L’Humanité des débats – COLLECTIVE TEXT
In India, “with more than 350,000 new cases a day and death around every corner, patients and families are caught in a race against time, begging for oxygen and medicine in front of overcrowded hospitals. In the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration, at least 453 migrants have died since 1 January.
Many voices speak of shame at the tragedy of drowned migrants who have disappeared without States deploying the necessary means to save them in accordance with the basic principles of international maritime law. According to UNICEF, “more than 10 million children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, north-eastern Nigeria, the central Sahel, South Sudan and Yemen will be acutely malnourished by 2021”. For the UN World Food Programme, “the continuing drought in Madagascar is pushing hundreds of thousands of people to the brink of starvation”.
Yet there is no shortage of resources. Thus, Le Monde of 15 April reported the visit of the French Foreign Minister to India as being “intimately linked to French economic interests. In particular, the possible sale of additional Rafale aircraft, of which India has already purchased 36 from Dassault Aviation in 2016 for nearly 8 billion euros. Since 2018, new tenders have been launched with potentially more than 150 aircraft at stake. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has estimated that global military spending will amount to nearly €1,645 billion in 2020, an increase of 2.6% over 2019.
France has delivered beds and breathing apparatus to India, a bit of human solidarity. But we are living in moments of shame. While millions of people are suffering from the pandemic without the necessary medical means, experiencing unemployment and precariousness, suffering from hunger, while others are drowning while fleeing wars and misery, the amount of world military expenditure has reached an amount never known in the history of humanity. People are suffering and weapons are being distributed to them. What a shame!
The reduction of military expenditure is a necessity. Redirecting them towards useful investments in health, education, research, culture, climate and a sustainable economy would create jobs in France and in the world.
If the nine states with nuclear weapons stopped their programmes, more than 820 billion euros could be redirected over the next 15 years towards meeting human needs. This would be in line with the UN Charter, which stipulates (Article 26) that states should “promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources”, but also with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Tian), which entered into force on 22 January 2021. For its future, humanity has no other path than peace.
Signatories : Roland NIVET and Edith BOULANGER (National co-spokespersons of the Mouvement de la Paix) ; Jean ZIEGLER (advisor to the United Nations Human Rights Council), Pradip BISWAS (vice-president of the Federation of Bank Employees of India), Alain ROUY (secretary of the AIEP – International Association of Peace Educators), Véronique MARTIN (CGT Confederal Secretary), Lilian HALLS-FRENCH (Co-president of the EuroMed Feminist Initiative IFE-EFI), Michèle DECASTER (afaspa activist), Jim ANDERSON (Peace Action), Christian REECHT (member of the Catholic Worker Action)
Tribune publiée en français dans l’Humanité le 14 mai 2021
