AS I sat in the Hydro on Friday night watching and listening to the phenomenal Adele, and singing along with 13,000 other people, I fell in love with humanity again. I was in awe at how a single human being can connect millions with her songs and her voice, and illustrate so simply how beautiful it can be to be human. But this was at the end of a week when the dark side of humanity was in full spate. Day after day, horrific reports of terrorist atrocities, genocide, murder and mayhem filled the front pages and the news bulletins.

We mourned the heartrending death of Paige Docherty, cruelly ripped out of the world at the age of 15. We learned of a further 31 people shredded by bombs in Brussels, adding to the never-ending carnage resulting from catastrophic wars launched by Western leaders in the first few years of the millennium. We read reports from The Hague where Radovan Karadzic finally faced justice almost a quarter of a century after he and others orchestrated genocide. And at the end of a grim week, we were left shocked by the brutal murder in Shawlands of an extraordinary man, Asad Shah, who stood up for peace and harmony in our fractious society.

In different times, the global media spotlight would have focused full glare on Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s civil war. We comfort ourselves that the “Butcher of Bosnia” is an unfathomably evil man, like Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin.

But Karadzic believes he did nothing wrong. He insists he did everything he could to “minimise” killing. And his daughter still sticks up for him, as do a lot of people in Serbia, where he remains a popular hero among many. Thousands rallied in his support in Belgrade following his 40-year jail sentence being announced.

Causes can inspire movements that change the world for the better. But causes can also provide justification for unimaginable brutality by men who seek power and status for its own sake in a world that reveres the powerful and scorns the powerless.

The indictment against Karadzic ran to 73 pages. His objective was the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from territory claimed by Serbia. He was a white Christian mass murderer of Muslims.

But even these horrific charges don’t bring out the full horror of what took place in Bosnia between 1991 and 1995. Buried in the indictment are references to a weapon of war that has been used for millennia. Rape.

Until the Rwanda war crimes in the 1990s, it was the atrocity that no war crimes trial was ever prepared to acknowledge. The Nuremberg trials did not punish Nazis for raping millions of women as part of the Holocaust. Nor did any of the estimated 100,000 women of Berlin raped by Soviet and western allies from 1944 to 1948 ever receive justice.

Radovan Karadzic himself only had to answer over the mass rape thanks to the work of feminist lawyer Catharine Mackinnon and the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York. On behalf of Bosnian and Croatian women, they pursued him in US courts, and in landmark cases won $5 billion in civil damages in 2000.

They are never likely to see a cent of this money, but the cases meant that their rapes and suffering were brought out into the daylight. Consequently, rape as a weapon of war can no longer be ignored by history. If it wasn’t for women taking action themselves, it’s doubtful that Karadzic’s conviction would ever have contained the word rape.

When the Allies marched on Berlin, rape was seen as justified revenge for Nazi rape of “our women” and the ‘just spoils’ of war. Violence on top of violence. Trauma on top of trauma. To this day, women are being raped in the Syrian conflict by Daesh and by the paid loyalists of Assad. How can we end it? How can we stop the cycle of avenging and revenging?

Maybe if we brought more war criminals to legal justice instead of sending in bombers the United Nations might at least deter some of the most extreme atrocities, including rape. Maybe if we’d focused on capturing Osama Bin Laden and bringing him to an international war crimes court for 9/11, instead of pulverising civilians in Afghanistan, the flames that were ignited would not be raging so fiercely today.

And maybe if we put George Bush and Tony Blair on trial for their illegal actions in Iraq, including indiscriminate bombings and torture, the more extreme fanatics would be more isolated today. Instead, we have Blair fanning the flames by strutting around the globe demanding more obliteration.

This was truly an awful week for humanity. But humanity is also capable of great beauty, generosity and kindness. Asad Shah died preaching harmony and tolerance. If some of our most powerful Western leaders had a shred of his courage and humanity, we might be living in a more peaceful world today.

Someday, we really will have to learn that meeting barbarity with barbarity gets us nowhere.