It was a sad week when Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office was attacked by terrorists, leaving 12 dead at the satirical magazine and five more in other parts of the city. The staff of Charlie Hebdo didn’t deserve to die just because they drew cartoons, even if the content of their work was often offensive to more than a billion Muslims around the world, as well as to people of other faiths.
But there’s a long way to go in the war against terrorism. The world has to unite in the fight against terrorists of various ideologies and show that all of them are to be shunned because they target civilians, including children, women and other innocent people everyday. This can only happen when all lives matter equally.
Regional commentators across print and social media have questioned the overwhelming international response to the Paris attacks with news outlets and leaders from around the world preoccupied with events in France while remaining largely silent on other atrocities.
Comparisons are being drawn between the treatment of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and the much larger, largely ignored assault on the same day in the Nigerian town of Baga. The terrorist attack in northeastern Nigeria resulted in an estimated 2,000 civilian deaths.
Do some human lives count for more than others? And if this is the case, how can the world ever unite against the terrorist threat?
The attack on Charlie Hebdo was widely perceived as an attack on freedom of expression, a valued principle in democratic societies, which provoked an international debate on the limits of free speech. In the meantime, the human tragedy in Nigeria did not get the attention it deserves.
Some might argue that the Charlie Hebdo attack was exceptional because it was the only major terrorist attack on French soil in decades and that Nigeria and some other countries have suffered such attacks on a regular basis for several years now.
But this cannot explain the disproportional media attention, which is actually not new at all. Consider the findings of a 2014 study generated by Media Cloud, a tool developed at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to measure comparative attention to topics and locations in different segments of the news media. The study found that media outlets publish three to ten times as many stories about France than about Nigeria, even though the giant of west Africa has a population that is almost three times that of France.
This is not surprising, say the researchers, because there is much less news on Africa in general, except at times of crisis, such as the Ebola epidemic or a spectacularly different terrorist attack. And so the bad news coming from Nigeria becomes “predictable”, regardless of the level of horror and the scale of human tragedy.
Understandably, most people are emotionally touched by events near by rather than in faraway places. This is why the majority of European commentators spent more time discussing the tragedy that took place in Paris, while most Arab pundits said the focus should be on the tragedy in Syria. Both ignored Nigeria.
But why do we have to give a political meaning to the killing of innocent people? Why do we always have to analyse events so clinically? Why can we not look at them from the point of view of the victims and the loss suffered by grieving families? Why does it have to be relevant to us, to what we believe in?
When it comes to the murder of innocent people – regardless of their background, age, race, ethnicity, religion or political ideology – we need to look at their murder the way we should look at any murder, as an unjustified human tragedy that must have been prevented.
In all religions, every human life is of equal value. Killing one innocent soul is like killing all of humankind, the Quran says. In a democracy too, human rights are the same for everyone and everyone has the right to life and security.
The innocent Nigerians deserve our compassion. And our attention. Those who were killed by the Boko Haram terrorist group must be mourned as our fellow human beings.
As the world united in support of the victims of Paris, so it should come together for Baga’s dead. It must condemn terrorism and governments that are too corrupt to prevent it and manage its consequences. How many of those leaders who marched in solidarity with Paris criticised the weak stance of the Nigerian government towards the atrocities? Why isn’t there an outcry over that?
How many of us take the time and trouble to question our own biases when reacting to world tragedies?
aalmazrouei@thenational.ae
Twitter: @AyeshaAlmazroui
