By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
When wars come to an end, slogans do not return to the cemeteries to apologize, nor do lengthy speeches stand at the doorsteps of homes that have lost their sons. Only mothers remain there, holding the photographs of the absent, counting the passing years as though each were a wound that refuses to heal. And only orphans grow up searching the faces of strangers for the features of fathers who will never return.
How many young men left their homes believing they were marching toward glory, only to find themselves walking toward anonymous graves? How many mothers bid farewell to their sons with the hope that they would return carrying life, only to receive them back as names engraved upon cold stone—or not even as names at all?
For decades, public squares were filled with slogans, platforms echoed with fiery speeches, and songs promised an imminent victory. Meanwhile, villages sank deeper into sorrow, homes grew emptier, and mothers silently taught themselves how to conceal their tears so that whatever remained of the family would not collapse.
The youth became the permanent fuel for every political narrative, and their dreams the easiest commodity to consume. They were told that sacrifice was the only path, that death was a form of heroism, and that the future awaited beyond the next battle. Yet the years passed, generations came and went, and the same question remained suspended above every grave: What did those who departed truly gain?
Those who lost their sons gained nothing. The words of consolation never compensated the children who grew up as orphans. The women who waited for husbands, brothers, and sons found, at the end of their waiting, nothing but memories burdened by absence. As for those who crafted the rhetoric, many changed their positions, altered their language, opened new doors, and reshaped their slogans to fit a new political reality.
History is filled with political transformations, and changing positions may well be part of political life. But what must never be reduced to a passing statistic is the human being. The lives of peoples are not bargaining chips, the blood of the young is not capital for any project, and the pain of mothers is not a detail to be overlooked in political statements.
What hurts most is not the collapse of a slogan—for slogans are born and die with time—but the collapse of an entire generation alongside it. It is the bitter realization, after years of sacrifice, that the conflicts which tore people apart eventually ended around negotiating tables, while cemeteries remained the only enduring witnesses to the price paid by the innocent.
There are still mothers who set the table for their absent sons as though they might knock on the door at any moment. There are children who learned to whisper the word "Father" before a photograph hanging silently on the wall. And there are fathers who left this world waiting for the return of their sons, never knowing that those sons had gone before them into death.
This is the truth that slogans cannot conceal. Flags may change, speeches may change, alliances may shift, but the tear of a mother who has lost her child never changes. The cry of a child deprived of a father never fades. The grief of a family that buried its dreams alongside its loved ones remains heavier than any political statement and more eloquent than any speech.
Peoples do not need more slogans as much as they need honesty. They do not need more rhetoric of mobilization as much as they need leaders who regard human life as more precious than any political gain. Just causes do not become more just through the multiplication of victims; they become stronger only when they protect human life and preserve human dignity.
And so the moral question remains, immune to the passage of time: Who consoles a mother who spent her life waiting for a son who will never return? Who restores the stolen childhood of an orphan? And who has the moral right to ask a people for more sacrifices before honestly accounting for those already made?
One day, slogans may fall. Flags may change. Alliances may be rewritten. Yet one thing will forever resist oblivion:
The pain of mothers... and the tears of orphans.