Al-Qalam 
Tensions between India and Pakistan is still high after India launched an air raid into Pakistani territory which ended with one of its fighter jets shot down by Pakistan’s air force. Pakistan has graciously returned the Indian pilot that it captured.
Both countries are nuclear powers and fighting on the border is ongoing with casualties on both sides. This must not get out of hand, because any miscalculation could lead to a nuclear conflict of immense proportions.
India has 135 nuclear weapons and Pakistan has 14. Assuming that 25 nuclear weapons are used, the death toll could exceed over 40 million. Any nuclear conflict is indeed a crime against humanity, and a gross violation of international law. Nuclear war is an act of genocide.
According to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Crimes against Humanity is defined as ‘Waging war without justification. Holding prisoners without giving them due consideration, legal representation or denying them all rights. These include murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.’
It was a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who was Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials of Nazi leaders, who uttered the following: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoners dock rather than the way to honours, we will have accomplished something towards making the peace more secure.”
We are witnessing genocide and wars across the globe. The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in articles 11 and 111 of the 1948 convention on the prevention of genocide.
It is often and truthfully said that war exposes the worst side of human nature. But even when outright, military warfare comes to an end, man’s inhumanity to man continues, humanity’s war on itself goes on, never ending.
Many governments are conducting a scorched earth policy. All they care about are their own selfish desires, oblivious to the human wreckage they leave behind.
The misery of their victims met with deaf ears, blind eyes and lying tongues. The violence continues, the brutality, the cruelty, the suffering. Pain has been given a voice. Retribution has been given a body. Vengeance and death walk as one.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong, and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
Farouk Araie
Johannesburg
