Peace Quest Marks UN International Day of Peace

RELEASES STATEMENT DEMANDING MOVEMENT

‘FROM A PRE-WAR TO A POST-WAR WORLD’  APPLAUDS THE ‘WALK FOR PEACE’ FROM PUGWASH TO HALIFAX 

On this United Nations ‘International Day of Peace’, Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) is releasing two statements in solidarity with the Canadian and global anti-war movement: a call for urgent steps ‘From a Pre-War to a Post-War World’; and words of welcome and praise for the many steps taken by the participants in a two-week (September 8-21), 200-kilometre ‘Walk for Peace’ from Pugwash to Halifax from September 8-21. Both statements are provided in full below: the remarks welcoming the peace walkers will be read at a ceremony in Halifax. 

The UN first designated September 21 as its International Day of Peace in 1981. The date was chosen to raise the curtain on each annual session of the General Assembly, and to remind all world leaders of their core mission, as set out in the United Nations Charter, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”: a scourge threatening, since the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the ultimate devastation of nuclear war. 

Two decades later, in the fateful year of 2001, the General Assembly voted to declare each Day of Peace a ‘global ceasefire,’ a call designed as both a serious demand and a gesture focusing attention on the distance yet to travel to a truly post-war world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2001, 24 “major armed conflict” were raging in 26 countries. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), last year saw “the highest number of state-based conflicts since 1946” – 59 – with around 40 other wars within states and between non-state actors. Also in 2023, global military spending reached a record $2.4 trillion – $2,443 billion: $306 per person on Earth – or 2.3% of global GDP, more than enough to meet many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) currently falling far short of their 2030 targets. 

Yet, incredibly, according to numerous statements from western military and political leaders we need to start seeing this hideously war-torn world as merely a ‘pre-war world,’ the prelude to a third world war between NATO and either/or Russia and China, a conflict– even before it almost certainly ‘goes nuclear’ – certain to wreak death and destruction on an unprecedented, unimaginable scale. “What we all need – today – to instead start imagining,” comments PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard, “is a world of common, cooperative security capable of advancing the human security of every global citizen of these nations currently so disunited by war and militarism, plagued by threats and acts of massive violence at every level of our dysfunctional world ‘order’. We don’t have long: but we do have alternatives.”