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Herald Correspondent

Reports that Ukrainian authorities are refusing African students studying in Ukraine to leave the country for their safety in Poland and other European countries that border Ukraine smacks of racism of the highest order.

They are allowing fleeing Ukrainians, Indians, Arabs and other nationals to cross the borders and take refuge in other countries. The only people they are barring are black Africans and yet there are hundreds of African students studying in the country who are stranded on the Polish border. To make matters worse, Ukrainians themselves are not allowing Africans to board the free trains that have been set aside to carry Ukrainians and other nationals to leave the country and flee to Europe.

There are reports that Ukrainian police got on these trains and removed all Africans saying that they had to stay behind whilst allowing all other nationals from other countries, including India etc. to proceed.

This is how low down the ladder Africans are regarded now to a point that even the BBC has reported on it. This only proves to us what President Putin has all along been saying that Ukraine is being run by Neo-Nazis.

During the so-called Maidan protests which culminated in the removal of the democratically elected President Victor Yanukovic, the Neo-Nazis openly campaigned using their symbols on the streets of Kiev with US politicians like the late John McCain joining in distributing burgers to them.

It is not a surprise to some of us that the same Ukrainians who are crying and chanting democracy today are also very racist. Indeed, the majority of them are descendants of Nazists who fled from Austria and Germany during the Second World War and settled in Ukraine. These guys are racists to the bone.

What boggles the mind with our African thinking is that, many Africans out there in the diaspora and within Africa are the first people to condemn President Putin of being a ruthless dictator and war monger when in fact he is fighting against NATO expansionism which threatens his country’s existence in the first place.

Today the Anglo-Saxons across Europe are busy putting in place sanction regimes to punish Russia and President Putin pretending as if they don’t know what is going on behind the scenes and as usual lamenting the fact that democracy is in danger in Europe, when in actual fact they don’t care about democracy at all.

If they cared about democracy, they could have done something in Palestine where the so-called democracy is at stake with daily killings of children, the old people, and demolitions of people’s houses is a daily occurrence. Instead they choose to look the other way without due regard of the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Another argument that is being advanced by the Anglo-Saxons in their attempt to discredit the Russian invasion is that Russia is a superpower why is it fighting Ukraine a military nonentity. They forget well too fast, how many superpowers bombed Gaddafi’s Libya? Was Libya a superpower? How many bombed Iraq, Syria, and now Yemen? Where all these countries superpowers?

It’s a shame for Africans to blindly support the doomed adventures of the western imperialist wherever it is happening because blacks will never be invited on their dinner table. When it comes to supper time, we will always be sidelined. Our African leaders should be careful enough to condemn what they don’t know in the first place.

Treating black Africans with such contempt is totally unacceptable and should be rightly condemned by all Africans who think. Do our people not have the right to flee from Russian bombs too and save their lives? Indeed this is nothing but pure racism and it is definitely evil. Even when they are fighting and people are dying, the Europeans still deny some people access to their borders simply because of their skin colour. How wicked can they be?

We call upon the African Union (AU) to think twice before condemning President Putin for having brought about this war, instead, appeal to the Ukrainian Neo-Nazis to stop treating black Africans like they are not human and assist them to evacuate to places of safety like anybody else. Aluta Continua!