Words that Never Leave You: “We need reconciliation, and the key to that is peace and justice. We are just farmers and cattle keepers, and we don’t want to fight.”
Part Forty-Eight in an ongoing series from Hollie's book "Words That Never Leave You: Fifty Pearls of Wisdom and Reflection from Survivors Across the World."
Few want war. Few ever want war. In a no man’s land traversing Iraq and Syria, a sun-crinkled farmer with cloudy, cataract eyes and a name I never learned marched toward me after discovering a journalist was visiting the fragmented, landmine-layered fields. By day, the man fights for his land. By night, he cradles a weapon and patrols with a local pack of militia fighters, unable to accept that the fight is over, and Bashar al-Assad has won.
“We need reconciliation, and the key to that is peace and justice,” he said, opening his hands as if to show the empty and failed long-term peace efforts. “We are just farmers and cattle keepers, and we don’t want to fight.”
I rarely meet people excitedly itching to take up arms and point guns toward their own people. But when wars wane without accountability for those wedged into the firing line without reason, the conflict will never truly end. There is no peace, no justice, without accountability.
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