Daily Inspiration Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

Brahimi’s line strips away the comforting fantasy that atrocities are committed by cartoon villains who can be shamed into decency by an outsider’s arrival. He’s talking about actors in civil wars and insurgencies who have crossed a moral threshold and then built a whole political identity on the other side of it. “Taken the responsibility of killing their own” is deliberately bureaucratic language for something intimate and horrifying: violence aimed inward, against neighbors, co-ethnics, or fellow citizens. The phrase “because they think that they are right” is the key twist. He refuses the easy explanation of pure evil and replaces it with a more destabilizing one: conviction.

The subtext is diplomatic realism with a hard edge. Brahimi is warning that once people have justified fratricide as “serving the interests of their people,” they are trapped by their own narrative. Backing down isn’t just a policy change; it’s an admission that the dead were pointless, that the cause was a lie, that the leader is a criminal rather than a protector. That’s why “they’re not going to give that up easily” lands like a diagnosis. The “just because you’ve shown up” is a quiet rebuke to international interventions that mistake presence for leverage, or moral clarity for strategy.

Contextually, this reads like a veteran mediator speaking from Algeria’s bloody 1990s and from UN negotiations in places where combatants arrive at the table with blood on their hands and legitimacy claims on their tongues. The intent isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a demand for humility: if you want an off-ramp from violence, you need incentives, face-saving, and power arrangements, not surprise visits and righteous speeches.