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Making War History
"Making Poverty History" must also mean making war history.
World annual military expenditure is again creeping up to the 1 trillion dollar
mark - that's a thousand billion dollars a year - a sum that dwarfs any amount
spent on aid or the release of debt. Though Iraq, which has so far cost the
United States alone over 150 billion dollars, is the conflict that makes the
news, it is not the only one. There are over 20 armed conflicts in progress
now, more than half of which are civil wars rather than wars between
states.
The link between war and poverty has been pointed out often enough. It is there in article 26 of the UN Charter, signed in 1945. It is powerfully there in Pope Paul VI's Populorum Progressio of 1967. It is there in paragraph 89 of the Final Report of the 1978 First UN Special Session on Disarmament. In 1992 Mostafa Tolbe, then Director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, having listed all our global needs, concluded that without progress on disarmament all other positive agreements "are worthless".
The connection between poverty and war is too obvious to be a matter of dispute but in practical terms it has not always been made.
Perhaps one reason is that bringing war to an end looks like an impossible dream despite its noble ambition. We applauded Pope John Paul in 1982 when, while the Falklands War was still in progress, he said "war should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future", but could it ever happen? After all, the UN was founded "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". Yet the years since 1945 have been bloodstained with wars and shadowed by the threat of war.
It is a time for a dose of practical optimism. Social change is always at first dismissed as impossible. The abolition of the slave trade, the creation of an old age pension, votes for women, were all in their turn described as utopian. The realistic optimist points to history. Our country is dotted with castles - once military fortresses but now tourist attractions. Some one-time enemies, for instance Germany and France, or Norway and Sweden, have so changed their political and economic relationships that war between them is simply unthinkable.
Consigning war to history means taking practical steps to build a culture of peace, to reject "peace" resting on threats of massive retaliation, to end the arms trade, source of so much destruction and so much debt, to create a public conviction that killing people is a barbaric way of resolving conflict.
For such changes to come about we need to build a global society in which the rule of law is paramount. There has been some progress in that direction. We even have a working International Criminal Court, though its jurisdiction is not accepted by the remaining superpower. In Interpol we have the start of an international police force. Changing attitudes is not easy but it does happen. The war nostalgia of the entertainment media can be redirected. The anti-poverty agencies can make practical and financial links with the peace movements. Remembrance Sunday and Week can honour the dead in the one way that they would want to be honoured, by working towards the abolition of war itself. Professor Joseph Rotblat, who refused in 1944 to work on the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, is the inspiration behind, and the President of the Movement for the Abolition of War. He remains a realistic optimist: "war must cease to be an admissible human institution".
Making poverty history is a practical possibility, but it will not happen unless at the same time we start to cut out the cancer of militarism.
Bruce Kent
This article first appeared in Pax Christi's
newsletter, Justpeace, for March/April 2005
A building-block towards the abolition of war - the Barcelona Report
"But what's the alternative to violent force ?" I feel the peace movement has never really been able to offer a well-thought -out, credible answer to this. Until now.
A Human Security Doctrine for Europe - from the Centre for the Study of Global Governance. ( also referred to as the Barcelona Report) asserts the primacy of human rights in all operations: this distinguishes the human security approach from traditional state-based approaches. The report gives details of 'A set of seven principles for operations in situations of severe insecurity that apply to both ends and means'. It's not heavy reading either. Peace comes before human rights in classic peacekeeping, and victory comes before human rights in classic military interventions. This report offers not only a 'third way' but one that is practically possible - and which treats all parties equally so no 'losers'. The right to life, the right to housing, the right to freedom of opinion are to be respected and protected even in the midst of conflict. It also implies that those who commit gross human rights violations are treated as individual criminals rather than collective enemies.
Of special interest to MAW is step 6, on the use of legal instruments. 'A much larger investment will have to be made in civilian capabilities for law enforcement, ie police, court officials, prosecutors and judges. Terrorists, war criminals, human rights violators and drug traffickers should face fair trials according to international human rights standards.' The report goes further: it asks for a 'new legal framework to govern both the decision to intervene and operations on the ground. This would build on the domestic law of host states, the domestic law of sending states, international criminal law, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law.'
Margaret Melicharova of the Peace Pledge Union says of the report : "The idea of a rapid-response Human Security Force ( eventually to be renamed without the word 'force' ?) could be a viable building-block towards the abolition of war. Its new requirements of the military - in a role more like that of police, fire-fighters or disaster relief engineers - move towards a new concept of military training: training for co-operation not aggression, rescue not retribution, problem-solving not power-wielding." The EU would have to make additional investment in human security, but some resources would be freed by restructuring defence budgets. The report remarks how 'Traditional war-fighting is unacceptable viewed through a human rights lens' - isn't that a huge step towards a change in perception? We know that the move towards a war-free world can't be made in one leap. Maybe, insisting on the ' primacy of human rights,' we can get there from here?
Do ask to discuss this report with your MP and MEP.
Click for PDF
Christine Titmus