We've all seen them on Twitter. #PrayForNewOrleans during the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. #PrayForBoston during the marathon bombing, #PrayForJapan during the earthquake. It's all awesome and it raises awareness for the tragedies, but I can't help but wonder how many struggling countries we have missed by overshadowing them with hashtags for more prominent countries? How many people have died and suffered in third world countries only to be hidden in the shade of the bigger more 'important' nations?
Let's get to it:
Did you know that Indonesia was under an oppressive regime for 31 years? That years ago, the mere mention of our ex-leader's name meant a possible abduction by the government? That my then 5 year-old sister couldn't even say that he looked 'weird' because even she herself could be in danger? My parents told me stories about the Suharto regime, including all the nitty gritty details about the mass murder and the propaganda for more than three decades, and never have I heard such an atrocity in the modern day.
Unless you are Indonesian or were associated with the country back in 1998, I'm sure none of you have heard about the May 1998 riots when the Indonesians turned against the Chinese in the country. I was too young to remember most of it, but my friends vividly remember being cooped up in a hotel room, fearing for their safety. They still remember being told to close their eyes as their parents drove away from all the rubble. "They hung men from billboards," my friend told me. Many Chinese-Indonesian citizens had to be smuggled out of the country to avoid their own demise.
Yet no one outside the country has even heard of that tragedy. We had our own Kim Jong Il, our very own Hitler. The adults that walk around the country all wear battle scars from those 31 years, and yet the world knows not about what they have suffered and to what extent.
Where was #PrayForJakarta when 24 people died in the flood just two weeks ago? The Boston bombings had 5 deaths, and I give my condolences to the family affected by it, but what about the families of the 24 people in Indonesia? What about the 40,000 people whose homes have been ruined by the flood? Where was the hashtag? The awareness? The donations?
A 14 year-old girl was raped in Missouri and the country went ballistic. But when a woman was raped by 3 men during a late-night taxi ride in Jakarta, it didn't even make a headline.
I have heard so many devastating stories about people in my country, all from those who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. Rarely do big events make it on the news. I'm sure we've had hundreds of Treyvon Martin cases, and yet no one bats an eye at us. I read a local story of a man who was beaten to death for holding a different religion. That's just one story. One. No one's even heard of it.
Typhoon
Haiyan that hit in November 2013 was 3.5 times bigger than Hurricane
Katrina. It impacted the Philippines, mainly, as well as Micronesia,
Palau, China, Taiwan and Vietnam. Another disaster; the 2004 Indian
Ocean earthquake and tsunami, hit Indonesia the hardest, followed by Sri
Lanka, India, and Thailand.
But I feel like any third-world country with a devastating natural disaster are easily overlooked unless it hits the neighboring countries as well. As if there's a checklist for how important a tragedy is. Was it a) Just confined to your own country? b) two countries? c) more than two? If you circled c, congratulations, you will have made worldwide news and it will go viral. Just wait for the hashtag and the donations to flood in. No pun intended.
For example, on July 2013, Aceh (the same city that was hit by the 2004 tsunami) had another earthquake, killed at least 35, injured 276 others, 8 missing, and over 4,000 homes were damaged.
Raise your hand if you heard about that on the news.
It's not that we don't care. It's that we all believe that the lives of those in third world nations aren't as valuable as the ones in the first. It might be a subconscious belief, but with the influence of Western media that flatters the perception of the white race, we have been conditioned to believe that the loss of a white man is more heartbreaking than the loss of a non-white man. Nobody thinks of Indonesia or Cambodia or Eritrea as a country worth knowing.
Australian Schapelle Corby was incarcerated in a Balinese prison for allegedly smuggling 4.2kg of cannabis into the country. She has her own Wikipedia page and a biography. I doubt any POC who gets arrested for smuggling drugs gets their own page and a book. I doubt they even make it on the news.
We all mourned when the planes hit the World Trade Center that fateful day on September 11. The ground zero has been turned into a memorial because nearly 3,000 people died that day, and it shook the world. But what about the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered in the war against terror? What about those statistics? What about the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse where the US Army and CIA committed murder, rape, and torture to the prisoners?
You all have seen this picture of a man mourning over the loss of a loved one after 9/11, but what about this one of a soldier searching the house of innocent civilians?
War is a touchy subject, I understand. My point isn't to get political because that's a whole other post. But I feel that the world is more inclined to support and listen to the woes of the privileged than of the poor.
Don't forget that there are 195 countries in the world, each with their own struggles. Each with lives as valuable as yours.
#PrayForEveryone.
No comments :
Post a Comment