From Gaza to Congo to Haiti: A Global View of Struggle and Resistance

What Gaza, Congo, Haiti and So Many Others teach Us About Global Violence

We live in an era where war, famine, and displacement feel endless, but these aren’t isolated tragedies. They are patterns: the same story retold through different lands of power, extraction, and human lives caught in between.

When we look at Gaza, the Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Yemen, Tigray, Somalia, Puerto Rico and beyond, we see that every border hides a bruise. And beneath every bruise, the same wound: greed dressed as governance.

 

Threads that Bind the World’s Wounds

Extraction and control. Land, oil, cobalt, gold, water  what we call conflict is often a struggle over what the earth can be forced to give.

Colonial footprints. Old empires never left; they just changed names. Borders were drawn by hands that never lived there, and people still bleed along those lines.

State fragility and proxy power. Armies rise, militias form, and foreign governments fund chaos to guard their own interests.

And always — civilians suffer first.

 

🇵🇸 Gaza : The City Beneath the Siege

For nearly two decades, Gaza has existed under blockade, a strip of land sealed by air, sea, and land. Israel controls its borders, water, electricity, and movement; Egypt controls a gate that cannot open without Israel’s consent.

The siege has turned survival into resistance. Bombardments, blackouts, famine, and disease are constant. International law calls the blockade collective punishment, yet the world debates semantics while people dig for their dead with bare hands.

The argument that this began with Hamas erases decades of occupation. Gaza is a wound of history  a people denied the right to breathe freely. The question isn’t who fired first; it’s why the fire never stops.

 

🇨🇩 Congo : The Cost of Everything That Shines

In eastern Congo, war is waged over minerals that power our modern lives such as cobalt for batteries, gold for circuits, coltan for phones. Rebel groups like M23 fight government forces, backed by regional powers chasing profit.

The result: millions displaced, villages burned, children enslaved in mines. Every spark of a smartphone, every glow of an electric car battery, carries traces of their suffering.

Congo’s tragedy is not chaos — it is commerce. Violence is the cost of convenience.

 

🇭🇹 Haiti : The Unfinished Revolution

Haiti was the first Black republic to break its colonial chains. Two centuries later, those chains return in new forms such as debt, intervention, and abandonment. Gangs now control most of Port-au-Prince; the UN sends yet another armed mission. The world calls it “peacekeeping.” Haitians call it déjà vu.

 

🇸🇩 Sudan : A War of Generals, Paid by Hunger

Two rival armies fight for power while millions flee. Entire communities starve not from drought alone but from deliberate obstruction of aid. Even nature joins the violence, the Nile floods, while foreign dams upstream alter its flow.

 

🇾🇪 Yemen : The Quietest Catastrophe

Bombed by Saudi-led coalitions, blockaded by land and sea, Yemen’s people endure famine and disease. Children die of hunger while oil tankers sit offshore. The world calls it a “conflict zone” loosing sight that Yemenis call it home.

 

🇪🇹 Ethiopia & Tigray : War Inside the Cradle

The Tigray war scarred northern Ethiopia; hundreds of thousands died. Now, old wounds reopen as ethnic militias clash and the struggle for water and power around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam intensifies.

 

🇸🇴 Somalia : The War That Never Ends

Between Al-Shabab insurgency, foreign drone strikes, drought, and famine, Somalia survives by sheer will. Its people rebuild between every bombardment, proving resilience can outlast empire.

 

🇵🇷 Puerto Rico : Colonialism Without the Name

No bombs fall on Puerto Rico, yet colonial control persists through debt, neglect, and disaster. Under U.S. rule since 1898, the island is stripped of self-determination and left to weather storms, both political and literal.

 

🌺 Hawai‘i : The Colony Hidden in Paradise

Tourists see beaches; Indigenous Hawaiians see a stolen kingdom.

