FAROUK ARAIE | No hope for peace as killings through war escalate

President Ramaphosa and other African leaders are embarking on a journey to bring about peace between Russia and Ukraine, a perilious journey whose outcome no one can predict. There are forces who seek to divide and destroy; powers that are dividing and choreographing events in Sudan, Pakistan, Palestine, Turkey, Iran and Ukraine.

Perhaps these wise men should also visit Gaza and Khartoum. As the war-torn world inches towards World War 3 and the holocaust that will follow, we as citizens of this planet must strive to prevent an inferno that no human being on earth will ever witness again. In 2021 raging global wars displaced 84 million people.

The chilling massacre of innocent civilians in occupied conflict zones in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Europe must be condemned by the global community. If we want to reduce the levels of conflict or even contain it, we will have to deal with its manifestations and its underlying causes. 

The poignant fact is that global peace has become a subject at the United Nations (UN), and all endavours to have it have been futile as unrestrained violence has made its way to establish its diabolical might. Terror against innocent civilians in occupied war zones has become a diurnal activity, as a shaken and frightened world sits viewing the dance of death as spectators.

It was Mark Twain who said: “Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that, that cannot be done.” The world is soaked in the blood of innocent victims of brutal 21st century warfare. 

When the UN was formed after the horrors of World War 2, the heads of nations who gathered to sign the charter agreed that it should begin with the following preamble; “Since it is in the minds of men that wars begin, it is in the minds of men the ramparts of peace should be erected.”

Peace must be more than an absence of violence. It must be absence of ill will and angst. Mankind is not ready for peace. Thus far all peace talks have ended in abject failure, costing over 250-million dead over the past 50 years.

It was Ernest Hemmingway who said: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

War is, without argument the worst collective experience of humanity. It has created new nations on the rubbles of destroyed cities and human dead; major powers will be facing the paradox of yet more asymmetric warfare by a small adversaries wielding outsize weapons capable of atomic explosions and chemical warfare.

We live in a violent culture in a violent world that appears to be coming more violent with time. As is the case with any act of war, the perpetrators and victims have been reduced to mere statistics and caricatures. It threatens us all, not only physically and politically, but morally and intellectually as well. It is a violent disproportion between ends and means against which we have no recourse.

Killing innocent civilians today is the most hideous employment method of warfare, which involves immense fatalities and has become the most ugly hallmark of intimidation by fire, it has never been as devastating, as it has become in the present day world.

Araie is a Sowetan reader