This is a follow-up to PressInfo 148 and 149.
Militarisation versus de-militarisation
Weapons and ammunition have poured into the Middle East conflict for decades. Those who have earned a profit on the arms exports have argued that it contributed to some kind of balance and to “security” and “stability”.
What if we finally used the Middle East tragedy to stop this kind of (self)deception?
What if a huge peace-keeping mission had been flown in long ago and, in a no-nonsense manner, had disarmed all sides, set up a security regime together with them and created a Zone of Peace?
What if we finally began to look at weapons and other violent means as a major problem (together with the deep-rooted conflicts, of course)? True, we may despair when we see people use weapons and kill each other. But what if we also condemned those private and state interests that profited by developing, producing and exporting those weapons?
What if we condemned the weapons exporting countries and corporations who hypocritically say: “oh, you guys were not supposed to use the weapons you paid us through the nose for! You must stop the violence before we deal with you!”
What if the media raised questions such as
these: Do the U.S. and other countries have a right to
give Israel weapons and tell it not use them? Is the
United States credible in arguing against military action
when it is history’s largest producer and consumer of
weapons and has a historically unique record of wars,
interventions, occupations, covert actions and other
military-supported policies?
Can the U.S. credibly tell Israel not to fight what it
calls terror when it has learnt the trick and the
rhetoric from the U.S. itself since September 11?
Does the United States have any moral right to condemn
Palestinian terrorism when the U.S. itself bases a
considerable part of its global policies on practising
state-terrorism?
What if…then perhaps
What if, in short, we began to address “local” conflicts as an almost unavoidable consequence of all the short-sighted and brutal policies conducted by the international community in the past, in this case from 1948?
What if we dared to draw the conclusion that violence, whether committed by George W. Bush, bin Laden, Sharon or the Palestinians, grows out of the interplay between one side’s arrogance of power and the other’s despair and powerlessness?
What if citizens began to demand that some principles were applied equally? If one compares what Slobodan Milosevic was presumably responsible for in Kosovo up to his indictment in 1999 with what Ariel Sharon is presumably responsible for in the last twenty or so years, it is not self-evident why the former is in the Hague and the latter is called “a man of peace” by the most powerful leader (in military, not intellectual or moral terms) in the West.
What if we dared say aloud that the use of violence is always a moral and intellectual defeat? That it is neither heroism nor statesmanship, but their very negation? To those who know nothing about conflict, mediation and peace, violence is a solution. The millions who know it is not are the ordinary, innocent and peace-loving citizens who pay the price in the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.
If at least some of these questions were discussed and researched more, there might be less violence around. We would see no military occupation by tanks and bulldozers, no state or small group terror and no suicide bombers. For a professional conflict expert, for a peace worker, these are quite natural questions to ask and explore.
My humble conclusion is that as long as there is so much conflict “illiteracy”, so little intellectual interest and professional knowledge among power elites, there will be violence.
When we want to reduce violence in traffic, we require people to read theory books, study the traffic rules, practise behind the wheel and then pass a test; only then can they get a driving license. We also build safer roads and cars. Not so in the international political traffic! Here people drive fast with no basic concepts, knowledge, practical experience or licenses concerning conflicts; and the biggest and fastest vehicles get their own way…
It’s obvious that the old intellectual maps are outdated, the old roads blocked. The tragedy in the Middle East is not about the Middle East only. It is about raw power politics disguised as “peace”-making, conflict-management and “security.” It happens in the wake of ten years of conflict-mismanagement in the Balkans, Somalia, Afghanistan and tens of other conflict spots where professed noble motives have been consistently trampled by interests such as oil, weapons-testing, diamonds, greed, economic profits, sheer demonstration of male power, establishment of military bases, privatisation and NATO expansion. In none of these terrible hot spots did governments altruistically try to help local conflicting parties live peacefully together.
The Middle East should be the final proof of the peace-making fraud made by the international so-called community, the United States in particular. Since 1989 we have witnessed only contempt of international law and human rights. We have witnessed how the potentially most relevant and internationally democratic organisation of all, the United Nations, has been sidelined and subdued by the United States, again in particular.
If some high-level leader had the courage to recognise and say something like this, new roads to global peace may be opened that would be a bit more worthy of Western leaders who profess to be both educated and civilised.
