Systematic Subjugation: An Interconnected View of Violence Across The World

In 2023, the world witnessed the high-brow principles of equity and fairness for all, that are the apparent ethos of the civilised, and the hallowed halls of power come tumbling down. 

For many, decades of lived experience have precluded them from accepting this illusion in the first place. They have been suffering from the realities of colour, cast and creed acting as the deciding factor in how the world treats them and their kin.

The wave of ongoing cruelty we are seeing is unfortunately not limited to any particular region. From Sudan to Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Yemen, Palestine and many more,  the collective suffering at the hands of intruders, imperialist forces, authoritarian states and civil war has rendered millions immobilised. 

The direct parallel between reactions to the devastating assault on Ukraine and the unhinged genocide in Palestine unfortunately serves as a stark reminder of the geographical nature of subjective empathy. 

The affected people of Ukraine saw Russia being scorned by the global population, from companies like FedEx, British Petroleum, to even Lego, suspending operations in various capacities in response to the illegal invasion.

The besmirching of sovereignty was seen as a hard line for many. Putin’s actions were unequivocally acknowledged as wrong, and the world stood behind Ukraine. Ukraine had the misery of war, yes, but also the absolution of being seen exactly as they are: the victims.

On the other end of the spectrum stands Palestine, for whom it seems, the world order works in reverse. The revered status of international human rights law had the floor fall beneath itself, once the Israeli carnage in Gaza had been broadcast live to mobile phones in homes across the world by the likes of Motaz Azaiza, Wael Al-Dahdouh, and Bisan. The blind eye being turned against the ethnic cleansing, infrastructural decimation, and outright genocide is so transparent, there couldn't be a better example than the recent cessation of funding to UNRWA on the say-so of Israel. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the UN agency whose specified mandate is to provide relief to Palestine. 

Multiple countries pulled their funding to UNRWA after Israel errantly claimed with no proof that 12 of the agency’s  employees were involved in the October 7 attacks, curtailing the life-saving aid that it provides to a thoroughly ransacked Gaza.

Despite disapproval of the plan and rejection of Zionism from the Palestinian people, the declaration was forced onto them and their land, leading to Palestine slowly stripping away from its native people to those who had no right over it: Zionist settlers.

This begs the question, why does a country and its people need life support from a dedicated humanitarian agency? 

The answer lies in the multi-faceted and systematic avenues of subjugation employed by Israel, a structure that came into existence courtesy of the audacious Balfour Declaration. Despite disapproval of the plan and rejection of Zionism from the Palestinian people, the declaration was forced onto them and their land, leading to Palestine slowly stripping away from its native people to those who had no right over it: Zionist settlers.

The newly formed state of Israel employed its might and Western backing to bring about hardship of biblical proportions on its hosts. The colonisation of Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites for most Abrahamic orders and its indigenous people, was completed through socioeconomic and ethnic alienation. This resulted in the recent  provisional order of the International Court of Justice on the motion brought by South Africa to consider the plausibility of Israel perpetrating a genocide being a mere slap on the wrist of the Zionist state. This serves as nothing but a scathing indictment of the efficacy of international law, where an uncontested wipe-out of an entire population, across multiple generations, is not enough to impose sanctions on the offending intruder.

Additionally, a key trope of the colonisers is the invocation of the national security narrative.

It has been used by the illegal Israeli occupation forces against the natives; by Pakistan to marginalise its own people in Balochistan, or to excuse the execution of an inhumane plan to rid the country of its largest Afghan refugee population; and by China to justify the concentration camps in which it stashes its Uyghur Muslim community.

The digitization of narratives and the promulgation of social media platforms has impacted pretty much everything in our ecosystem; from the facilitation of data sharing, to providing alternative space for discourse to the creation of staunch echo chambers churning deliberately deceptive content against individuals, communities and clear victims of objectively horrifying rights violations. 

Palestinian rights activist and digital rights defender, Mona Shtaya points to the role Big Tech has played in facilitating the dehumanisation of her countrymen. 

“Social media companies are not thinking about combatting disinformation, they are not willing (to combat it). Disinformation is spreading against Palestinian people. They are allowing hate speech and violent speech to be spread on their platform and it is leading to real-world harm.” 

As a Palestinian based in the West Bank, she says, “We can see the escalating violence against us here, military checkpoints have been increased. We’re speaking about making Palestinians’ lives harder and this is reflected in their genocidal intent and hate speech on the internet.”

Disinformation is spreading against Palestinian people. [Social media platforms] are allowing hate speech and violent speech to be spread on their platform and it is leading to real-world harm.

