Newsletter 113 : End of 2021 - Early 2022

Newsletter 113 : End of 2021 - Early 2022
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Newsletter n° 113

End of 2021 – Early 2022

At the end of 2021, we lost a friend, so precious... truly unique.

Desmond Tutu, born in South Africa in 1931, passed in Cape Town, the day after Christmas 2021.

For us, and many others, he was « The Arch », simply. Our beloved Arch. Like an arch... The Arch : for Archbishop, but you would never think of him as a religious dignitary. All you saw was the man, radiating with integrity, faith, vital joy, strength.

He was our beacon, our primary engine too.

Seven peace campaigns we led, from 1995 to 2019, in Bosnia, Algeria, Israel-Palestine, he was always ahead, among the very first to support, with his signature, his reputation. When they would see his name, many others would follow suit, without a doubt.

He and the Dalai Lama, the Irish Nobel Mairead Maguire, and her "twin" Betty Williams.

The Peace People, the Peace laureates. Those whose voice was heard, and respected, right from our first campaign, The Zenica-Sarajevo Call, co-signed by Martin Luther King's widow, Coretta Scott King, with Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu of course, Presidents Gorbachev, de Klerk, Perez Esquivel, Arafat, PM Rabin just before his murder...

http://www.peacelines.org/bosnia-1993-1996-c24711616

Ten years later, there was The Nobel Call against terror and for common sense, supported by eleven Nobel peace laureates, and amazing personalities : astronauts Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14, he walked on the moon), Russelll Schweickart (Apollo 9), Jean-François Clervoy and Umberto Guidoni (European astronauts both of them), along with Loïc Leferme, the No Limit apnoea recordman, the bluesman John Mayall, Maud Fontenoy (who rowed across oceans), the actress Isabelle Adjani...

http://www.peacelines.org/israel-palestine-2000-2014-c24800090

Then and thus, the mobilization for peace had its full meaning, its full measure.

But horror would only grow, at the hinge of milleniums.

http://www.peacelines.org/bosnia-1993-1996-c24711616

Have you forgotten the NATO bombings of Belgrade, a European capital, 900 miles from Paris, in 1999 ?

On April 21 and 22, 1999, there was a gathering of seven Nobel Peace laureates in Rome : Presidents Gorbachev, de Klerk, Peres; Betty Williams, David Trimble (Irish Prime Minister in 2001), Joseph Rotblat, and Rigoberta Menchu were there, to stand up against the western military intervention in Serbia. The media blocked out their initiative. In Italy as in France, and elsewhere. The drums of war only spoke.

In October 2000, there was the Palestinian uprising, known as the Second Intifada. The Holy Land was on fire again. Our third campaign gathered 31 Nobel laureates, 4 of them Peace laureates. The Dalai Lama again, François Jacob, Jean-Marie Lehn, Christian de Duve, and the Germans Klaus von Klitzing, Robert Huber, Günter Blobel, among scientists…

http://www.peacelines.org/israel-palestine-2000-2014-c24800090

In twenty years, we have organized five campaigns with the Nobel laureates, for peace between Jews and Arabs. The main one, Open the Doors !, from 2014 to 2019, with 77 laureates and up to 414 Members of the European Parliament.

Since 2020 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become inaudible, due to the unprecedented covid world crisis, and the evolution in depth of relations between nations in the Middle East, and in the midst of the Arab world - thanks to the Abraham Agreements/ The American war in Irak, followed by the civil war in Syria (and all the foreign powers involved in it), the birth of the Islamic State, Turkish and Iranian expansionism, have moved the lines, to this day. The world post-2020 is not what it was at the beginning of this century. You can't understand what's unfolding in 2022 if you don't think of the three previous decades - from 1992, the violent dislocation of ex-Yugoslavia, until now, this slow dislocation of Ukraine.

The Second Palestinian Intifada lasted five years, from the end of 2000 until early 2005. Three thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis paid with their lives for it. During this interval, though, two worldwide disasters happened.
- On September 11, 2001, the passengers' planes thrust by the Al Qaeda kamikazes at New York and Washington, with three thousand victims. Soon after, the American reaction, to invade and occupy Afghanistan, until 2021. Let us recall that Al Qaeda was born in 1988, as a development of the American vengeance against the Soviets, for their defeat in Viet-Nam, in Afghanistan (the 1979-1989 war), and it morphed into military proxy confrontation in Afghanistan from 1996 onwards, boosted by a radical reaction to the American military settlement in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, in 1990.
- On March 20, 2003, the Americans invaded the whole of Irak, for the sake of "Iraki Freedom', and occupied it with their troops for nine years, until 2011, leading to the birth of the Islamic State in 2006. About five thousand Americans were killed in those years, compared to 100,000 to one million Irakis, depending how you count. See Michhael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, about the relation between thse two disasters, 2001 and 2003.
http://www.peacelines.org/israel-palestine-2000-2014-c24800090

Have you forgotten the bombings of Baghdad, in 2003 ?

The Islamic State, whose leaders got together in prisoners' camps, has since spread to Somalia, Mali, Yemen, Nigeria... In 2007, the last djihadis' group in Algeria swore allegiance to Al Qaeda, and became Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, AQIM...

The civil war in Algeria, led by radical Islamic groups, in ten years, from 1991 to 2002, left over 150,000 dead in its wake.

From warring Bosnia in the early nineties, a number of jihadi fighters had moved to Algeria, in the mid-nineties.

Not to forget : Osama Ben Laden was present in Bosnia, in 1994.

As we can see, the threads are all entangled, from Afghanistan in the eighties until now, but in the center of the web, two "actors" are tragically complementary of each other: the United States and the jihadis' galaxy.

Could this have stopped in 2011, with the end of the American war in Irak ?

