War & Peace Quote by Nicholas D. Kristof

“War zone” is doing double duty here: it’s a geographic description and an indictment of abandonment. Kristof’s sentence is built like a prosecutor’s charge sheet, stacking verbs - burning, kidnapping, robbing, killing - until the reader can’t pretend this is just “instability” or “tribal conflict,” the euphemisms that often let distant crises slide off the news cycle. The specificity matters. “Villages” and “travelers” yank the violence out of military abstraction and into civilian life. “Children” is not subtle, and it’s not meant to be: it’s a moral tripwire.

The real sting is in the final clause: “with impunity.” That phrase relocates blame from the gunmen to the void around them. Impunity implies no courts, no police presence worth naming, no international attention strong enough to deter. It suggests a political ecology where violence is rational because consequences are absent. Kristof isn’t just reporting atrocities; he’s documenting a failure of governance and, by extension, a failure of global priorities. Central African Republic is the kind of place that becomes a war zone partly because it can be. No strategic oil choke points, no superpower rivalry, no live-streamed outrage.

As a columnist steeped in human-rights storytelling, Kristof’s intent is to collapse distance. The cadence is designed to make passivity feel complicit: if people are being killed “with impunity,” someone, somewhere, is granting that permission by looking away.