Sit in your place.

Sit in your place. In a political system, immunity can be necessary to guarantee the position and continuity of government. However, when it becomes a shield against accountability, its meaning changes. It no longer simply means protecting a position; it means creating a distance between a decision and its consequences.

The greater this distance becomes, the more political responsibility is weakened.

Those who make decisions but do not directly experience their consequences may gradually stop seeing war as a human catastrophe and instead view it as an instrument of foreign policy, a military option, or a bargaining tool. At this stage, the individual moves from being a “decision-maker” to becoming someone who “bears the cost of the decision.”

Immunity does not eliminate responsibility overnight; rather, it gradually erodes it within the realm of power.

When a leader can repeatedly make decisions and place the burden of their consequences on others, accountability gradually turns from a political principle into an empty phrase. Mistakes are called “miscalculations.” Failure is portrayed as the consequence of “complex circumstances,” and people’s deaths become an “unavoidable cost.”

Therefore, the issue is not simply who is in command. The issue is what kind of structure allows authority to evade responsibility for its own decisions.

When power is not controlled by accountability, it gradually comes to see itself as more legitimate than society. In such a situation, the leader is no longer merely a decision-maker; they become someone who can determine the fate of millions of people, without those millions actually having any say in evaluating the consequences of that leader’s decisions.

In such situations, sometimes silence is no longer a solution. Diplomatic words and empty embellishments lose their value, and I feel like going into the street, shouting, and pounding my fist on the ground. Stay in your place and end the war! No political title, no geographical border, and no claim of national security can reduce the life of an innocent human being to a number that can be eliminated from the calculations of power.

Defenseless people are not your playthings; they are human beings with lives, families, dreams, and plans for the future.

What are you really fighting for?

For borders, power, prestige, victory? Or so that history will one day record that this or that leader was “determined” and persistent?

Have you ever asked yourselves what role the dead played in this display of power?

What crime did the murdered child commit?

What role did the old man among the ruins play in this war?

What crime was the mother guilty of while holding the lifeless body of her child in her arms?

And what crime did the worker commit who spent his entire life working to build a small home that you destroyed in a single moment?

For those in power, war may be a political or military decision; but for someone buried beneath the rubble, war means the end of life.

Real power is not demonstrated merely by carrying out decisions; real power becomes apparent when a leader accepts responsibility for the consequences of their choices.

Courage is not demonstrated only in war.

Sometimes the greatest courage is being able to say: “I could have fought, but I chose not to.”

Author: Gouya Roshan — All rights reserved.