Hawai‘i was an independent, internationally recognised nation until 1893, with treaties signed with the U.S., Britain, France, and others. It had its own monarchy, constitution, and thriving economy built on agriculture and trade.

That changed when a group of U.S. businessmen and sugar plantation owners, backed by U.S. Marines staged a coup d’état against Queen Liliʻuokalani, Hawai‘i’s last reigning monarch. Their goal: protect American business interests and pave the way for annexation.

The overthrow was illegal under both Hawaiian and international law, a fact later acknowledged by the U.S. Congress in the 1993 Apology Resolution, which admitted that Native Hawaiians never consented to the annexation.

Five years after the coup, in 1898, the U.S. formally annexed Hawai‘i during the Spanish–American War, valuing its location as a strategic military base in the Pacific. Today, the U.S. military occupies nearly a quarter of O‘ahu.

Behind the postcards and the palm trees lies the same colonial pattern found worldwide: land theft, cultural suppression, and environmental devastation disguised as progress.
The fight for sovereignty never ended , it transformed into the Kanaka Maoli movement, the protectors of Mauna Kea, and countless calls for de-occupation and Indigenous land return.

Like Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i is proof that colonialism never ended. It just moved closer to home.

 

Patterns in the Smoke

Across continents, the same threads repeat:

• Governments suspend rights and call it “security.”

• Starvation becomes strategy  not a by-product but a weapon.

• Resources decide whose lives are valued.

• Foreign powers profit from instability they helped create.

• And yet, people resist. From flotillas on Gaza’s coast to miners’ strikes in Congo, to Mauna Kea’s protectors and Puerto Rican mutual-aid kitchens resistance always rises from ruin.

🖤 What We Can Do

• Bear witness. Share verified reporting; amplify local journalists.

• Support credible aid and advocacy groups:

  • Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)

  • Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières

  • Refugees International

  • Congo Children Trust

  • Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

  • Mutual Aid Puerto Rico

  • Protect Mauna Kea / Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i

• Challenge silence. Talk about these crises even when headlines move on.

• Live consciously. Question what your tech, clothes, and politics are built on.

Empathy is resistance.

The world’s pain is networked and so must be our care.

 

Why We Should Care

Because distance is an illusion.

Empires fall the same way they rise , by teaching people that suffering elsewhere isn’t their concern. But the world doesn’t end in someone else’s country. What happens in Gaza, Congo, Haiti, or Hawai‘i isn’t far away it’s the same story written in a different language.

If the world can watch millions starve, drown, or burn without consequence, then the boundary between “them” and “us” has already vanished. What happens there today can happen here tomorrow , all it takes is apathy, silence, and a government that decides some lives are worth less than others.

We care because caring is how we stay human.
Because the same systems that bomb, mine, and colonise abroad also exploit, surveil, and divide at home.
Because empathy is not weakness  it’s armour.

🕯️ May empathy be the spell that saves us all.

 

🩸 Footnotes & Sources

1. Smithsonian Magazine – The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Legacy of Resistance.

2. U.S. Public Law 103-150 (Apology Resolution, 1993).

3. University of Hawai‘i – Center for Oral History: Voices of the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement.

4. Hawai‘i State Archives – Queen Liliʻuokalani’s 1893 Protest to the U.S. Government.

5. Al Jazeera – Global Sumud Flotilla sets sail to break Gaza blockade (Sept 2025).

6. AP News – Flotilla boats report drone attacks near Greece (Sept 2025).

7. Reuters – Record 28 million people face hunger in Congo (Mar 2025).

8. The Washington Post – Rwanda-backed rebels seize Goma (Jan 2025).

9. UN OCHA & ICRC – Gaza remains occupied territory under international law.

10. Human Rights Watch – A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and Apartheid (2022).

11. Council on Foreign Relations – Conflict in Ethiopia.

12. The Guardian – Haiti and the return of international force (2025).

13. Smithsonian Magazine – The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Legacy of Resistance.