Speaking on the partisan nature of social media platforms’ policies, Mona says, “When this war started, the whole disinformation wave came out, like the 40 beheaded babies’ news and other disinformation propaganda, even after different investigative reports came out of news media outlets and the Israeli army admitting to not having any evidence, social media platforms did not retroactively take down those allegations which contributed to the labelling and stereotyping of Palestinians.”

The other side of the conversation should focus on the systematic and deliberate discrimination in social media content moderation policies and their algorithmic bias, Mona contends. 

Speaking to systematically employed bias, we see the unmistakable use of similar ploys of narrative-shifting and demonization of the Baloch community in Pakistan.

Pakistan, a purportedly democratic nation state, seems to have taken a page out of the IOF’s playbook on subduing a people on the basis of ethnicity. Balochistan, the geographically largest province of the country, has long been sidelined, mistreated, and deprived of livable infrastructure. Its people have been demanding for equal treatment and recognition for over seven decades since the country came into existence in 1947. 

Social media has played a large role in bringing to general knowledge the long and heart-wrenching history of the struggles of the Baloch people. Another amplifier for this conversation has been the recent Baloch long march.

This past December, a daring contingent of the Baloch community led by Mahrang Baloch, and other courageous women, marched from Quetta to the federal capital. The open air sit-in they staged for 35 days outside the press club in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, in the bitter cold demanded an end to enforced disappearances and the extrajudicial killing of their people. Women who mobilised the march have all experienced the loss of their male family members in enforced disappearances, and demanded from the state that their loved ones be returned to them alive.

Sadia Baloch, an activist who was a part of this recent women-led protest, commented on the movement and the stimulus behind it: 

“The Baloch movement is complex and multifaceted, with its roots stretching back centuries and evolving through multiple phases. Several factors, both historical and contemporary, have contributed to its rise and persistence. Perceptions of political and social marginalization, cultural suppression, and human rights abuses by the Pakistani state, including enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, have fueled resentment and resistance.”

The protest was met with a stark contrast to the values deeply ingrained in Baloch culture, where respect for women holds immense significance, Sadia states. Instead of being welcomed with understanding, the protestors were subjected to water cannons, batons, and tear gas by the authorities. The violence however, went beyond physical harm; officers snatched the chadors (shawl) of the Baloch women. “This blatant disregard for our dignity was deeply painful. The abuse continued during arrests. We were subjected to torture, verbal abuse, and treated as though we were personally responsible for the ongoing insurgency in Balochistan. Even a favourable ruling from the Islamabad High Court couldn't change the authorities' behaviour. Barbed wire became our fence, restricting food, blankets, and even visitors. Police profiled anyone who approached our camp, creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation,” Sadia said.

The stripping of dignity as a tool to sway Baloch women’s resistance against state violence is akin to what we have witnessed and continue to witness amidst colonial atrocities elsewhere in the world.

The Language of Domination

Language has been serving as a parallel ring for this equation of violence, where one opponent has their arm twisted behind their back, and is constantly being waterboarded, without being allowed to come up for air. For instance, terms like ‘national home’ in the Israel-Palestine equation have been crafted solely for the purpose of serving a Zionist version of events. To sell their people and the world on their principles of hyper nationality. Instead of employing terms that accurately reflect the situation and describe the deceased Palestinians as killed, murdered and targeted, the term ‘unalived’ has been employed by Western media to absolve the question of who brought them to this state.

The stripping of dignity as a tool to sway Baloch women’s resistance against state violence is akin to what we have witnessed and continue to witness amidst colonial atrocities elsewhere in the world.

Equally disingenuous is the equating of ‘from the river to the sea’ to an antisemitic chant. The use of language such as ‘human animals’ by Israel when referring to the Palestinian people at large has played a crucial role in normalising their genocide in the world view, where 43.9% of the population comprised of children, as per a 2022 report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Similarly we have seen the employment of specific language to dehumanise those unwilling to accept oppression in Pakistan where the government and accompanying propaganda machines such as a compromised media have led the average Pakistani citizen to think of their Baloch countrymen as barbarians; uncivilised, separationist and blood-thristy –  of Balochistan as a dangerous place few should dare venture.

 They have repressed an entire population in the name of security, and used narrative building to cast the net of public fear and apprehension wide against them. 

To underpin the urgency of vacating the pedestal we have collectively been holding western law and order on, it is imperative to recognize the thread of oppression weaving in and out of all of these man-made disasters.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 6.9 million people had to be displaced from their homes, most of whom hail from the eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, and Tanganyika. This was a direct result of an internal strife fostered by external vested interests.

