War targets human lives, not politics

While reading some responses on my last article, I had noticed that people easily speak about war like it’s nothing else but a little chess move with attention for a checkmate.

It’s easy to have guts and start a war. That doesn’t take a lot of courage at all, especially for those people whom for their whole lives lived in freedom and don’t know what war means at all – it’s not a boot camp or shooting practice.

The war breaks all the way beyond the military, war toys and politics. It targets human lives and human hearts and minds and nobody is saved, not even children. That is why I am anti-war and why I’m looking forward to giving peace a chance in the Iraqi conflict.

I come from a country where people saw the real face of war. While some of us were protesting against the oncoming war in Bosnia, many of them dug up their rusty weapons and made them ready for a fight with smiles on their faces.

The older generation wouldn’t give up their politics and the younger generations were supposed to follow their calls and give satisfaction to their impotence. Soon after the war started, it wasn’t about politics, the military or playing with guns anymore.

It was about civilians, killed in bomb raids or by the human beings like them, but it wasn’t important any more who was the killer and who got killed. We all became part of it, women, children, young and old people. Those who once wanted the war mostly ran away or stopped talking about it. Those who got killed didn’t have the chance and those who stayed alive got beaten, tired and without any chance to live a normal life, wherever they were.

I’m one of those who will never have a chance to live a normal life anymore because it haunts me wherever I am, but I want to see other people living their lives whoever they are – Americans, Iraqis or Africans.

I know that we can find a peaceful solution. It is going to save many lives, also young Americans who will have to taste the reality of war. I think that the interests of those who want the war are no match to their lives.

I’m also hearing how people who are against the war in Iraq are cowards. It takes a lot more to find out about nature of war and politics beyond what we assume that they are, then easily justifying a war and pushing for it. We should remember that while we are here being all busy with arguments and anti arguments there are people out there being victims of it.

This is not a hippy article that is just a product of anarchism. I don’t believe in any ideologies and theories. I had to live the conflicts produced by those ideologies, interests and politics.

I believe that people can make a difference if they stop and think just for a moment or two. It doesn’t take all the time in the world. It takes some small adjustments. Nobody is going to get cancer because of thinking too much.

Edvin Subasic, The Arbiter

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