Qadir Sheikh, a landmine victim from Warsun in Kashmir, says that his handicap will mean no education for his two daughters. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 2013 (IPS)

Slavery. Colonialism. Apartheid. Gender discrimination in voting. All were abolished in most places after longstanding battles – largely in bygone eras.

Now a high-level panel is scheduled to meet next month to discuss another politically sensitive issue: Should the institution of war be abolished?"If the world cannot find a way out of war, then we may well be defeated as a civilisation." -- Siddharth Chatterjee of the IFRC

Asked if this would be just an exercise in futility, Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, told IPS, “I don’t think that working toward ending war is an exercise in futility.

“I think there is little consistent effort to challenge the view that war is inevitable and to begin serious education from the time children enter school about conflict resolution and the actions we all need to take to create a global culture of sustainable peace,” said Williams, who led the highly successful global campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines.

Asked if the concept of eliminating wars should begin in the minds of politicians and decision-makers or with the leaders of the global arms industry, she said: “I think the work to ending wars must begin at all levels.”

Williams said it should extend from educating children about the horrors of war – “and not pretending it is all heroic and patriotic” – to pressuring policy and decision makers to change their thinking about war as a solution to problems.

“Tackling the arms industry directly would likely not be as fruitful and they stand to lose the most,” she added.

Williams will be one of the participants, along with diplomats, former senior U.N. officials and anti-war activists, at a briefing co-sponsored by a coalition of non-governmental (NGOs) organisations and Switzerland, a country which has not been in a state of war since 1815.

Scheduled to take place Jun. 6, the briefing will focus on the topic “Determined to Save Succeeding Generations from the Scourge of War.”

The speakers will also include Ambassador Paul Seger of Switzerland, Ralph Zacklin, former U.N. assistant-secretary-general for legal affairs, and Nounou Booto Meeti, programme manager, Centre for Peace, Security and Armed Violence Prevention.

Cora Weiss, president of The Hague Appeal for Peace, told IPS, “There will always be war, some say, just as many said there will always be slavery, colonialism and apartheid and women will never vote.

“Maybe if more women were at all decision making tables and at all levels of governance (per Security Council resolution 1325), we would see less violence,” she added.

Asked for his take, Siddharth Chatterjee, chief diplomat at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told IPS, “If the world cannot find a way out of war, then we may well be defeated as a civilisation.”

Asked about the role of politicians, decision-makers and the global arms industry in preventing wars, Chatterjee said, “Simple economics. Once the demand for war stops, the tools that supply it to wage the war will also stop”.

He said it goes beyond politicians and policy makers. And civil society can actually play a strong role in preventing wars.

A backgrounder to the briefing released here points out that since the U.N.’s creation, the international community has not seen a conflict with the same level of globally widespread catastrophe as the Second World War, which motivated governments toward the creation of the world body.

“Unfortunately, the scourge of war has not disappeared. Now, nearly 70 years after the U.N. Charter’s signing, ongoing violent conflicts continue to inflict unimaginable suffering around the world,” it says.

The current crisis in Syria, for example, has resulted in over 70,000 deaths so far, with no end in sight.

According to the latest statistics, over 1.7 trillion dollars is spent globally on armaments, making up about 2.5 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the world is over-armed and peace is underfunded.

Asked about the validity of the view that the fear of nuclear weapons has done more for global peace than any other threat, Williams told IPS: “No, it is not valid. You cannot prove a negative.”

She said it is a claim easy to make because there is no real answer.

Growing up under the threat of nuclear war, however, has marked people for life, she added.

“I had to practice curling up in a ball under my desk in grade school to know how to protect myself during nuclear attack. I was totally terrified. It most definitely did not feel like a peaceful world,” she added.

Weiss said the secretary-general has been a champion for disarmament, asserting that nuclear disarmament in particular “is critical to global peace and security”.

“Increasingly I find people talking about the immorality, illegality and glorification of war and the militarisation of society,” she said, adding that the 1999 Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century said: ‘Peace is a Human Right and Time to Abolish War’. It was endorsed by 10,000 people from over 100 countries.

The nature of war has changed. Weiss said the journalist Jeremy Scahill has just published “Dirty Wars” documenting armed violence in half the world.

“As long as there are nuclear bombs and nuclear wanna-bees, global security is threatened,” Weiss said.

