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Kathmandu Friday February 15, 2002 Falgun 03, 2058.
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Guided missiles and misguided
men
By DR GOPAL KRISHNA SIWAKOTI
Can we imagine a peace paradise where the wolf
shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the
young lion embrace each other? And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie
down together and the child put his hand inside the crocodile’s mouth!! Impossible.
Today peace is turn into periods of cheating between periods of fighting. War is growing
as an industry. Out of 36 wars fought in 1998, two were international and the rest were
internal armed conflicts. We are fighting the wrong wars in the wrong places in the wrong
time and with the wrong enemy. Today he who murders one becomes a villain, but massacring
millions makes one a hero. Crazy warlords are continuing a series of wars on some false
pretext if a previous war is lost. The media is largely glorifying war. Cheap landmines
are taking an innocent life every 20 minutes. Planting a peace pole on top of Mt Everest
and counting beads for peace in a monastery do not bring genuine peace. Peace activism and
peace building measures are vital in the search for just peace, freedom, rights and
liberty. Arms alone are not enough to keep the peace-it must be kept by men. The whole
conception of war is changed. Now it does not matter if one country is more powerful than
another in the use of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. No one is more powerful in
ruin than the other. That is what is meant when saying that the point of saturation has
been reached. To hit the nail on the head, there can be no victory. It may perhaps rightly
be said that owing to this very terrible danger, people refrain from going to war.
While the causes and conduct of armed conflict
have changed over the last century, the propensity to use violence to resolve disputes
has, if anything, increased. Demystification of the root causes of war, degrading human
values, attitudes, patterns of behaviour and structures that permeate our society, is
essential to establish a culture of peace and non-violence. While the end of cold war has
reduced the likelihood of a global nuclear holocaust, not enough progress has been made
towards disarmament and peace as hoped for by the people of the world. Governments have
failed to seize the historic moment to move rapidly toward reducing and eliminating
nuclear weapons. Too little has been done to stem the tide of civil wars and conflict that
have turned Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and scores of other
countries into killing fields. With $800 billion going into global military expenditure,
peace-keeping and post-reconstruction programs remain underfunded. The flow of human
rights violation and killings continues.
Peace in the 21st century demands a shift in
investment from military to civilian programs that safeguard human security. Disarmament
will entail making drastic cuts in weapons, forces and military budgets. Demilitarization
will require transforming the military economy to a peace economy by allocating resources
for programs that ensure the well being of the world’s citizens- that provide for the
basic human rights of food, shelter, education, work, health, security and peace. It will
require global adherence to the United Nations Charter and to the development of
non-military security structures.
As we begin this new century, the first steps
toward eliminating war and militarism as the organizing principle of human society can be
seen in the practice of the New Diplomacy. The leadership and cooperation of civil society
organisations and good governments resulted successfully in the international treaties to
ban land mines and to establish criminal court. Using this model, new initiatives and
campaigns to stop the weapons trade, to reduce military budgets and to abolish nuclear
weapons are gaining momentum and support. Civil society is showing the moral imagination
and courage to create a culture of peace across the globe. As a first step toward
disarmament and demilitarization, the Hague Appeal for Peace has endorsed the Women’s
Peace Petition, which calls for a 5 percent reduction a year in military spending for five
years and the reallocation of the substantial resources saved toward human
security-educational, health care, environmental, food, housing and employment programs.
Nuclear weapons still threaten the survival of all human kind. In order to comply with
their obligations under Article VI of the Non-proliferation Treaty, all states should
negotiate and conduct a Nuclear Weapons Convention within five years. Failure to comply
would result in states being brought before the International Court of Justice. The
Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in July 1996 explained that the
obligation points to negotiations aimed at reaching total nuclear disarmament.
The New Agenda Coalition’s resolution,
adopted by the First Committee of the United Nations, calls on the nuclear weapons states
to commit themselves to undertaking the immediate practical steps and negotiations
required for complying with legal obligations under Article VI of the Non-proliferation
Treaty. Steps toward nuclear disarmament include: ratification of the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty; adherence to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; de-alerting; no-first use; the
de-nuclearisation of regional arrangements; extension of nuclear free zones; and a ban on
fissile materials and subcritical tests. In the interest of transparency and
accountability, stocks and warheads withdrawn under arms control agreements should come
under international control. Small arms, light weapons and landmines pose the biggest
threat to human security; their use results in the majority of civilian deaths. The Hague
Appeal for Peace has endorsed the campaign of the International Action Network on Small
Arms. All states should negotiate and implement a comprehensive global code of conduct for
all exports of all types of conventional weapons, including light weapons, small arms and
guns. Perpetrators of violence should be held legally accountable as well as local justice
systems that guarantee individual rights. International institutions prosecuting these
criminals should be supported and their rulings internationally enforced.
Steps toward stopping the flow of weapons
include: controlling legal transfers between states; safeguarding the availability, use
and storage of small arms within states; preventing and combating illicit transfers;
preventing weapons transfers to human rights violators; increasing transparency and
accountability; reducing demand by reversing the culture of violence; reforming public
security institutions; fostering norms of non-possession; promoting more effective and
sustainable demobilization and reintegration of former combatants. It is desirable to call
on all countries to ratify the BWC and the CWC as part of a global effort to abolish all
weapons of mass destruction. Commitments to ban chemical and biological weapons must be
reinforced by commitments by all countries to ban and abolish all nuclear weapons. All
countries are expected to strengthen BWC and CWC by adopting strong national legislation
that implements these conventions without qualification and by participating in the
current efforts to enhance compliance with BWC.
Parties to CWC should not dilute provisions for
inspection and verification through domestic legislation or executive actions. Efforts to
strengthen BWC and CWC must ensure that all parties that are in compliance receive equal
treatment with respect to trade in the agents and equipment covered by these treaties. In
particular, the Australia Group, which coordinates the export controls of 30 mainly
industrialized countries in private, with no international accountability for its
decisions, must be replaced by international controls managed within the framework of the
relevant conventions.
The Parties to the Biological Convention must
exhaust all efforts to strengthen article X, encouraging the exchange of information and
materials for peaceful purposes. In particular, industrialized countries should enable
developing countries to build capacity in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of all
diseases by providing technical information and needed resources. Similarly, research
organizations, professional societies, and individual scientists are urged to reinforce
the prohibitions of BWC and CWC by pledging not to engage knowingly in research and
teaching that furthers the development and use of chemical and biological warfare agents.
And finally all countries must reinforce commitments to BWC and CWC by prohibiting the
development of novel biological and chemical agents that do not have a peaceful purpose as
their unambiguous justification, even if these activities are promoted for defensive
purposes.
(The author is Executive Director of INHURED
International and Advisory Board Member of The Hague Appeal for Peace)
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