Tuesday, December 11, 2007

How war and peace have affected my life

The dictionary definition of peace doesn’t express the importance of this term. The dictionary defines peace as a state of tranquility or absence of war. Nevertheless, when you have already experienced war, you know that this definition is too simple to describe the importance of this term. In my opinion, peace is more than a simple definition or a political reality. I have read books about how war has affected people’s life, but you have to experience it to figure out it importance. Thus, my real life experience with war has impacted my life in several ways.

First of all, I’m able today to understand the importance of peace in a country. Indeed, because I have seen my country before, during, and after the war, I’m convinced that a country can’t prosper without peace. For me, having peace in a country is more important that being the most powerful country in the world. I remember the day the last agreement which brought peace in my country was signed. I had never seen such kind of happiness around the cities. Everybody was singing and dancing in the street. In the days after that, it was like life appeared in a country and all despair and sadness had disappeared leaving hope and joy in its place. For me, this kind of experience showed me the importance of peace in a country.

However, the most important effects of war had on my life is that now I’m more involved in bringing peace around the world. Indeed, at the beginning of the war in my country, some friends and I organized a collection of clothes, shoes and money in France to help the people who lost everything in this war. To do so, we organized some conferences about how war had destroyed people’s life. Today I’m still working in an organization which aims to talk about peace around the word. When I was in Canada, we organized a conference at my university to explain the causes and the effects of war in Africa and to make people understand the importance of peace, but the principal aim of our conference was to involve African students who wanted to return in their countries. We wanted them to be more concern about peace. We think that this kind of actions like the conference can be one method to avoid future war.

To conclude, even if war had some bad consequences in my life, for instance I lost lot of members of my family; it also helped me to understand the importance of peace and figure out that I want to be more concern of social things, for instance being involved in NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) in my country like helping people who needs some help. However, in general, war is not a good thing and peace has to be a principal of everybody.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

how to resolve a conflict

The resolution of an army crisis is not easy, and it takes several steps. We are going to take the example of the resolution of the Ivorian crisis. First of all, all parties involved in the fight went to Paris to sign the First agreement which is called “Marcoussis’s agreement.” Nevertheless, this agreement wasn’t accepted by Ivorians, because they thought that the rebels were given all the power, thus there were lot of demonstrations in the street against it. So, they went secondly in Accra, the capital of Ghana, to sign a complementary agreement which was supposed to fix up the first one as it was rejected. Unfortunately this new agreement wasn’t accepted once again by the Ivorians. The United Nations decided then to take care of the Ivorian problem because one of their roles is the prevention of conflicts and the promotion of peace, so they tried to write an agreement called “Resolution 1633,” which was supposed to end the war. This resolution was interpreted by Ivorians as powerful countries wanting to impose their view on the weaker countries, so it was completely rejected even by the parties involved in the fight. Finally, the Ivory Coast president decided to propose a way to resolve the fight. Indeed, he proposed that all parties had to be involved in the resolution. All assailants must be pardoned for their role in introducing war in Ivory Coast, and manufacturing must be developed in the northern part of the country since unemployment in this part was one reason for the different. Because all these solutions proposed by him were attractive to all parties, they were accepted by the opposition, and then the fight was ended and peace was brought to the country. To conclude, we have seen through the Ivorian example that the resolution of an army crisis is not easy, and it can take several steps, and lots of time too.