I would have liked to participate in these preparatory activities for the 2nd World March for Peace and Nonviolence…
Peace and Nonviolence are the most important things we have to do. The moment we achieve this transition… from force to speech, from a culture of war to a culture of peace, through understanding, comprehension, listening and conciliation. Not only will we have provided the greatest well-being for humanity as a whole, but we will also have the means, the economic resources that we do not have today, precisely because everything goes towards the traditional security of borders and territories. This is another thing we will have to change, a new concept of security. We are not only interested in the security of territories maintained by armies and borders. And for the people who live in those territories, who is in charge of food security, health security? Who is in charge of ensuring that we all have access to quality healthcare services, environmental services and education? … This is absolutely fundamental.
That is why I would like to sincerely congratulate Rafael de la Rubia and all those who collaborate with him in this great initiative that has the support of World without Wars, the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament, the Culture of Peace Foundation and FundiPau, and other institutions all of them thinking that yes, a transition from “if you want peace you should prepare for war” to “if you want peace, prepare the words, prepare the meeting, prepare the conversation, dialogue, prepare conciliation, prepare the alliance” is fundamental.
We must bear in mind that these sessions, which are to be held in the Congress of Deputies and the Madrid City Council, deal with very important issues. One of them is, as I have already mentioned, the nuclear threat. We have to end it once and for all and favour everything that the United Nations is doing to finally break the hegemonic temptation of the Republican Party of the United States. Because today in reality those who maintain this situation, those who have avoided the total elimination of nuclear warheads is the Republican Party of the United States. In October 1986 in Reykjavik, at the meeting between President Reagan and the then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the total elimination of nuclear weapons was precisely what was proposed. Why do we have to live with this sword of Damocles? Why? And then it was once again, once again, President Reagan, representative of the Republican Party of the United States, who prevented the elimination from being total.
Therefore, what we now have to do is to do this, to know what has happened, to know what President Eisenhower was already thinking, when on January 20, 1961, in the transmission of power to the new president, the magnificent President John F. Kennedy, he said, “You are now the most powerful man on earth as a result of the United States Military-Industrial Complex. And now we have to realise that this preponderance must be exercised differently, with a different concept of security.”
As I said before, it is more necessary than ever for there to be a governance that is ultimately in the hands of all countries, a democratic multilateralism. A radical change in our current conception of global governance through these plutocratic entities created by President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher is fundamental. At a time when everyone was crying out for peace in the 1980s. Everyone cried out for peace. We had the end of the Soviet Empire with the symbol of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that immense number of countries, of citizens, of subjugated cultures that now has become a community of independent states. And we had President Nelson Mandela who in a few months was able to overcome what represented the most abominable form of domination and racism that was racial apartheid in South Africa.
At that time, once again, these hegemonic ambitions caused the United Nations to be marginalized and replaced by six countries, at the beginning there were six countries, only six rich countries! Plutocracy instead of democracy! It was nonsense! But how could it be accepted that 6, then 7 then 8, then 20 countries? But how can it be accepted that 20 countries are the ones to take the reins of the world, in which there are 195 countries I believe, at present recognized by the United Nations. This can’t be so. Here we have one of the great current aims, one of the great objectives of this World March for Peace and Nonviolence must be the “Refounding of the United Nations”.
It’s all very well studied. Don’t think we’re improvising. A General Assembly has already been proposed that responds to the lucid and far-sighted first sentence of the United Nations Charter: “We the peoples determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” This is what we must do now, we the peoples must ensure peace and take care for future generations and maintain the quality of the habitability of the earth. And that security should not only be a security, as I said before, of borders and territories, it should be of food and health… This is another conception of security. All this with a multilateral system in which the General Assembly then reflects “we the peoples…” and has 50% of representatives of states and 50% of representatives of civil society institutions. To the Security Council should be added an Environmental Security Council and a Socioeconomic Security Council. The great failure of ECOSOC is that it begins with “eco”, from economy, and it never ends with the social aspect. No, it must be the other way around. I say this because of experience in the United Nations system.
I will end by saying that I would have liked to participate very much, both in the Congress and in the City Council because I believe that this 2nd March can be a contribution to Peace and Nonviolence in our world.
Federico Mayor Zaragoza
17th November 2017