“If we could abolish apartheid,” she quoted Bishop Desmond Tutu as saying, “why not war?”

Chatterjee told IPS the toll that war takes on a soldier is clear, but what sort of toll does it take on a community?

“What does this say about a community that not only do we send people out to a war that leaves them permanently scarred at the age of 21 or 22, but we also do not help them ease back into civilian life so that they can have a shot at a normal life?

“Doesn’t it affect the future of a country and a people when hundreds of thousands of young people are asked to put their life at risk to defend its borders, only to be told their wellbeing is not of concern to the very people who would ask this sacrifice of them?” asked Chatterjee, who has overseen U.N. relief missions in several of the world’s battle zones.

Sachiko Masumura (79) was standing just two kilometres away from the hypocentre of Little Boy, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan over six and a half decades ago.

She lost her mother and two siblings to the horrific heat, flames and radiation that engulfed the prefecture on Aug. 6, 1945, instantly wiping out 120,000 people.

Three days later the United States dropped a second plutonium bomb, ‘Fat Man’, on Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people according to government records.

Thousands of others, like Masumura’s father, who died last year from leukaemia, suffered the after-effects of radiation for years.

Masumura’s son is disabled from a brain disorder, a disease she links to the long-term impact of radiation. Though it is certainly horrifying, her family’s story is not one of a kind.

The 67^th anniversary of the 1945 U.S. bombing, the world’s only nuclear attacks on a country, is felt most sharply by thousands of second generation bomb survivors, whom the Japanese government refuses to recognise as ‘official’ victims of the tragedy.

Kasuki Aoki, a second generation ‘hibakusha’, the Japanese term for atomic bomb survivor, told IPS that children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims face a double struggle: first, to gain recognition and insurance from the state as legitimate victims suffering from genetic side-effects of radiation; and secondly as bearers of their parents wishes for a nuclear-free world.

“My parents, whose lives were torn apart when the bomb was dropped, wanted (nothing more) than to see a world rid of nuclear weapons and radiation. This is a fight we children have to follow through by speaking up on their behalf,” Aoki, who now works in the Hiroshima Kyoritsu hospital, told IPS.

He also pointed out that the responsibility of carrying the torch for family members that suffered enourmous physical and mental damage from the bomb is daunting for the second generation, now in their fifties and sixties, who are themselves struggling to secure welfare protections from the state, such as free medical support.

The government justifies its position by stating that there is a lack of concrete evidence of health risks among the offspring of survivors of the explosion.

But those born after 1945 point to countless studies and reports by Japanese and U.S. research organisations that prove a much higher genetic risk of cancer for children of bomb survivors.

Further, scientific research conducted by numerous organisations including the Hiroshima Red Cross and Atomic-bomb Survivors hospital has proved time and again that those who were directly affected suffer higher rates of cancer, especially leukaemia, from exposure to high doses of radiation.

Hiroko Sakaguchi, who makes annual trips to the U.S. to speak out against nuclear weapons, states she has cousins who have died of cancer. Her own mother was affected by the bombing in Nagasaki that left her weakened and infirm for the rest of her life.

Shinichi Oonaka (64) is a second-generation hibakusha in Hiroshima and spokesperson for a recently formed group under the umbrella Japan Atomic Bomb Sufferers Organisation, one of the largest in Japan, with more than 200,000 members.

He told IPS that members of his group have begun to retire from their jobs and now find themselves facing a vulnerable future.

“While we had jobs we were entitled to regular medical check-ups, but that will no longer be the case,” he pointed out.

Oonaka plans to form a lobby to pressure the government to permit free and regular cancer check-ups by extending official hibakusha recognition to second-generation survivors.

But there are many obstacles to this process. Oonaka told IPS that second generation victims remain scattered and reluctant to speak up for better treatment, fearing the same social discrimination that plagued their parents for decades.

“Physical scarring and particularly the risk of cancer made marriage and jobs almost impossible for hibakusha,” said Oonaka, whose father, a former Japanese soldier stationed in Hiroshima city when the bomb was dropped, subsequently married a hibakusha, a common practice among first generation survivors.

In response to the government’s indifference, Masumura launched the Kogane Friendship Organisation for people with brain disorders in July. “ We cannot wait for the government to help us anymore,” she said.

