.
Indeed, Prince Zeid.
But then, neither are we.
And that is why, despite your plush aristocracy alongside your speaking like a bazaar toughie, we are not terribly impressed by your silk tie-sanctimony.
Because, while we are not rich from centuries of colonial rule, followed by decades of 'human rights' wise-talk, we are not fools either.