Examine the use of paradox in John Pepper Clark's "The Casualties."

John Pepper Clark’s "The Casualties" presents the far-reaching impacts of war through paradox. The poem is literally about the Nigerian Civil War, which included a fight between the Nigerian government and the seceding state Biafra. The war, which ran from 1967–70, began after ethno-religious riots, military coups, and persecutions against the Igbo. The tensions surrounding the war were political, religious, and economic (related to the control of oil production). The war also came on the back of the unsettling impact of Britain ending the occupation. The poem emphasizes the interconnectedness of a people simultaneously responsible for and impacted by the war. This is the overarching paradox, which the poem explores in smaller paradoxes, subcategories of this overarching idea.
The lines that best represent the overarching paradox depict a metaphor of fire:

The casualties are not only those who startedA fire and now cannot put out. ThousandsAre burning that have no say in the matter.The casualties are not only those who are escaping.The shattered shall become prisoners inA fortress of falling walls.

In this excerpt, the speaker defines casualties as all the people responsible for “sparking” the tensions which led to the war. Given the context, this could easily be read as the people of Britain (who occupied a country just to leave it unstable) as well as those who participated in the riots, coups, and persecutions. It would also include anyone involved in the economic, religious, and political apparatuses nationally and internationally, which would be a lot of people given the mutual interconnectedness of these kinds of systems.
The line break in the first line of this section emphasizes the idea that those who started the war and those who did not end it are equally responsible. The line reads, "The casualties are not only those who started." By breaking at "started," it leaves the reader to fill in the blank. If it is not only those who started the war, then who is left? Those who did not start the war, including those who stood by and watched the fire without attempting to put it out.
The next line uses a line break to emphasize the high numbers of people affected by the fire of war: “A fire and now cannot be put out. Thousands.” Ending on the number causes the reader to contemplate the number of people impacted (although in reality it was much, much more than thousands of civilians impacted by this war in Nigeria alone). The paradox found in these lines is that all of those responsible for the war in one way or another are now “burning” and “have no say in the matter.” The fire they started and/or let grow is now consuming them.
The paradox extends in these lines by using a metaphor of a falling fortress. The “shattered,” or the people who have embraced the economic, political, and religious rifts of the war, are becoming “prisoners” themselves. As they figuratively attack the fortress, or military stronghold, of their enemies, the figurative walls of the fortress they attack fall around them to become a sort of prison. This image emphasizes that both sides of a civil war are mutually destructive because they all share the same figurative walls (systems of governmental, economic, and social structures) that hold the country together.