中国论坛《参考观点》（第24期）|关于批评西方国家围绕俄乌战争表现出的虚伪和双重标准的观点

Original 中国论坛清华大学战略与安全研究中心 2023-06-15

收录于合集 #中国论坛《参考观点》 34个

导语

随着俄乌战争的持续和乌克兰流离失所人数的增加，欧洲出现自二战以来空前的乌克兰难民潮。曾以强硬态度拒收中东、非洲和阿富汗难民的一些欧美国家，对乌克兰难民表现出截然不同的态度，并高调要求国际社会关注“乌克兰人道主义危机”。这种在俄乌战争和美西方发动的阿富汗、伊拉克、叙利亚战争上采取双标的做法引起不少国家的不满和一些媒体的批评。

（图片来源：People's Review）

一、欧盟所有27个成员国都同意为乌克兰难民提供短期居留权和其它福利，而非乌克兰国民（第三国公民）却没有这个待遇，他们没有得到如同乌克兰人那样的权利或法律保护。

Poland has welcomed two million refugees from war-torn Ukraine at lightning speed and with open arms. Yet just north of that border, the EU member continues to push back those crossing from Belarus.

Since last summer, thousands of migrants and refugees -- mostly from the Middle East -- have come knocking only to be turned away by Poland, which sees their arrival as a kind of “hybrid warfare”.

The approach taken by Polish officials regarding those they call migrants -- who in some cases are actually refugees fleeing war -- as well as humanitarian organisations and journalists has been denounced by representatives of the United Nations, European Commission and Council of Europe, to no visible effect.

At the same time, by welcoming huge numbers of people running from Russia's invasion, Poland has built up an image of itself as open and compassionate in the eyes of the world.

That makes it ever”"harder to understand why on the one hand helping those fleeing Ukraine is desirable, rewarded and lauded while on the other hand helping people at the Polish-Belarusian border is stigmatised and criminal”, Jagura said.

(April 1, 2022, RTL Group, Polish pushbacks to Belarus go on as Ukrainians welcomed)

萨罗尼加（希腊的城市）抗议者表示支持乌克兰

（图片来源：DeutscheWelle）

Human rights activists have long denounced the Greek government's treatment of refugees. The government, however, claims that Turkey is a safe third country and that, therefore, people had no right to international protection in the E.U. Speaking to the parliament, Greek Migration and Asylum Minister Notis Mitarakis recently labeled the refugees from Ukraine “real refugees”. Meanwhile, leading politicians have said asylum-seekers from the Middle East or Africa are “illegal immigrants”, according to Greek media.

Neda Noraie-Kia, an expert in European migration policy at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green Party, said she disapproves of the Greek government’s unequal treatment of refugees. A rather somber picture has emerged regarding refugee protection in Greece, she said: Illegal deportations, lack of basic provisions, lack of integration efforts — the list of accusations is long. “It's important that the E.U. responds to documented breaches of law,” she told DW. Nonetheless, it is also important that refugees from Ukraine receive protection in Greece without red tape, she added.

“This proves, after all, that solidarity is possible,” said Noraie-Kia, adding that such solidarity also has to be extended to others who seek protection. Many people, including asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, have been waiting too long for an asylum hearing, trapped in a legal gray area for years. “Protection against war and persecution is not an act of mercy,” said Noraie-Kia.

(March 28, 2022, Frontline, Greece accused of refugee hypocrisy）

二、在乌克兰危机爆发之后，西方媒体和北约国家对难民困境的反应方式存在种族差异。西方媒体更愿意报道蓝眼睛和金发、“相对文明”的乌克兰人的悲惨故事，却对同样遭受战争痛苦的叙利亚人、也门人视而不见。

“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades,” said Charlie D’Agata of US network CBS News. “This is a relatively civilised, relatively European, I have to choose those words carefully too -- city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope it is going to happen.” A day later, after much online furore, D’Agata apologised for his “poor choice of words”.

Meanwhile, journalist Philippe Corbe said, “We are not talking about Syrians fleeing the bombardment of the Syrian regime, supported by Vladimir Putin. We are talking about Europeans who are leaving in their cars, that look like our cars... and who are just trying to save their lives.”

These are just of many remarks on reputable media outlets drawing a line between the conflict unfolding in Ukraine and those in other parts of the world.

(March 28, 2022, Frontline, Ukraine’s refugee crisis exposes Western media's hypocrisy）

The Continent’s response to those fleeing Ukraine should be the rule — not the exception. Some Western commentators have added fuel to that fire, with journalists describing Ukrainians as civilized Europeans with white skin and blue eyes, unaccustomed to the horrors of war. Commentary like that adds nothing to the story, but it does dehumanize the displacement experiences of black and brown people.

(March 31, 2022, Politico, Europe’s refugee double standard leaves it vulnerable)

三、阿拉伯国家以及非洲联盟批评西方在乌克兰战争和叙利亚战争、阿富汗战争、伊拉克战争以及巴以冲突中采取的双重标准，称其中充满种族主义的“伪善”，加剧了国家间的不平等并阻碍了世界的包容性发展。

“We have seen every means we were told could not be activated for over 70 years deployed in less than seven days,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki told a security forum in Turkey earlier this month. “Amazing hypocrisy,” he added.

