Statement on the 1991 Persian Gulf War

Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait. The aim of the invasion was not to free Kuwait from a corrupt feudal regime, still less to free the Palestinians. It was simply to serve Saddam Hussein's strategic interests. Any claims which Iraq has -- for instance, access to the sea -- should have been pursued by non-military means.

We also call for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the region. It is simply a masquerade that governments, which have failed to reduce their economies' dependence on oil, now purport to be pursuing some noble cause. Those who for decades have condoned, or even supported, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its bombing of Lebanon, cannot fool anybody that their troops can help bring justice to this region.

War is waged by governments and suffered by people. The victims of war are not those in power or those who profit from the sale of arms. They are the families bombed in their homes, the soldiers attacked in their dug-outs, their loved ones left to live without them. Who knows if soon these victims might include those gased by chemical or irradiated by nuclear weapons. WRI takes the side of all the victims of war: the soldiers lured or forced into the armies, the Iraqi, Israeli, Kuwaiti and Saudi populations, the Palestinians living under the curfew, Arab immigrants in North America and Europe faced with hatred and discrimination.

The idea that the United Nations has sanctioned the massive bombardment of Iraq is a defeat for everyone who has hoped that the UN could be a cornerstone for a peaceful world order. This episode shows the UN not as representing the "world community" but as a creature of governments: governments which violate human rights, governments which can be bribed or bullied, governments which make deals to serve their own interests.

It would be naive to expect governments to be consistent in their recognition of human rights or international standards: they are invariably selective about which abuses they take up and which they ignore. This war, however, shows us double standards being applied on a grand scale. Governments, which have ignored the Geneva Conventions as they apply in the territories occupied by Israel or in the Baltic, now invoke them in their propaganda war. Governments which courted Saddam Hussein -- which armed Iraq, which condoned the invasion of Iran, which were untroubled by chemical attacks on Kurds or Iranians -- now seek to destroy him and his country. A country as undemocratic as Syria is suddenly transformed from being a terrorist state to being a favoured ally of the US, a position President Assad can occupy only by going against the overwhelming feeling of his subjects. The ground is already being laid for post-war power struggles in the region.

Peace has to be based on justice and respect for human rights. Human rights have been denied throughout the region, from the democratic right to oppose governments to the rights to self-determination of the Palestinians, Kurds and numerous ethnic minorities and to opposition movements. WRI supports the right of all oppressed groups to shape their own future.

The effects of this war and the preparations for it are not confined to the Middle East region. It provided the Soviet military with the opportunity to send in troops to repress the freedom movements in the Baltic. Unembarrassed by international protest, the Chinese government sends nonviolent advocates of democratisation to prison. In the home countries of the Western Allied forces too, war has an impact on social life. Censorship and disinformation are part of the propaganda war. Petty restrictions and expanded police powers acclimatise people to the threat of a new wave of sub-State terrorism. Racial hostility mounts, as anti-Arab or anti-Muslim feeling grows in the Western world and immigration policies are tightened. The poison of racism, endemic in these societies, is now inflamed by war threatening the security of all Arabs and Muslims, no matter what their beliefs.

This war will not put an end to tensions or conflicts; it will create and fuel further hostilities, not just in the Middle East but extending throughout the world. It is not a war to end wars; but a war which will start more wars. Whatever its immediate outcome, in the final analysis its costs will be disastrous. We recall the words of Mahatma Gandhi: "I object to violence because when it does good, the good it does is only temporary -- the evil it does is permanent."

* WRI supports all those who refuse to participate in war and who nonviolently obstruct the war machines.

* WRI calls for the extension of noncooperation with the war to economic life: refusal of war-related contracts, refusal of war taxes, consumer boycotts of companies producing military equipment.