Adolfo Perez Esquivel
PHOTO/Adolfo Perez Esquivel
Open letter to Barack Obama, President of the United States, from Nobel Prize Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Buenos Aires
Dear Barack,
In addressing you I do so fraternally, and at the same time, to express my concern and indignation for the destruction and death sown in so many countries in the name of “freedom and democracy”, two words that have been abused and stripped of meaning. They end up justifying murder, which is cheered on as if it were a sports event.
Indignation at the attitude of some parts of the US population, of heads of state in Europe and other countries who came out in support of the assassination of Bin Laden, and by your complacency in the name of a supposed justice. There was no effort to detain and try him for his alleged crimes, which generates more doubts. The objective was to assassinate him.
The dead don´t speak, and the fear of the accused who could disclose inconvenient truths for the USA, was turned into assassination in order to ensure that the “death of the dog would end the madness”, without considering that you have only increased it.
When you were granted the Nobel Prize, of which we are holders, I sent you a letter which read: “Barack, I was very surprised by your having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but now that you have it, you must use it in the service of peace among peoples. You have all the possibility to do so, to end the wars and begin to correct the severe crisis in your own country and the world”.
Unfortunately however, you have increased hatred and betrayed the principles assumed during your electoral campaign before your people, such as ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, closing the prisons in Guantanamo, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. On the contrary, you decided to start another war against Libya, backed by NATO and with the shameful resolution of the UN to support you. This lofty organization, diminished and unable to think for itself, has lost its direction and is subjugated to the whims and interests of the dominant powers.
The founding premise of the UN is the defence and promotion of peace and dignity among peoples. Its Preamble begins by saying: “We, the peoples of the world…”, now absent from this organism.
I would like to recall a mystic and teacher who has had a great influence in my life: Trapist monk Thomas Merton of the Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky. Merton said “The greatest necessity of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think”.
Barack, you were very young during the Vietnam war, perhaps you don’t remember the struggle of people all over the United States in opposition to that war. I have shared with and accompanied the veterans of the Vietnam war, in particular Brian Wilson and his companions who were also victims of this war and of all wars.
Thomas Merton, analyzing a postmark that had just arrived, saying “The U.S. Army: Key to peace”, wrote: “No army is the key to peace… No ‘great’ nation has the key to anything but war. Power has nothing to do with peace. The more men build up military power, the more they violate peace and destroy it.”
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