Since the 1870s, the Congolese people have suffered at the hands of imperialism. At first thanks to the Belgian King Leoplold II, then through intrusion of those Western powers considering themselves their overlords and seeing fit to intrude and control the political landscape by engineering chaos in the country, generations of the Congolese have seen little peace and autonomy in the last century. This includes the present-day situation brewing in the DRC, brought about by infighting following power vacuums in the hollowed out country. 

Over and over, the pattern repeats itself. An innocent people and a twisted rendition of the white saviour complex or a God complex or just plain hubris ruining lives and autonomy.

Connecting the struggles of her people with similarly embroiled communities, Sadia Baloch from Balochistan, Pakistan, says, “Many groups, including the Baloch, Kurds [in Iraq], Palestinians, and some Congolese factions, advocate for varying degrees of self-determination, ranging from greater autonomy to full independence. This desire often clashes with the interests of the central government, leading to conflict.”

She adds, “Like the Baloch people, these groups often face marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression within their own countries. This can manifest in various forms, including political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, cultural suppression, and human rights abuses. Some of these regions, like Balochistan, Congo, and the Uyghur region [in China], are rich in natural resources. This can attract exploitative practices from external powers or the dominant group within the country, further disenfranchising local communities.”

Sudan saw the warring Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) invoke a massive crisis in early 2023 by breaking into combat, causing 3.8 million to be internally displaced, and significantly increasing the welfare needs of 25 million people.

Sudan tops the charts in the annual Emergency Watchlist by the International Rescue Committee in 2024 even while the violent escalations in Gaza have been ongoing for over 6 months, depicting the further potential escalation of violence that the country can face this year.

Sadia highlights that despite facing significant challenges, these conflicts in global majority regions often receive less international attention than conflicts in other regions in the North, making it difficult to garner global support and hold their respective governments accountable. It often means that the marginalised and victims of violence have to put on a show of their suffering for the world to notice, if at all.

The storied history of the world is proof positive that those with a mandate – legal or coerced – seldom care to be seen as just. They get their way without having to create that illusion.

Sudan tops the charts in the annual Emergency Watchlist by the International Rescue Committee in 2024 even while the violent escalations in Gaza have been ongoing for over 6 months, depicting the further potential escalation of violence that the country can face this year.

Afghan mass exodus 

The trajectory of the Afghan people from members of a robust society to millions of them being displaced and forced to flee to the neighbouring country of Pakistan is not for the light-hearted. 

The modern state of Afghanistan went periodically through wars, colonisation, being declared a kingdom and then finally becoming a republic in 1973. However their troubles were far from over, given the way the country was first used as a pawn in the Cold War and then following 9/11, becoming the centre of the world’s attention and hate.

Driven by the successive wars and decades of violence, 6 million Afghans are currently refugees with at least 3-4 million of them residing in Pakistan up until recently, under pitiable conditions exacerbated by rampant discrimination at the hands of Pakistani authorities and citizens alike.

This ranged, over the decades, from the creation of a counterterrorism response that required the repatriation of Afghan refugees following the deadly school attack in Peshawar, Pakistan, to police intimidation, racial profiling, being termed ‘namak haram’ (traitors), and forced economic hardship. 

In September of 2023, Pakistan began to execute a mass exodus of 1.7 million Afghan refugees and asylum seekers by deporting them ‘back’ to Afghanistan. This included people of Afghan descent who had never set foot in their ancestral land, like children of those refugees who relocated to Pakistan amidst the US war in Afghanistan. In a heart-wrenching summation of the dire state faced by those being expelled, a video on the topic by DW shows an Afghan mother near the Torkham border holding up her baby, saying the young one had only had a cup of tea all day and barely anything the day before. This is one of hundreds of such clips, videos and personal accounts.

This clearance drive put at significant risk, not only on the Afghan women, children and girls but also human rights defenders and activists, by virtually sentencing them to the gaol now run by the Taliban regime which assumed power in 2022 in the vacuum left by the United States military who had held control of the country since 2001 under the guise of freeing the people.

Accountability for these heavy-handed and devastating tactics, all played out in the name of restoring safety and security, just as Belgium’s position on its occupation of Congo, has been scant to negligible at best. 

The common thread weaving through the unbearably high number of injustices this world has seen and is still actively viewing and bearing is the notion of superiority. It is the exact step at which one draws a line or crosses the threshold into imperialism.

The real hurdle to the imperial and colonial forces of the world lies in the stoic nature of those they wish to oppress. To quote Sadia Baloch, “Despite the hardship, our spirit remains unbroken. [...] We carry the stories of our mothers, etched in our hearts. We will not be silenced, no matter the intimidation or hardship.”

May this hurdle forever remain steadfast.