A guest post by JOHN LAWRENCE
“Genocide is genocide, a mass grave is a mass grave. We are with the people who are in there, and against the people who put them there”, journalist Ed Vulliamy told a discussion meeting in London on Monday.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s war on Gaza – both of which have settler colonial and genocidal dimensions – had thrown an unusually clear light on the hypocrisy of people who oppose one, but not the other, Vulliamy said.
In the United Nations, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky abstains over Gaza, and South Africa abstains over Ukraine, Vulliamy said.
“Large sections of the left wonderfully support Gaza but, having denied and justified [the massacre in 1995 of Bosnians by Serb troops at] Srebrenica, at best indulge, or support, Vladimir Putin and his imperial endeavour,” he continued.
On the other hand, the UK rightly lends its support to the Ukrainian resistance, “but is also complicit, and in its way leading, the atrocity, the calamity, the catastrophe and the genocide in Gaza”.
Vulliamy was chairing a panel discussion at the Frontline Club, an association of independent journalists who cover armed conflict, and speaking on the club’s behalf. It does not usually make statements of position – but this was a departure from that general rule.
Vulliamy, who covered the atrocity-ridden Balkan wars of the 1990s, said: “We don’t do genocide à la carte or à la mode. Genocide is genocide.”
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