Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” But in societies all over the world, whatever political system they say they have, it is the voices of those who have power that are heard.

Excluded and marginalised individuals, groups and peoples are mostly absent and silent. Even when they are able to speak, they are often not heard or taken seriously and listened to by those in power.

When we refer to these oppressed people as “voiceless” we are disregarding the power structures that leave  their voices unheard or deliberately silenced. Are the powerful ready to listen to those they try to keep weak? What happens if they do not listen? What happens if the weak are not ready to accept being deprived of their right to speak, to be heard and to be taken seriously?

In her blog ‘There is No Such Thing as the Voiceless’ (LSE, May 12, 2021), Malaka Shwaikh describes how “… international media often chooses to ignore structural violence and decades of settler colonialism in Palestine, including, for example, the current attempts at forced expulsions in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and the continuous Israeli violence in other parts of Palestine from Haifa to Gaza and beyond.

“Through ignoring such realities and the violent state structures that feed them, the media deliberately exclude Palestinian voices. This does not make them voiceless. It rather makes those media outlets complicit in silencing them. We ought instead to question why some voices get heard and others remain silenced.”

In the radio programme ‘The World of Ideas’ of September 29, 1988, Bill Moyers asked Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe: “You once said that Africans hope the West, and America, in particular, will listen. If we listen, what will we hear? What does Africa have to say to the rest of the world?”

Achebe answered: “I would simply say: ‘Look at Africa as a continent of people’. There are people there – just people. They are not devils; they are not angels; they are just people. And listen to them. We have done a lot of listening ourselves. This is a situation where you have a strong person and a weak person. The weak person does all the listening.

“Up to a point the strong person even forgets that the weak person may have something to say, you see, because he is simply there; he is a fixture, you simply talk at him ... A British governor of Southern Rhodesia, once said, ‘The partnership between us, the whites, and the blacks, is a partnership of the horse and its rider.’ And he wasn’t trying to be funny. Seriously he thought so.

Martin Luther King famously said that violent rebellions are the voice of the unheard- Evarist Bartolo

“Now that’s what we want the West to get rid of, because we lack imagination when we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of the person we oppress. If we were able, if we had enough imagination to put ourselves in those shoes, things would begin to happen. So, it is important that we listen, that we develop the ability to listen to the weak, not only in Africa but even in your own society. The strong must listen to the weak.”

Opening door to violence

Martin Luther King was inspired by Gandhi’s politics of non-violence when he led the civil rights movement in the United States advocating racial equality. He was assassinated in April 1968 by a white supremacist while taking part in a strike in Memphis by waste collectors.

These workers had been protesting since February 1968 after two of their colleagues were crushed by a malfunctioning garbage truck. All they asked for was to be treated as human beings.

In a speech at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968, Luther King famously said that violent rebellions are the voice of the unheard. He was not condoning violence. He was warning the government that if it continues to ignore the rightful demands of those who want to bring about political change through peaceful means, it discredits them. It opens the door wide to those who will use violent and extremist methods to achieve their aims by showing that reasonable and non-violent methods are ineffective and fruitless.

Twenty days before he was assassinated, Luther King said: “But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.

“And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

Addressing the UN Security Council on October 23, 2023, UN Secretary General António Guterres made a similar point: “Israelis must see their legitimate need for security materialise and Palestinians must see their legitimate need for an independent State realised, in line with UN resolutions, international law and previous agreements.”

Guterres said that nothing could justify the deliberate killing and kidnapping of civilians, or the Hamas rocket launches against civilian targets, but he said it was important to recognise the attacks by Hamas “did not happen in a vacuum… The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation…. the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.