“My death wish is to see my son, who represents the second generation of hibakusha, live independently,” she told IPS.

High-profile international personalities, including the eldest grandson of former U.S. President Harry Truman, who ordered the bombings, attended the memorials this week in the two cities.

Clifton Truman, attending the functions out of respect for the dead, listened to the stories of the survivors and said, “ It is now my responsibility to do all I can to make sure we do not use nuclear weapons again.”

Oonaka says he is content to hear such comments from the former enemy, which he views as a step towards hibakusha’s dream of ensuring such suffering is never repeated.

(END)

Now that the war in Iraq is considered ‘over’, another major goal of Israel has come into view: attacking Iran on the pretext that it may possibly be working on a nuclear weapon – though Pakistan, China, and India definitely already have them.

For years now, the major producers of weapons and oil, both essential to the world’s “great powers”, have been seeking a confrontation with Iran, just as they did years before with Iraq, resorting to falsehoods and bogus arguments. It is no coincidence that Iran’s oil reserves are as large as and possibly even larger than those of Saudi Arabia.

Given that Israel does not need to speak with the Pentagon to convince the military leadership  – because it is already inside the Pentagon­ – there is reason to worry that something might happen the way it happened in 2003: an inundation of news about the malevolent intentions of Iran today, ­as with Iraq then,­ followed by a decision to take military action without obtaining permission from the United Nations Security Council.

But things will not unfold in 2012 the way they did in 2003, when the entire world looked on passively in fear and silence. Today millions of people, in person or virtually, will react against it.

Working together we can promptly put an end to these intolerable abuses, the effects of which are not even tallied afterwards, including the number of dead, maimed, and displaced.

The G8 and the G20 (the richest nations on the planet) have amply demonstrated their incompetence at global governance, including economic governance. What is urgently needed is a refoundation of the United Nations. Only multilateralism will make it possible to avoid armed conflict and immediately regulate ­and then abolish­ atomic weapons through recourse to words and mediation.

Humanity should not live another day under the nuclear threat, which is an invitation to death by inaction and a collective disgrace. This, and not the fluctuations of the stock market, is the true problem we face. It affects all of humanity and is a concrete and urgent challenge.

A systematic crisis requires a change of the system: transferring power and initiative to society and aligning political action with the principles of democracy, ­which were so well expressed in the preamble to the UNESCO Constitution­ and not to the exigencies of the markets, whether local or global.

In this way we can bring about the urgently-needed refoundation of a strong U.N. with the moral authority enjoyed only by those institutions that are able to bring together all of the countries of the world without exception or exclusion.

The hegemonic impulses to govern the world through a plutocratic group of seven, eight or 20 countries must give way to multilateral cooperation in response to the global outcry that is about to make itself heard.

I have written before how both the new General Assembly and the Security Councils (a Council for Socioeconomic Security and a Council for Environmental Security would be added to the current Security Council) could be restructured in order to provide adequate international structures, especially when global governance requires it.

After the intolerable and immoral intervention in Iraq, global civil power should now firmly oppose such adventurism, particularly that which would have Iran as its target, both for geostrategic reasons (spurred on by Israel) and for its fabulous oil reserves.

The only solution to the problems potentially posed by Iran, or Yemen or Syria – and this would have been true with Libya as well­ – is mediation by the United Nations as the only interlocutor that has the backing of the entire world.

Have we considered the horrific number of casualties caused by the intervention in Iraq? Have we considered the five million displaced and the thousands and thousands killed or maimed? Have we examined who is exploiting Iraq’s oil fields today? The people of the world will no longer tolerate atrocities of this nature.

It is apparent that the Republicans in the U.S., who continue to profoundly influence the country’s political direction, are redoubling their efforts, which began in the 1980s, to demolish the U.N. They abandoned UNESCO in 1984, then they reconciled in order to invade Iraq.

Now they are trying to paralyse it again by not paying their dues because the organisation decided to allow the admission of the Palestinian State  acting on the autonomy conferred upon it by the General Conference.

They are stubbornly trying to activate the G20, the G8 and the G2 at the same time as they are turning their backs on multilateral cooperation. But these will be the death throes of a system that is in complete collapse.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Federico Mayor Zaragoza, ex-director general of UNESCO, is president of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace.

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