Afghanistan’s children
Mar 16th 2022 BBC
“Every few seconds a sick child is brought in to the emergency room of the main hospital in Lashkar Gah.”
The tragedy of Afghanistan's malnourished children
Combine a war in Europe and the 24/7 news cycle, and Afghanistan is not front page news anymore. Neither is the war in Yemen, or in Syria, and when did you last hear about the drought in Ethiopia?
More than 20 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in both Afghanistan and Yemen, 13 million in Syria, 7 million Ethiopia, and countless others in other crises around the world.
The casualties of this Russian war of choice in Ukraine, also include children in Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria, and every other crisis being pushed to the back burner by this war.
We can blame ourselves, or the 24/7 media, both are not wholly innocent here, but the main culprit in this tragedy is Russia. Instead of looking forward and focusing on making the world a better place for people to live in, it is looking back and focusing on grievances arising from a failed communist experiment.
This totally unnecessary war and the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since WWII, will make the other crises in the world worse, by forcing the world to focus on this war. And that will, in the end, most likely result in even more refugees trying to find a place in the world to survive in.
Russia will lose this war, but by accident or by design it has managed to weaponize refugees. If you are cynical enough and do not care about human lives, why not weaponize refugees? Refugees will mostly try to reach ‘western’ countries, so if you can not beat them economically or militarily, why not use their humanity against them and create yet another refugee crisis, and let them deal with it.
I did not think that the world is a perfect place to live in, or is governed by benevolent rulers, but now we have reached yet another low point in our history. While Ukrainian children are dying in Russian shelling and airstrikes, children in Afghanistan are dying from malnutrition, tuberculosis and measles.
Both totally unnecessary and both totally preventable.
