Furthering the Cult of War

By Thalif Deen

Non-governmental organisations are critical of the WSSD draft plan of action for its failure to focus on the escalating military spending worldwide.

“Throughout the years, through international agreements, member states of the United Nations (UN) have recognised that the military budget has been a waste and misuse of resources,” Joan Russow of the Global Compliance Research Project said, yesterday. “Unfortunately, institutional memory is either short or member states ignore precedents,” she added.

Global military spending is estimated at between 850 billion to 1 trillion U.S. dollars annually. The United States (US), which has the world’s largest military budget, spends an average of over 300 billion dollars a year.

Jeffrey Sachs, adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, says that a very small fraction of the US military budget -- about 25 billion dollars annually -- would resolve most of the world’s economic and social problems. But the US has shown no willingness to cut military spending and divert resources to poorer nations, he added.

Pauline Cantwell of Peace Action says military production and consumption are a serious impediment to sustainable development. “They cause pollution and occupy resources that could otherwise be spent on sustainable development,” she explained.

At the 1992 Rio summit, Russow said the international community agreed to finance the implementation of Agenda 21 -- the global plan for a cleaner environment -- by re-allocating military budgets.

But this has never to become a reality. “The WSSD implementation document, by ignoring the urgent need to address militarism, furthers the cult of war rather than the culture of peace,” she added.

Last week, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs, Jayantha Dhanapala, urged participants at WSSD to recognize the vital role of disarmament in tackling the issues on the gathering’s agenda.

Dhanapala warned that rising global military expenditures was jeopardizing humanity's common natural environment and the prospects for social and economic development of all nations.

Pointing to the possession or pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and terrorist groups around the world, Dhanapala warned of the serious environmental and economic costs of producing such arms -- especially the deadliest of all, nuclear weapons.

"The very development and production of such weapons will not only leave behind environmental nightmares for future generations, as we are seeing in Central Asia today, but the actual use of such weapons in war may well jeopardise the very basis of life on this planet," he said.

He pointed out that Article 26 of the U.N. Charter envisages a system of international peace and security based on "the least diversion for armaments of the world's human and economic resources"