By Alusine Fullah
“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
War is a perilous affair with death and destruction converged it. With this destruction and death, it is quiet surprising how often we go to war. From the beginning of time wars have raged on from generations to generation, shifting and changing from one reason to another. It’s easy to say humanity is a species that cannot do without it. With all the peace efforts, in the end only ruin remains. After all the first war that was recorded in the Christian Bible was in heaven itself. Where an angel called Lucifer tried to overthrow his creator.
Most times, I find it arduous to answer why these wars are fought. When the dust settles, the fire dies and the soil of the earth is no longer drenched with blood, we then ask why it happened in the first place. For instance in Sierra Leone, we are still asking why the 11 years’ war? The simple truth is we only have bits and pieces. Most say the problem behind it is out approach to everything. How we feel for there to be peace there must be conflict, how we feel we most sacrifice a great deal for the peace of the future, a peace that doesn’t last forever.
It’s crazy how we evolved from swords and shields to Atomic and nuclear bombs. Weapons so powerful that we now hang in the balance of fear and peace. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves, what are we fighting for? These, resources and lands, are they really worth the blood shed? Our beliefs and greed are they really worth the millions of death? Our quest for expansion and power are they really worth the end of humanity itself?
When we ask ourselves these questions, we realize that we are just killing and fighting for things that don’t really matter, no matter our differences in kind we are all still human beings and that should count for more than just race but unity.
So before we pick up our guns and bombs, let us think about the future, let us remember that death and destruction is all that proceeds from it and if we remember those we love the most, we’ll realize that peace is the only way to keep peace. To keep the history between us clean, and still try to erase the darkness which we build between ourselves in the past. We only share one home, one planet and it’s all we have. Once we destroy it, we destroyed who we are.
According to NBC News, more than 1.6 million people have been displaced in Gaza, and health officials there say more than 10,800 have been killed. Israel says 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas terrorist attack Oct. 7, with 239 people still held hostage in Gaza. Wow!!! What is happing with the world? Are these guys trying to end the world?
Civil war can have a devastating impact on the economic development of countries. Countries experiencing civil war will see a collapse in tourism, foreign investment and domestic investment. It can lead to shorter life-expectancy and lost GDP. A report entitled “Africa’s missing billions” (Oxfam, 2007) estimates the cost of war in Africa has been equal to the amount of international aid. A country like the “Democratic Republic of Congo” has experienced a particularly difficult war, which besides causing the deaths of about 4 million people, has cost it £9bn, or 29% of its gross domestic product. The report also notes that ongoing war and increased availability of weapons can lead to increase in rates of armed violence and organised crime.
Putting aside the very real human cost, war has also serious economic costs – damage to infrastructure, a decline in the working population, inflation, shortages, uncertainty, and a rise in debt and disruption to normal economic activity.
From some perspectives, war can appear to be beneficial in terms of creating demand, employment, innovation and profits for business (especially when the war occurs in other countries.) However, when we talk about the ‘economic benefits’ of war we must be aware of the ‘broken window fallacy‘ – when we spend money on war, this creates demand, but also it represents a huge opportunity cost – rather than building bombs and rebuilding destroyed towns, we could have used this money to improve education or health care. For example, the opportunity cost of the Iraq war was estimated at $860 billion by the end of 2009.
In many circumstances, war can lead to inflation – which leads to loss of people’s savings, rise in uncertainty and loss of confidence in the financial system. For instance, in the US civil war, the Confederacy struggled financially to meet the cost of the war. Therefore, they started printing money to pay soldiers’ salaries. But, as they printed money, the value of money soon declined. High inflation hits middle-income savers the most as they see the value of their savings wiped out.
During the 11 civil war in Sierra Leone, we saw a rise in inflation because the economy was running close to full capacity, the high levels of government spending and shortage of workers saw inflationary pressures. This means that, during war, the economy can also experience cost-push inflation due to shortages of goods and services and rising price of raw materials like oil.
If a country is devastated by war and the capacity to produce goods is sharply reduced, it can create the circumstances of hyperinflation as governments desperately print money to try and deal with the lack of goods. For example, with a devastated economy, in 1946, Hungary and Austria experienced the highest rates of hyperinflation on record.
