19th of February 2003

PRESS COMMUNIQUE

“WAR CAN NO LONGER BE AN INSTRUMENT OF NATIONAL POLITICS”

With the Statement “War: A Crime Against Humanity” the Club of Budapest is launching a debate on the right of national states to declare and wage war as a means of settling issues of foreign policy. “Times are over when questions of war and peace could be decided in the context of international power politics,” says Ervin Laszlo, President of the Club of Budapest, a global think-and-action tank with a hundred members including the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Archbishop Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Peter Ustinov and others. “Right cannot be decided by might, in the international field any more than in the personal domain. In an interdependent global community every war between nations is fundamentally a civil war.” Terrorists and potential aggressors must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them. Warfare must be replaced by dialogue leading to mutual understanding as a basis of multilateral cooperation in regard to relations among nations in the political as well as in the economic and the ecological spheres.

According to the Club of Budapest, the project of creating a structure of global cooperation beyond the veto-power and special status of individual states is best pursued in the framework of a “World Futures Council” as proposed among others by Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacob von Uexkuell. The Council is to be constituted of one hundred independent individuals of high integrity who place the shared human interest above any parochial national or cultural interest. The Club of Budapest takes an active part in the creation of such a Council and will promote its work with special attention to questions of civil and political values and perceptions, and the humanism and sustainability of the policies motivated by them.

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The following Statement is signed by Members of the Club of Budapest inter alia Sir Peter Ustinov, Paolo Coelho, Pir Inayat-Vilayat Khan, Zubin Mehta, Betty Williams, Hans Küng, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, Jane Goodall, Peter Russell, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and Lady Fiona Montagu.

WAR: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

The time has come for the world community to recognize that war, rather than an instrument for the elimination of terrorists and aggressors, is a crime against humanity. It is itself an act of aggression that threatens human life, and the environment on which human life vitally depends.

No other species kills massively its own kind: war is a uniquely human phenomenon. Such killing was never justified, but it had a marginal warrant at a time when war was waged among neighboring groups for the acquisition of territory with natural and human resources and could be limited to the territories and the warriors of the protagonists. At a time when resources are not limited to defined territories and hostilities cannot be contained, war is neither politically nor economically justified. Given that modern warfare kills innocent civilians, inflicts serious damage on the life-supporting environment, and may escalate to a global conflagration, waging war needs to be declared a crime against humanity. No nation-state should have the legitimate right to wage war against any other nation-state.

The stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction is not a warrant for waging war. Weapons of mass destruction whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional are a threat to human life and habitat by whoever possesses them. They are not tolerable in the hands of any state, whether it is large or small, rich or poor, and headed by a dictator or by an elected politician. Such weapons need to be eliminated from the arsenals of every state, a task that is not the self-declared prerogative of any government but the responsibility of the global community of all peoples and states. There will be no lasting peace on earth until all weapons of mass destruction are destroyed, their production and stockpiling proscribed, and strategies calling for their use replaced by strategies of dialogue, negotiation and, if necessary, internationally agreed economic and political sanctions.

Attempting to eliminate weapons of mass destruction with weapons of mass destruction is to fight violence with violence on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a policy that can end up making everyone blind and toothless. Aggressors and terrorists must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them.

http://www.planetaryvision.net/

http://www.club-of-budapest.org/start.htm

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"The Club of Budapest is an informal association of creative people in diverse fields of art, literature, and the spiritual domains of culture. It is dedicated to the proposition that only by changing ourselves we can change the world - and that to change ourselves we need the kind of insight and perception that art, literature, and the domains of the spirit can best provide. The members of the Club of Budapest use their artistic creativity and spiritual insight to enhance awareness of global problems and human opportunities. They communicate their insights in word and image, in sound and motion, and in the myriad new media and technologies. They are recognized world leaders in their fields of literary, artistic, or spiritual activity; their names are assurance of insight, and their membership in the club a testimony of their dedication to our common future."

--Ervin Laszlo

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