Pink-Washed Genocide

When bombs are sold in the name of “her rights.”

They always start with girls.

The eyes. The dust. The Hello Kitty sleeve sticking out from the wreckage. A schoolbag flattened under concrete. She is never just a child. She is always a symbol. The West has made an artform out of weaponising girlhood to justify violence, of parading brown children like broken dolls to build moral consent for war. They say they’re here to save her. Then they bomb her, photograph her, frame her as a tragedy, and keep funding the man who did it.

If they cared about her safety, she wouldn’t be buried beneath a democracy drone strike.

If they cared about her future, they wouldn’t sell tanks to the people turning her school into an open grave.

So, let’s drop names. Here’s what “supporting peace” actually looks like:

• United States: Armed both sides of the Iran–Iraq war, backed Saddam, then bombed Baghdad. Left Afghanistan after 20 years and $2 trillion, handing power back to the same regime it claimed to defeat.

• United States (again): Sends billions in military aid to Israel while vetoing calls for ceasefire as Palestinian children bleed in classrooms.

• United Kingdom: Sold over £7 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia since 2015, directly fuelling the war in Yemen, where girls starve beneath fighter jets made in Birmingham.

• France: Trains Israeli military forces and signs weapons contracts while Palestinian women give birth in corridors with no electricity.

• Germany: Increased arms exports to Israel by 140% in 2023, claiming neutrality while fuelling one side of an ongoing ethnic cleansing.

• Canada: Condemned the killing of civilians in Gaza, then quietly approved arms transfers to the same regime doing the killing.

• Australia: Delivered speeches about international law, then signed off on weapons sales to nations actively violating it.

• Italy: Trained police forces in Sudan, then said nothing as women were gang-raped in the street by soldiers they helped prepare.

• Saudi Arabia: Bombs Yemeni civilians, starves them through blockades, and executes women for social dissent, all while sitting on UN human rights panels.

• Iran: Imprisons, tortures, and kills women for protesting hijab laws, then accuses the world of imperialism for noticing. Two things can be true.

• Israel: Bombed over 200 health facilities in Gaza, targeted journalists, and turned schools into tombs, then framed it as self-defence.

• United Arab Emirates: Funded proxy militias in Yemen and Libya, built detention camps, and used sexual violence as a method of control.

• Belgium: Continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia post-Khashoggi murder, citing “economic interests” over Yemeni lives.

• Multinational Corporations: Extract coltan from child labour sites in Congo, fuel militia violence, and label it "ethical tech."

This is not collateral damage.

This is the design.

When war breaks out, the headlines reach for the same words. “Women and children.” Always said together, like a branding unit. Always photographed together, in the rubble, on the roadside, under a tarp, on a flyer. Always described in soft, sympathetic terms, as if they’re decorations of the crisis instead of its most calculated casualties. They are framed as the reason we must intervene, but never the reason we must stop.

Because nobody ever really means to protect them.

They just mean to use them.

The rape rates in war zones are not side effects. They are war tactics. In Sudan, mass sexual violence has become a public tool of ethnic cleansing. In Congo, hundreds of thousands of women have been raped by soldiers, militias, and even UN peacekeepers. In Yemen, forced child marriage has soared, with girls sold for food while the world debates arms deals. In Gaza, women are giving birth on floors with no anesthesia while their daughters bleed beside them. There are no safe zones for the female body. Only different flavours of threat.

There’s a reason girls are plastered all over “humanitarian” brochures but never at the table when the peace talks begin.

Because she was never invited to survive — only to symbolise.

And after the bombings stop, the second invasion begins. The NGOs arrive. White saviours. Conferences with words like “resilience” and “microenterprise” and “empowerment” while women clean blood off the floor with a child on each hip. The same governments who funded the war now fund photo ops. They hand out dignity kits while shaking hands with the men who ordered the strikes. They invite girls to speak on stage but never into policy.

They sell “recovery” like a subscription box.

But you cannot recover from being made a metaphor.

Because while a girl in Gaza screams under rubble, Germany signs a new weapons contract. While a girl in Sudan is raped with a foreign rifle barrel, France renews its silence. While a girl in Yemen loses her womb to an airstrike, the UK celebrates a new export milestone. The fire never stops. It just changes slogans.

They want to be both arsonist and firefighter.

They burn the house. Then sell tickets to the rebuilding.

And still, they do it.

Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Palestine. Yemen. Sudan. Congo. Iran.

Different continents. Same choreography. Find a girl. Frame a threat. Flatten a nation. Print her face on a leaflet. Frame her death as a sacrifice. Profit. They love to say, “girls’ rights are human rights.” But not when she’s inconvenient. Not when her death implicates the donor. Not when her bruises can’t be monetised with a gala dinner, or packaged into a TikTok-friendly trauma arc sponsored by Coca-Cola.

So let’s stop pretending. If you cared about girls, you would stop needing them to be pitiful before you pay attention. You would stop selling the weapons that kill them and then donating the bandages. You would stop calling it strategy when it’s gendered brutality. You would stop turning their lives into pamphlets for imperialism.

You do not save girls by bombing their schools and handing out pencils in the ash.

You save them by dismantling the system that ever thought that was noble.

Let them live.

Not in theory. Not in marketing.

In full. In freedom. In futures not sold to the highest bidder.