The Chaos of War: Time for the UN to End it!

The agony of war has darkened too much of our lives. Over and over again I saw the trauma of trench warfare in World War I from my artillery officer father’s stories of shells lighting the skies, the rat-a-tat of incessant machine guns, mud, misery, fear, poison gas choking the lungs. I have stood on the Mamayev Hill in Stalingrad, the final locus of the 200-day epic siege in World War II, mourning the million on both Soviet and German sides slaughtered for conquest or survival. I have wept at ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the stories of hibakusha still suffering from the barbarity of nuclear bombing in August 1945. “War is hell,” General Sherman said in 1879. “War is insanity,” echoed Maireed Corrigan Maguire in 1988.

War is the issue of our day. A year ago, as most Member States of the United Nations opposed war on Iraq, 80 million people marched, all over the world, protesting the looming attack, but also in growing numbers calling war itself in question. As the Iraq story unfolds, their ranks swell, through scepticism about alleged reasons and alarming consequences. More people think now is the time to say “No more war!”

It is an outrage that the 20th century saw more people killed in wars than all previously recorded time had. An outrage that now the vast majority of those killed in war are civilians, indeed, women and children. Technology, driven by industry and military ambition, invents ever more lethal, inhumane weapons: mustard gas, aerial warfare, tanks, and the machine gun in World War I; terror firebombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, and the nuclear horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II; the glut of small arms that even child soldiers can use, the scorched earth technique in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq where depleted uranium munitions ensure death-dealing toxicity for all time, land mines and cluster bombs killing and maiming long after “peace” comes, and the looming nightmare of Star Wars.

There is no discrimination of non-combatants or mercy for them as the historic “rules” of war dictate, no proportionality in means used. “Just war” -- if it ever existed – has given way to barbaric Crusade. Now is the time to turn back, to heed Eleanor Roosevelt’s challenge: “You must do the thing you think you can not do.”

The global community is increasingly concerned about the escalation of use of force and about the legitimization of war. States’ insistence that they must have substantial military forces and arsenals of weapons sustains the notion that war is legitimate, renowned peace researcher Anatol Rapoport notes. The world is in grave peril from the continued retention and development of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear weapons states renege on the unequivocal commitment they made, at the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference in 2000, to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals. The risk of nuclear catastrophe by accident or intent – omnicide – hangs over us all. And bans on chemical and biological weapons remain unenforced.

We also are at a dangerous crossroads. “Self-defence” under Article 51 of the UN Charter was redefined to legitimize war on Afghanistan. Subsequently unilateral assertions of a right to pre-emptive/preventive attack have been made. Thereby an increased potential for escalating war has been created. The stage is set for states to use such policies to legitimize military interventions. Pre-emptive aggression could be our future. Now is the time for us, finally, to heed the warning in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto half a century ago: “Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?”

Moreover, our warring madness, with its near trillion dollar annual weapons trade, costs us care for Earth and for human needs – food, shelter, education, health. It is an outrage that the crises of Earth – its ecosystems, air, water, lands, forests, climate change -- the poverty gap, the AIDS pandemic cry out to be addressed, but resources pour instead into war and militarism. These deadly twins leave long-term disastrous environmental, health, and social consequences. As recent studies show, the military are the single largest polluter. Destroying the environment has even been a deliberate tactic – agent Orange defoliating Viet Nam – despite the convention against modification of the environment in conflict. And war unravels the social fabric.

With all these harms, war must be rejected as a legitimate instrument to resolve disputes. Efforts of citizens and of UN Member States could and should, through the UN, be directed towards delegitimizing the cause of such suffering and destruction.

The seeds for delegitimizing war have been planted through the UN Charter and a half century of UN treaties, conventions, covenants, conference action plan commitments, and UN General Assembly resolutions, which set State obligations that, if implemented, could give substance to the idea.

• The United Nations was founded on the very determination to prevent the scourge of war, as the UN Charter says, and Chapter VI provides for means to do so.
  
• The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century, a UN document (A/54/98) emerging from a civil society conference of 10,000 people of all ages from 100 countries, prefigures the abolition of war in its call for education to that end.
  
• The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peoples to Peace asserts that peace is a right of all peoples. (Resolution 39/12 Nov. 1984)
  
• The 1985 Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women to the Year 2000 includes global commitment to recognize that peace depends on, amongst other things, the prevention of the use or threat of use of force, aggression, [or] military occupation.

How do we, the Canadian Voice of Women Project for the Delegitimization of War, think the UN Commission on the Status of Women can help? We would emphasize the unique opportunity available in hammering out peace accords to include formal provisions for ending war and armed conflict that would oblige States parties to build and maintain the necessary infrastructure for non-violent conflict resolution. We urge that the value of non-violence be embedded in such peace accords, and that obligatory formal arrangements for developing and maintaining non-violent systems of security, and for ensuring accessible peace and human rights education be added. We need institutions and capacity to sustain peace!

The Commission on the Status of Women should, we have urged, refer in all its statements and position papers to the goal of preventing the scourge of war and endorse the idea of integrating peace and human rights education into all systems of education as a vital means to that end. The CSW should also recommend to the Secretary General that the mandate of the new Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change include institutional provisions to delegitimize war and provide for further development of non-violent governmental and civilian options. It should, in addition, recommend that the panel redefine “security.” We see as mistaken the notion of security as “military security” and the positing of “human security” to validate “humanitarian” intervention and legitimize violent military intervention. Against these false notions, we reiterate the concept of true security, encompassing the idea that the common enemy is the war system itself, a concept the Canadian Voice of Women presented to the NGO Forum in Nairobi in 1985. The purpose of the UN Charter and the protective UN treaties and conventions is better reflected in Olaf Palme’s concept of common security -- peace, social justice, and environmental protection. For progress towards true security, we urge the CSW to call for the implementing of the long-standing commitment to reallocate the nearly $1 trillion global military budget. UN Member States must honour commitments made to transfer a peace dividend for common security.

Lastly, we urge the CSW to call for the strengthening of Chapter VI of the UN Charter, and to put the case that Chapter VII, which condones conditional legitimization of war, must be recognized as contravening the purpose of the Charter itself.

Humankind has a choice to make: non-violent community, or the chaos of war and annihilation. War is misconceived as a means of positive change: Evil cannot overcome evil, only good can. War is obsolete, a failed human institution. We believe, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that “we have the capability, if we are determined, to end war.” In abandoning other failed human institutions such as absolute monarchy and slavery, humankind has demonstrated our capacity for reason, justice, and humanity. The power of truth and love, which undergirds and nurtures life, can join us together and do far more than we can imagine. Mobilizing the collective good will to achieve reform and render war illegitimate is the task before us.

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