French philosopher and journalist Benrad-Henry Levy wrote a seminal book on forgotten wars titled "War, evil and the end of history", chronicling his various travel to the low intesity war around the world (SriLanka, Angola, Burundi, Colombia, and more) where the vision of hell is turned to reality.
An American writer Robert Young Pelton write "The Hunter, the hammer and heaven: Journeys to the world gone mad" travelled to aftermath of Sierra Leone, to the midst of second Russian invasion to Checnya, and the post Executive Outcome scandal in Bougenville, Papua New Guinea.
I very much recommend you to read these two books about these conflicts that are still raging for decades and constantly consume any vision of hope for peace in their region. What both books bring is a horiffic and vivid description of "we are in worse shit than we thought" concept and why the good intention of peace process and diplomacy might looks good on paper and newspaper headline, but simply doesn't matter to the parties involved on the ground, locked in a dance of death and distruction that lasts for generations, so long that most people involved have forgotten why the conflict started in the first place. War is simply what you do.
Excerpts from "War, Evil and End of history"
"And the Muslim engineer who tells about the impossible situation of his community, the third group on the island and, perhaps, the most threatened: "we speak Tamil, but we are not Tamil, and even are we Tigesr - they see us as false friends, they hate us, rob us" Muslims as excluded outsiders? Islam caught in the crossfire of Buddhism and Hiduism?" (On Sri Lanka Tamil Tiger conflict - the innovator of sucide bombers)
"The second camp came after a year. It was a training camp still in the Wanni. They taught the women who, like me, were not virgins to spend a day with a grenade in our vagina. They put replicas of the suicde-vest on our backs-those big heavy vests, stuffed with dynamite, with a detonator, a cable , and stell balls, which the Leader himself had conceived of after seeing them at the cinema in a Rambo movie" (from a repentant Tiger Tamil female suicide bomber trainee)
"I ended up simply asking a taxi to drive me south, and teh driver replied yes, okay, the roads are good in Burundi- but on one condition, and only one, which he clung to quite adamantly: that we make teh journey on a Saturday.
"Why Saturday? Because the "genocidal attackers," the Hutus of the FNL (National Liberation Front) the images of whose abominal crimes the entir country keep replaying over and over again--that priest whome they forced to eat his own penis before they crucified him.... those babies burried alive... those children impaled, sprinkled with gas and burned, in their schoo, by the principal himself...-- are also excellend Christians, generally of the Adventist persuasion, who don't smoke, don't drink, arrive in the villages singing humns at the top of their voices, and they consider Saturday a sacred day, devoted to prayer, on which one must above all not shed blood (On Burundi)"
"Who kills better? A fascit or a Marxist guerilla? The peasants of Querbrad Nain are still debating about it. A month ago the former arrived in the village, the "paramilitaries" of the drug lord Carlos Castano, and killed twenty people suspected of "collaboration" with the Marxist guerilla movement. Egith days later, people from the guerilla movement turned up, the one called FARC, and on the pretext that the survivors hadn't resisted enough, on the pretex that they might even have fraternized with the enemy, killed ten more of the villagers (On Colombia lost map)
After you are done with these two books, you will see why "war is never an answer" slogan simply rings hollow. Violence happens, and most of the time an overwhelming force and decisive victories are more merficul to the alternative of prolonged misery of attrition and tiring conflicts;where they last so long, it's simply become part of the country reality, and with sufficient numbers, became a reality of the regions. Take a look at Central Africa; will you be surprised to hear another armed conflict in that region?
These low intensity conflicts are the cancer of humanity, happening under our awareness, draining bloods by the gallons;not by rivers, because it will be stopped if it reaches that level.
What the world community have set is an unacknowledged acceptable level of bloodshed; a gruesome calculation of body counts and victims per day or per month; and somehow by twisted logic, it somehow makes more sense to kill many many more so that intervention will finally arrive; please horrify us to spring to action.