The United States-led war in Iraq, which began 19 years ago this month, was widely seen as an unlawful invasion of one state by another. But Iraqis who fought the Americans were branded terrorists, and refugees fleeing to the West were often turned away, treated as potential security threats.

(March 29 2022, Associated Press, Many in Mideast see hypocrisy in Western embrace of Ukraine）

乌克兰人逃往多个邻国的地理分布图

（图片来源：DeutscheWelle）

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas criticised the West’s “double standards” that he said penalised Russia over its invasion of Ukraine while ignoring Israel's “crimes” against the Palestinians. Abbas voiced his frustration to visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a press briefing with reporters at the Palestinian presidential residence in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

“The current events in Europe have shown blatant double standards,” he told Blinken.

“Despite the crimes of the Israeli occupation that amounted to ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination... we find no one who is holding Israel responsible for behaving as a state above the law,” he said.

(March 27, 2022, France24, Abbas slams West's “double standards” on Ukraine, Palestinians)

The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists’ Association condemned “examples of racist news coverage that ascribes more importance to some victims of war than others”.

“This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalising tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America.”

Political scientist Ziad Majed said that, while there was “magnificent solidarity” from the world over the Ukraine conflict, it also revealed a “shocking distinction”.

The discrepancies in media treatment revealed the “dehumanisation of refugees from the Middle East”, said Majed, a professor at the American University of Paris. “When we hear some commentators speaking about ‘people like us’, this suggests that those coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa are not (like them)”.

The African Union (AU) said on Monday that it was disturbed by reports that African citizens in Ukraine are being refused the right to cross borders to safety as they try to flee the conflict in Ukraine.

(March 01, 2022, WION, Ukraine’s refugee crisis exposes Western media's hypocrisy)

四、美国不能借普京的非理性行动来洗白自己。美国政府想借乌克兰危机占领道德高地，但美国从来都是为追求一己私利行事的，美国在“9·11”以来发动的战争已经将其“道德纯洁”打的粉碎。

Over the weekend President Joe Biden met in Poland with a group of Ukrainian refugees whom he lauded as “an amazing group of people.” But where was Biden when it came to the Afghan refugees fleeing the rule of the Taliban this past summer?

It was, of course, Biden who created that refugee crisis with his ill-considered and poorly executed decision to pull out of Afghanistan unilaterally in August. Biden has never visited any of the Afghan refugees that his decision-making helped to create.

(March 29, 2022, CNN, Biden's double standard on refugees）

Gently, they place bouquets of sunflowers outside the church, and stand in silence to honour the civilians being erased from existence by Russia’s war machine.

What the audacious, short clip fails to show are the corpses of the forgotten Iraqis torn to shreds by the American war machine. Unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crimes, those of Clinton and Bush came with global impunity.

In a statement last month, Bush condemned the “unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine”, while Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, wrote just weeks before her death that Putin was making a “historic mistake”.

Unlike Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Iraq War was met with no sanctions or diatribes, receiving hardly a fraction of the condemnation we hear today. In 2003, generations of Iraqis came out limping from a decade of sanctions and into the arms of another war, sugarcoated in ostensibly benign intentions by the US and UK.

Today, each bomb launched by Russian soldiers lays bare the West’s hypocrisy, piercing its tattered cloak of righteousness and morality.

(April 1, 2022, Middle East Eye, Ukraine wins West’s boundless sympathy, but did they forget Iraq?)

（图片来源：DW）

The U.S. cannot cleanse itself using Putin’s unconscionable actions. Not too long ago the U.S. knowingly deceived the global community before entering a war of choice and a neocolonial nation-building project in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. President Joe Biden and much of our commentariat claim standing up to “bullies” is “who we are.” Yet the U.S. has actively aided Saudi Arabia in its brutal, ongoing war and blockade against Yemen. This is just to list two of countless examples of the U.S. being a bully, or siding with bullies, after World War II and disregarding a rules-based order.

Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine was not fueled by moral imperatives. The U.S. is not a country that gazes upon the world with an altruistic eye, but a state which, like any other, pursues its own interests. Moreover, in its quest to be the world’s sole superpower, it has acted ruthlessly for decades. Which is why the U.S. painting its involvement on behalf of Ukraine as a pure extension of defend-the-underdog principles is nonsense.

Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me the U.S. seems to be seizing an opportunity to reclaim a moral high ground. “In this moment there is a real danger that American leaders will use this moment to reclaim a sense of moral purity that the U.S. has lost domestically and internationally as a result of the war on terror and post- 9/11 military operations,” he told me. “This attempt seems to take the form of ‘Russia is a terrible actor’ — which is true, and ‘Therefore the U.S. is more virtuous than it was a month ago’ — which is false.”

(March28, 2022, MSNBC, Why the U.S.'s double standards on Russia-Ukraine matter)