The Christmas holidays usual offer Christians with good reasons to smile, share love, exchange gifts, visit friends, and sometimes holiday making. It is a time when people retire from their routinely demanding chores of the hard work of the passing year while also recharging for the coming year, however, 2023 was different.
Instead of smiling, the world is mourning, instead of exchanging gifts, countries are exchanging bullets, instead of visiting friends, some captives are held hostages, instead of advocating for peace, world leaders are vetoing cease fire agreements, and arming those in the war front. They are signing peace accords with the right hand while the left hand is holding a gun.
In Africa, a pledged to silence guns by 2030 was made, however, the continent has more than 35 non-international armed conflicts taking place. In Burkina Faso, Camerron, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan, several groups are fighting government forces or against each other. Apart from these conflicts, the continent recorded 7 coups in the last three years and the African Body just like the United Nations, proved to be a mere spectator without any power. (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali (twice), Sudan, Guinea and Gabon)
In the Middle east, more than 45 armed conflicts are currently taking place throughout the region in the following territories: Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and Western Sahara.
With all these conflicts having turned perennial, the latest genocide in Gaza has erased any prospect of a peaceful world. While the world watches, while the world travels and stays in hotels for peace summits, women and children are crying for help under the rubbles in Gaza. Parents are lucky to bury their children as most just disappear and probably are being buried in mass graves.
Families are wiped away in seconds. Even the injured with chances of survival have their life saving machines switched off as Israel air strikes target hospitals, schools and United Nations Refugee Camps. In Europe, the Russian-Ukrainian War is clocking 700 days and counting. Painfully, politicians and their children are safe while ordinary civilians face the full wrath of war.
‘ The Russian people are once again forced to sacrifice their lives to protect the world from Nazism and fascism. We exchanged 50 of our prisoners of war for 50 Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers were treated in our hospitals, given three full meals a day and returned home. ‘We received Russian soldiers who had their fingers and genitals cut off. Not even the Nazis did that in the last war’, Russian President was quoted saying last week. William Ewart Gladstone once said, ‘We look forward to the time when power of Love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace’. We look forward to when Christmas will once again be a time of exchanging gifts and not exchanging bullets, then will our world celebrate.
By Desmond Nleya
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