XIVth World Congress

In the same way as I have been shaken since 1994 by the pain and destruction the people of Rwanda have inflicted upon each other, I am again shocked by what Americans and other prosperous people, under the direction of research centers, industrial complexes, and governments, are willing to threaten everybody else with.

After Paris 2000

by Wera Saether

The weapon producer creates waste and poisons. Once in a while the peace worker crops up in the world, like the child in the fairytale, and asks whether it is really necessary to spread as many serious illnesses as possible and, in the end, wholesale death.

"Is it really necessary?" the child asks.

This child does not give in.

I was a peace activist 15 or 20 years ago. Day in and day out I breathed in the great horror that was rooted in the possible obliteration of all things. Everything I loved could have been lost for ever. Every thing that everyone loved could have been lost for ever. But as a rule, a writer hesitates to organize herself politically. She will think her own thoughts and write in her own style. Moreover, this writer became exhausted by the one-sided technical-bureaucratic language of the anti-nuclear activists at that time. So I travelled -- and this was before the genocide of 1994 -- to Rwanda. I witnessed AIDS and the mental and political consequences of European colonial power in a small African country.

We must think about several genocides, yet each one of us has limited endurance for pain. Those who do decide to take a stand in relation to humankind's pain choose specific aspects on which to work: for example landmines, child labor, the colonization of Tibet, the suppression of freedom of speech, and so on.

The greatest violation of human rights has been, and continues to be, the threatened use of nuclear weapons and the possibility that they might actually be used. As a woman said from the speaker's podium at the IPPNW conference in Paris during the summer of 2000: "Then there will not be a single child left to forgive us."

I was invited to take part in the Congress in Paris because I had written two books about Rwanda and had held a writing course in Kigali in 1999. I was to talk about Rwandan genocide survivors who wanted to learn to write about what they had heard and seen in Rwanda in 1994. "I have seen dogs eat mothers," one woman wrote in Kigali.

I had not earlier taken part in an international conference with doctors who are activists. I now know that these doctors, in fact and without overtly expressing their desire to do so, have mobilized me once again. In the same way as I have been shaken since 1994 by the pain and destruction the people of Rwanda have inflicted upon each other, I am again shocked by what Americans and other prosperous people, under the direction of research centers, industrial complexes, and governments, are willing to threaten everybody else with. I can say that I am shaken back to the point I had reached in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, over the waste of us, of nature, and, indeed, of the joy of being.

At the same time I am moved to the very marrow by doctors who for some 20 years have persevered in a resistance movement that promises no other rewards than those of the conscience and of solidarity.

The Congress had brilliant contributions of a political and technical kind. It contained ceremonial and bureaucratic elements that I, as a sort of immigrant, could have done without. And it lacked in its program, to too great a degree, what the anti-atomic weapons work of the 1980s also lacked: namely, nourishment for "the heart," with regard both to topics and to forms of expression.

The concert in the St. Francois Xavier Church one evening took care of the "heart." People's reunions with each other also did that. But some people presumably came for the first time, and they lacked the context that gives pleasure to reunion.

How long can someone carry out an ethical and political resistance struggle inspired by fear alone, by duty, and by the imagination of pain?

In Paris, I thought that these doctors form a sort of "church." They give all they can, without asking for any personal reward. It is really beautiful. But how far can a technical-bureaucratic language reach? How long can people survive under the burden of the knowledge of the possibility of complete annihilation? (In addition to the stresses of private life, which none of us escapes.) How effective is technical language with regard to changing the world?

This is the language weapon technologists use. Yes, it is the enemy's language. To know the enemy, something that must be said to be a benefit, does not mean that it is necessary to use the enemy's (lethal) language. On the contrary, we must go further, and think with another vision than "the enemy" about the living planet on which we dwell and about all that is beautiful, everything ancient and vulnerable that this planet contains.

Why wasn't Paris used at the Congress for everything it means to us? Paris is one of mankind's wonders. I say that as one who also appreciates Calcutta and Budapest. A book on the sales counter at the conference was called "Bombing Bombay?" What about the theme "Bombing Paris?" Paris as the kingdom of the cockroaches. That could be an exercise of the imagination which, if carried out skilfully, could perhaps move some stones, if not actual mountains, in a nuclear France. Paris surrounded us with the Seine, with museums, and with churches. Paris is also vulnerable. [See Editor's note]

Love for the living is at the heart of the peace movement. We don't want all of this -- the world and the heart -- to disappear. Could -- and should -- a language of "motherliness" be introduced for doctors who endure and don't give up, despite unbelievably small means and no reward other than that which the conscience gives it servants? Or is there a more or less unexpressed demand for so-called scientific objectivity among doctors that makes such a "motherliness" impossible?

I thank those who sent me to Paris, but with a bitter gratitude. Again I have to live and write with a nuclear horizon. I must do this work in such a way that the horror does not devour me, nor my rage against the ruling classes, all these researchers, the arms manufacturers, and the politicians who crush the poor everywhere. ("The poor shall die" appears to have become a doctrine!)

The question is what shall we do with what we know, and how shall we live our small, ordinary, and irreplaceable personal lives with the knowledge from Paris 2000? We must also ask which questions are worth asking ourselves and those in power. What could a fruitful hierarchy of topics be, at the next big conference for doctors who wish to save the life of the planet?

How can we preserve the enthusiasm of those who are already initiated, and how can we intitiate new people and inspire them to enthusiasm?

Wera Saether is a writer and activist from Oslo, Norway. English translation by Gillian McCabe.

[Editor's note: At a press conference in Paris preceding the Congress, IPPNW Co-President Mary-Wynne Ashford described the consequences of a 1-megaton nuclear explosion over the city, and at a demonstration to mark the conclusion of the Medical Student Congress, medical students and physicians handed out annotated maps of Paris, illustrating the zones of destruction and the medical consequences of a nuclear war, to Parisians along the Boulevard St. Germain des Près. Ms. Saether is right to call for even more attention to the underlying health and environmental effects of the continued possession of nuclear weapons, and our wish to correct the record on this one point in no way diminishes our agreement with her overall point.]