Speakers on the second day of Sant’Egidio’s “Unarmed and Disarming Peace” meeting in Assisi, and at Sunday’s opening session, carried its themes into Africa, Asia and the economics of war.
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, Archbishop of Kinshasa, rejected the maxim that preparing for war secures peace. “Whoever prepares for war ends up waging it, and it is always the poor who pay,” he said. In eastern Congo, he said, “the coltan, the cassiterite, the gold of our hills feed the war instead of feeding our children,” amid “an external injustice” of foreign interests competing for the country’s resources. He also warned: “A dialogue that excludes those with whom one is at war is not a dialogue: it is a monologue.”
Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare described an economy in which “war becomes an indispensable investment” and “catastrophe becomes a market,” with democracies pushed to become “the principal shareholders of the war market.” India’s Sudheendra Kulkarni, drawing on Gandhi, said, “The force of violence cannot be countered and defeated with a counter-force of violence.”
France’s Grand Rabbi Haïm Korsia said, “One must never confuse peace with weakness,” urging the faithful to “convert our power into the capacity to build.” Indonesia’s Minister of Religious Affairs and Grand Imam of Istiqlal Mosque, Nasaruddin Umar, said, “To have peace on earth, we must make peace with the earth.... We have something much stronger: the moral conscience of humanity.”
In a forum titled “The World Is Repaired Together,” a Shia cleric from Najaf and a Sunni preacher from Baghdad spoke side by side. Jawad Al-Khoei, secretary-general of the Al-Khoei Institute in Najaf, said that Iraq’s experience of terrorism and sectarian war taught that “the protection of society is not achieved by protecting a single group, but by protecting its entire human fabric.” The same machine, he said, runs in East and West, “converting anxiety over complex, real problems into fear of another group, and reducing the world to a simple picture of ‘us’ and ‘them’"; the extremists on each side are not interested in confronting one another, “and it always ends in shrinking the space for the moderate forces within their own country.” Abdulwahhab al-Samarrai, of Iraq’s Fiqh Council and preacher at Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa mosque, condemned double standards, insisting that suffering must not be “great in one place and marginal in another because of differences of race, language or color,” which he called “selectivity in distributing justice, humanity and rights.”
Belgian Muslim theologian Khalid Benhaddou said that civilian suffering in Gaza exposes “the distance between the universal principles we defend and the political choices we make,” and that “religious leaders cannot speak about peace in the world while remaining silent about hatred within their own communities.”
