West’s ‘double standards’ get Doha rebuke
Middle East suffering deserves same attention as Ukraine’s, forum hears
The NATO powers’ disproportionate focus on the Ukraine crisis at the expense of conflicts elsewhere — many of which have their origins in Western meddling — exposes the double standards practiced by nations in the military alliance, a forum in Doha heard.
At the gathering in the Qatari capital, Qatar and Saudi Arabia pointed to the double standards adopted by the United States and some European countries in their approach to humanitarian crises across the globe, TRT World, a Turkish public broadcaster, reported.
“The humanitarian suffering that we have seen in Ukraine, and everyone is talking about it right now … has been the suffering of a lot of countries in this region for years and nothing has happened,” Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said at the annual Doha Forum International Conference on March 26.
“We have never seen a global response to address those sufferings and we’ve been calling for this and that setting a precedent in the region by witnessing the brutality against the Syrian people, or against the Palestinians or against the Libyans or against the Iraqis or against the Afghans,” he was quoted as saying by Doha News.
The remarks of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud directed at the US and its allies at the forum echoed the stance of Qatar’s top diplomat. “I think you have to have a much better conversation with the rest of the global community,” he said, referring to the strong call for unity heard among the Western powers.
Al-Thani expressed the hope that the Russia-Ukraine conflict can be seen as “a wake-up call for everyone in the international community, to look at our region and to address the issues … with the same level of commitment that we have seen” in relation to those two nations.
The Qatari and Saudi diplomats advocated that the world should pay equal attention to conflicts in the Middle East and other parts of the world as they do with Ukraine.
In what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, at least 100,000 Yemenis have lost their lives, and millions have ended up displaced due to years of violence in the poverty-stricken Arab country.
The UN said that it required a total of $4.27 billion to avoid a humanitarian crisis in Yemen. However, at a virtual pledging conference held in Geneva on March 16, only a “disappointing” less than one-third of the target, or $1.3 billion, was raised, with many major donors not pledging at all.
According to the UN’s World Food Programme, the number of people in Yemen lacking food amounts to around 17 million, and will increase to 19 million in the latter half of the year. “Don’t make us make decisions between taking food from the children in Ukraine to the children in Yemen,” David Beasley, the agency’s head, was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.
Earlier on March 26, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a “surprise” appearance via video link
at the event. He called on gas-rich Qatar and other nations with resources to increase their energy output so as to offset the loss of energy supplies from Russia. “The future of Europe rests with your efforts,” he told the forum.
Zelensky made comparisons between the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the war in Syria.
It is estimated that the death toll in the Syrian war has reached around half a million people and the number of those who lost their homes has reached into the millions since the civil war erupted 11 years ago.
Under the banner “Diplomacy, Dialogue, Diversity”, the two-day Doha
Forum gathered senior officials and researchers to discuss key challenges in the world, and “to build innovative and action-driven networks”.
According to the state-run Saudi Press Agency, Faisal said that enhancing dialogue to find a common solution is the best way to end the conflict in Ukraine.
He also highlighted the importance of the concerted efforts of developing countries to overcome the challenges that they commonly face, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and economic problems. Such challenges “cannot be overcome without working together”, he said.