Church leaders decry South Asia arms race

Christian Century, August 14, 2002

As India and Pakistan continue their military stand-off over Kashmir, church leaders from South Asia have issued a warning about the buildup of weapons across the subcontinent amid growing poverty and deprivation. The church leaders, meeting in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, warned of the danger of military conflict between India and Pakistan and criticized the money spent on armaments rather than on tackling the region's social needs.

"The colossal magnitude of human insecurity and deprivations make South Asia the most vulnerable space on the globe today," they said in a statement issued at the end of the July 24-26 gathering. The meeting was organized by the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA) and the World Council of Churches. "The situation here is alarming. Development activities are ignored in the name of national defense," said Metropolitan Joseph Mar Irenaeus, from India, one of the CCA's presidents. While defense expenditure had shot up in recent years, the region is facing "growing economic problems, poverty and malnutrition," the churchman told the conference.

But the churches' attempt to draw attention to the "wasteful" military expenditure has only led to their being branded by nationalist groups as "anti-national and unpatriotic" for questioning the arms race, he later told Ecumenical News International. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says military expenditure in South Asia had increased by 54 percent from 1992 to 2001, while for the world as a whole this expenditure had fallen by 9 percent.

M. A. Oommen, a prominent Indian economist, told the conference that the two biggest countries in the region--India and Pakistan--had 20 times more soldiers than doctors. "This ratio should be the reverse," he said. A 2 percent cut in India's defense expenditure would enable the government to provide safe drinking water for 226 million people, or to supply essential medicines free to all the 135 million people who cannot afford them, Oommen pointed out.

Similarly, while a poor nation such as Sri Lanka spent $4 million on a battle tank, that money would be sufficient to provide primary education for one year to all its children not in school, Oommen said.

Meanwhile, a prominent Sri Lankan church leader has cautioned that unless people's fears about his country's fragile peace can be put to rest, the fledgling peace process in the island nation may be doomed to collapse. "We have peace now, but we are not sure whether we will have peace in the future," said Ebenezer Joseph, general secretary of the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka.

A truce was initiated at the end of 2001 by Tamil rebels, known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, to stop a ferocious civil war that had been raging since 1983. The rebels had been fighting against what they called the domination of the island's Tamil minority by the Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority.

The truce led to the signing on February 23, under Norwegian mediation, of the country's first-ever formal cease-fire agreement between the government and the rebels. Sri Lankans were relieved that the killings had stopped, that they were able to move about freely and that bomb attacks by the Tamil Tigers in the south of the country had ended, said Joseph, a Methodist pastor. Still, not many believed that the peace would hold, especially without a more finely delineated plan for the future, Joseph noted. He described a "lurking fear in the minds of the people: what will happen next?"--ENI