We always seem to ignore the causes

I thought this cartoon was very relevant – not only to the Baltimore situation but to many areas of conflict throughout the world.

Take the situation in Ukraine. The media seems to only concentrate on problems of the ceasefire – violations and non-compliance with withdrawal of heavy arms.

But the Minsk agreement covering the current ceasefire has far more content than just the ceasefire arrangements. It has political and social requirements such as constitutional reform, language rights, local autonomy and new elections.

Of course these are dependent on maintaining a ceasefire – but the ceasefire itself cannot be maintained without progress on the political agreements. Unfortunately the media concentration on  the ceasefire and it’s almost complete silence on the political requirements is just not helpful to a proper solution.

The current ceasefire is crumbling and most observers are predicting outbreak of full-scale fighting in the near future. But the cause of this is not just the itchy trigger-fingers of the combatants. It is the refusal of at least some parties in the conflict to allow any progress on the political solutions.

We should stop concentrating on, and moralising about, the riots and shooting which are manifestations of the underlying problems and instead work on solving those underlying problems.

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