Adolfo Pérez Esquivel*

Letter to Bush – stop the massacre

Mr. President of the United States of North America George W. Bush I don’t know if you will read this letter, not because it won’t reach you, but because you are incapable of reading it, because your heart is hardened by hate and fear, because you don’t have the capacity or courage to open your mind and spirit to compassion. In spite of all this, I’m not able to stop it from being sent to you, because if you don’t read it, I’m sure that many men and women will read it, those who asked that you might desist from the massacre against the Iraqi people.

When you yourself decided the invasion of Iraq, in spite of the opposition of the people of the world, you did not listen to their protests: “No to war! Yes to peace!”, closing your ears and your heart when the United Nations, the churches, the humanitarian and human rights organizations, protested once again that the rule of law and the consideration of the people ought to rule. You weren’t disposed to hear them.

I expressed to you in another letter not to challenge God, not to construct the tower of Babel from mercilessness and hate, not to let yourself be dominated by ambitions of power to impose your political, economic and military interests. I said to you, reflect, because as you sow, so shall you reap. Lamentably, you don’t know how to honor life, you have profoundly endangered all of humanity and your own people. You will win battles with your imperial army and those of your allies, will be able to demonstrate the power of arms and the high technology of death, but nothing of this gives you the reason.

The greatest of your defeats is that you will lose the respect of the people of the world, and win rejection in humanity’s conscience for all the crimes committed. In this flight to rush onward, you are accompanied by your allies of death: Tony Blair, José María Aznar and John Howard. You hide the true motives of the Iraq invasion and seek to justify massacres in order to seize the oil resources of Iraq, and to dominate the Mideast, and to impose your plans of world hegemony and global dictatorship. You have transformed the United States into a terrorist State. Do you need to massacre the people of Iraq, kill children and mothers to depose a dictator that once was your ally?

It’s necessary to remember and recall -- not to remain in the past, but to allow ourselves to illuminate the present. The long history of invasions confirms it, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and the military dictators that the United States imposed; the current militarization and the military bases in all of Latin American and other parts of the world. You may be able to dominate militarily, but you will never be able to convince. The people won’t allow themselves to be deceived by campaigns of disinformation and lies that complicit medias of communications use as psychological action, showing United States and British soldiers in acts of charity, giving our caramels to Iraqi children after killing their families and bombing the people.

How are you going to justify your crimes of collateral damage? How will explain to the world that you seek to destroy the United Nations and ignore international law, in order to apply your policies of domination, without concerning yourself of the human cost and the destruction of other countries, applying State terrorism? How to justify the unjustifiable? Are you able to sleep without your conscience castigating you? Your army bombs with thousands of missiles, cities and civil populations; hurled are cluster bombs yellow in color, and food packets also yellow, at the people, deviant methods employed in Vietnam, Cambodia and in the Gulf War. Bombs and food are your “medicines of death.”

Your generals say they don’t count cadavers, they count the bombs that produce them. The perversion has no limits, but you say you pray to God and that you believe yourself predestined by God for humanity. Hitler thought the same in unleashing his own madness and wish to dominate the world. The God of Life will ask you for an account of your crimes. Your are responsible for crimes of great inhumanity and you will be judged for so much death and pain against the people of Iraq and others.

The world sees with horror that you distribute that which does not belong to you, that the birds of plunder that surround you are laying in wait to launch themselves over the pillage and blood of the Iraqi people, in order to do business with oil. They speak of the “reconstruction of Iraq” colonized and submitted to United States’ interests, and think as well that they will win.

You speak of God and blaspheme him. You speak of liberty and you destroy it. You speak of democracy and dignity, and don’t hesitate in sacrificing at the alter of the god Moloch, your god of destruction and death. You speak of human rights, violating them systematically.

The United Nations is an obstruction to your interest. Either it submits itself to your will or you will destroy it. You intend to constitute a tribunal to judge your ex-ally, Saddam Hussein, because he no longer serves you, but you ignore and disown the International Criminal Court as judge of crimes of great inhumanity. You want to enjoy the impunity of your soldiers and they give you the same.

Don’t challenge God and the people of the world. Empires fall, through greater powers than them. You could sow peace and solidarity, but you don’t do it. You could generate programs for the life and development of peoples, but you don’t do it. You choose the worst of roads. Who will be your next victims?

I’m not able to give you my greetings of peace and good will because you don’t believe in peace and don’t practice the good. I am able to tell you can repent of your crimes and can atone for the evil that you’ve done.

Buenos Aires, 9 April 2003

* Nobel Prize Winner







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Strategic Pastoral Action

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