By the end of 2011, the United States officially left Irak, but in the meantime they had provided the logistics of another military intevrention, led by the French and the English, this time against the Libyan Jamahiriya.

Amazing Libyan Jamahirya of the Gaddafi régime, which reached the 53rd position with the Human Development Index in 2010 - the first country in Africa on an economic and human ground, far before Algeria (ranking 84), Egypt (101), South Africa (110), Morocco (114), Nigeria (142), Senegal (144), Mali (160)... but also before Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Russia (65), Ukraine (60), Iran, Brazil, China, India !

- https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr_2010_fr_complete_reprint.pdf

Why did they destroy Libya in 2011 ?

In 2018, Libya had regressed to the 110th position as the Human Development Index established, in between Uzbekistan and Indonesia, on the same level as South Africa, Viet-Nam, Palestine, Irak.

http://www.peacelines.org/open-the-doors-campaign-2015-2019-c25456496

Have you forgotten the French bombings of Tripoli, some twelve hundred miles from Paris ?

In the Western media all we have seen for some time is pictures of ruins in Ukraine.

Does that mean there would be good bombings, and bad ones ?

The good ones, Belgrade in 1999, Baghdad in 2003, Tripoli in 2011.

Bad ones, Marioupol, in 2022.

NO WAY. Any act that deliberately damages the physical integrity, the life of human beings, whether it is committed by a kamikaze terrorist or a bomber pilot is, in its intention and essence, criminal.

The speeches to justify it, at best are pathetic, at worst despicable, shameful.

Were they good rebels in Libya, bad ones in Ukraine (who called the Russians for help) ? Good targets in Baghdad, Belgrade, bad ones in Lviv or Kharkiv ?

The blood dripping from all these stretchers, is it from a group that's different from all the others ?

By the end of 2011, shortly after the attacks on Manhattan and Washington, Nobel Peace laureates got together in Oslo, their capital, to deliver a statement about the American intervention. They were a handful to stress Einstein's ultimate philosophy: "Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be reached through comprehension." Among them, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Perez Esquivel.

Strange as it is, you may search for their declaration today through the net, you will not find it - just as you will have a hard time finding any trace of the seven Peace Nobel laureates in Rome in 1999.

The only article that can be found - https://www.dawn.com/news/9810/us-warned-against-attacking-other-states-nobel-laureates-deplore-afghan-war - mentions Desmond Tutu's warning :

"Might is not right."

« If it is utterly reprehensible that innocent civilians were targeted in New York and Washington, how could we possibly say it doesn’t apply elsewhere in the world? »

Desmond Tutu's position, however, was not shared by Elie Wiesel and others. For Wiesel, you had "first to eradicate terrorism, then organize an international conference to analyze its causes."

Shoot first, talk later ?

As a non-governmental, humanitarian organization, whose pillars are absolute non-violence and non-judgment, confronted since 1993 to conflicts of total violence, civil wars in Bosnia and Algerie, warfare about territory and creeds in Israel-Palestine, we have been witnesses, in Middle Bosnia and later, of the necessity (for the United Nations Protection Force, in Bosnia) to shoot fast, and hold their fire, as happened in Algeria (for the National Army of the People, protecting the country and its population from the threat of Islamic totalitarianism)/

One can still dream of a world in which the Americans would not have financed the roots of jihad in Afghanistan in the eighties... in which they would not have invaded Irak in 1990 and 2003, Afghanistan in 2001... in which they would not have supported the Anglo-French endeavour to destroy Libya in 2011... In the three cases, with the dreadful consequences that we know.

We chose not to go to Irak in the years 2003-2010.

Not to go to Afghanistan, betwwen 2001 and 2021.

Nor to go to Libya between 2011 and now.

In 1999-2000, we did not go to Serbia either.

Our only trip to Kosovo was a failure : the disaster had happened yet. The "ethnical cleansing" of Kosovo Serbs had already taken place. In Prishtina, the capital, out of some 40,000 Serbs, all you had left were two hundred at most, under the heavy protection of UN blue helmets.

Humanitarian activists as we are, we face the same limits as those who combat fire. When the blaze and the winds are too intense, men will withdraw.

From its creation, in the midst of the Bosnian conflict, our organization had the common sense to set clear, concrete geographical limits to our capacity for action. Our criterium was how much a van tank could hold. In war zones, no service stations, we had to take jerrycans of fuel to get back. Still, there is a limit as to how many filled jerrycans a van can hold.

By the end of the war in Bosnia, early 1996, some asked us whether we'd go to Chechnya next. Our answer then : Sarajevo is 1,100 miles from Paris. Grozny is double that. We shall not go to Grozny.

Our only exception to this logical, logistical rule, remains Israel-Palestine, where you have to go by plane. Long, we focused on this hinge between continents, until we had to realize that we were obsessed by the hinge, whereas the whole frame was burning: Irak, Syria, Libya.

Eventually, from 2012-2015-2016 (the murderous attacks in Toulouse, Paris, Nice, Brussels), we had to open our eyes before our doors : the horror had now reached our threshold.

The well-named mass media may hammer it all day, we shall not go to Kharkiv, which is 2,500 miles from us, when you drive. Just like we did not go to Grozny.

Claude Lanzmann, the unforgettable film director of Shoah, did warn us all against the temptation to play the world's gendarmes [Contre la gendarmerie planétaire, Marianne, n°731, 23 avril 2011]. Gendarmes or the world's firemen : the dilemma is the same. If the powers that be find their financial interest in fueling a war betwwen giants that once was "cold" at the expense of the little peoples of Ukraine and other Eastern regions, it is not our duty to get caught into such binary, manichean madness, that strangles any freedom of expression. If we have one duty, it is to care about the flames spreading through our cities, before it gets too late.