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Quote by Louis Yako

“A Mall and Bullet Holes" While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country devastated and drained by the wars of the global elite, exactly like mine, I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side… On the left side, there was an old residential building filled with bullet holes that looked like eyewitnesses to all the free death that took place here in a war that has since ended, yet its real causes and the criminals behind it are still lurking in every corner, like infected pus ready to burst at any moment of awareness… I wondered bitterly: When will the world understand that violence never erupts inadvertently, that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon by a small elite that decides in advance that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality, must be disciplined with free death for those who resist! It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that the minds and souls of all survivors must permanently be pierced with bullet holes! In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes… I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes, like those we see in malls… The elderly woman looked at them as if wishing to tell them about all that happened here, but they didn’t notice her existence for their eyes were fixated on their phones… I painfully wondered then: Has anyone told them about what happened here? Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks? Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted, told them about the real price she’d paid with all the holes left in her heart and her history for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods? [Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

Quote by Louis Yako

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Louis Yako

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“When will the world understand that violence never erupts inadvertently, that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon by a small elite that decides in advance that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality, must be disciplined with free death for those who resist! It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that the minds and souls of all survivors must permanently be pierced with bullet holes! [From a poem titled "A Mall and Bullets Holes". Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

“In this unending chaos, and with the passage of time since then, the voices of the Kaurs who lived through unimaginable horror and trauma have been silenced. And once I became aware of this silence, I wanted to undo it. I wanted to ensure that the voices of these survivors were heard and their stories remembered.”

“Most of these women were not educated; many had never stepped out of their homes. They responded to the continuum of patriarchy as they had been conditioned to do so - providing thumb impressions to false statements, and in the case of rape survivors, staying silent because they were commanded to to so.”