Unfinished Lives

The Arab lands..

Tom Barrack, US Ambassador in Ankara and Special Envoy for Syria: “There is no such thing as the Middle East; there are tribes and villages.” Yes, much as we may dislike them, these mocking words, which contain a good deal of truth, say a great deal.

Later in the same conversation, with the same mocking air, he had said: “When we talk about peace, we are really talking about an illusion. There has never been peace in the Middle East. There probably never will be, because everyone is fighting for their own legitimacy.” What he is really saying is that there can be no peace where we hold the power….

The cradle of history, the meeting point of civilisations, the land where the ancient religions were born. Yet how painful it is that today this land has become a symbol of gunpowder, blood and tears. With every bomb that explodes, behind every plume of smoke that rises, there is a childhood left behind, an unfinished youth, a dream left half-realised.

War speaks in statistics; numbers tell how many people died, how many were displaced, how many children were orphaned. But each of these numbers is in fact the full stop placed at the end of a life story. A child whose name is unknown might perhaps have become a doctor, perhaps a musician, a teacher… But now that name amounts to nothing more than disappointed dreams written on the stoneless headstone of a mass grave.

In Syria, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq – whichever map you look at, there is an unending tragedy in the background. Hopes that die before they are born, children who never got to carry a school bag, lovers who could not say goodbye to the one they loved… Each of them an unfinished life.

The eyes of a baby breathing its last in its mother’s arms ask us this question: is there really such a thing as justice in this world?

Unfinished lives do not speak only of death. They also represent the voids and absences that the survivors carry within them. For war does not only kill; it also gnaws away at those who survive. Where a father falls silent as he looks at a gravestone, where a little girl grows up in a minefield instead of among toys, humanity too is in fact quietly dying.

In the Middle East, war is not waged only at the front. War lives in a mother’s sleepless night, in a child’s fearful glance at the sky, in the eyes of a teacher moving across empty desks.

And we…
How many times have we, the world, looked at these unfinished lives and then turned our eyes away?

Perhaps the greatest loss is not only the deaths. The greatest loss is that the peace which never manages to take root in this region, and the future that people seek to build, are razed to the ground every time. For every unfinished life in fact means a future that is a little more diminished.

We want to believe that one day the wars will fall silent and that children in this region will once again play and laugh. Perhaps when that day comes, the memory of unfinished lives will make peace all the more precious to us. But for that to happen, it is of course essential that the rule of tribes and families should end, and that there should be states with institutions, where the law functions and scientific research is valued..

But until that day…

Unfinished lives will continue to stand before us as a mirror of conscience.

Samir ALTUNKAYNAK
Director of Law and Justice, SESA