WHO chief says racism behind greater focus on Ukraine than Ethiopia

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World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has criticized the international community's focus on the war in Ukraine instead of other crises ravaging the world, citing the crisis in his home country, Ethiopia.

He attributed the discrepancies in the attention given to crises around the world to pigmentation, saying the world might have been giving the war in Ukraine more attention because the people affected by the crisis in Ethiopia were not white while their Ukrainian counterparts were.

Tedros did not only cite his home country, for he went on to question whether the world really gave "equal attention to Black and white lives," going on to count the crises ravaging Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria, which he said garnered only a "fraction" of the concern for Ukraine.

Last month, Tedros said there was "nowhere on Earth where the health of millions of people is more under threat" than the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

According to the health official and ethnic Tigrayan, about 2,000 trucks of humanitarian aid should have reached the region, bringing in food, medicines, and other essentials to the conflict-stricken area, but only 20 have made it, he told a virtual press briefing from Geneva on Wednesday.

"As we speak, people are dying of starvation," he highlighted adding that what the Tigray region was undergoing was "one of the longest and worst sieges by both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces in modern history."

He did not deny the global significance of the Ukraine war, though he used his platform to ask whether other crises were being given enough attention as the world seemed to ignore many catastrophes the world has been undergoing for decades.

"I need to be blunt and honest that the world is not treating the human race the same way [...] some are more equal than others," he reiterated.

He also went on to say the media had failed to document much of what had happened in the region, accusing it of not taking the situation seriously altogether.

The attention the media has been giving to Ukraine has been subject to criticism from Russia too, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying the Western media was trying to dissolve the situation in Ukraine with demagogic reasoning.

The issue at hand at the time was in Bucha, a town in Ukraine that was the focal point of footage published by Kiev it claimed showed evidence of crimes committed by the Russian armed forces, which Moscow's defense ministry described as yet another provocation.

Western media was not only silent on the Russian narrative, but it was also ignoring facts on the ground, such as Russia's forces being out of the town long before the violence took place.

They spread the footage and news on the matter like wildfire, but Russia had proof it had no hand in the matter. This situation went to show that Western media was willing to propagate news about Ukraine so much so that it did not mind there being disinformation or twisting of facts so long as it put Ukraine in the spotlight, all the while ignoring true facts about crimes being committed all around the globe.

This is not the first time that racism has been brought up with regard to how the West is treating the war in Ukraine; another racist aspect that was brought up was how the entirety of Europe opened its doors to Ukrainian refugees while closing the door to others from other ethnicities and conflict or crisis-stricken regions around the world.