Conventional War Kills, Too : Arias Begs Notice of Those Who Die ‘Little by Little’

The following is from the lecture given Friday in Oslo by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, recipient of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize. Peace consists, very largely, in the fact of desiring it with all one’s soul. The inhabitants of my small country, Costa Rica, have realized those words by Erasmus. Mine is an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship.

I am not receiving this prize as Oscar Arias, any more than I am receiving it as the president of my country. While I have not the arrogance to presume to represent anyone, neither do I fear the humility which identifies me with everyone, and with their great causes. I receive it as one of the 400 million Latin Americans who, in the return to liberty, in the exercise of democracy, are seeking the way to overcome so much misery and so much injustice. I come from that Latin America whose face is deeply marked with pain, the record of the exile, torture, imprisonment and death of many of its men and its women. I come from that Latin American region where totalitarian regimes still exist that put the whole of humanity to shame.

I do not share . . . defeatism. I cannot accept that to be realistic means to tolerate misery, violence and hate. I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering. I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.

Behind the democratic awakening in Central America lies more than a century of merciless dictatorships and general injustice and poverty. The choice before my little America is whether to suffer another century of violence, or to achieve peace by overcoming the fear of liberty. Only peace can write the new history.

Central America cannot go on dreaming, nor does it want to. History demands that dreams turn into realities.

Central America is at an agonizing crossroads: Faced with terrible poverty, some call, from mountains or from governments, for dictatorships with other ideologies, ignoring the cries for freedom of many generations. To the serious problems of general misery, as we know them in their North-South context, is added the conflict between East and West. Where poverty meets conflicting ideologies and the fear of liberty, one can see a cross of ill omen taking shape in Central America.

Let us make no mistake. The only answer for Central America, the answer to its poverty as well as to its political challenges, is freedom from misery and freedom from fear. Anyone who proposes to solve the ills of centuries in the name of a dogma will only help to make the problems of the past grow bigger in the future.

My country is a country of teachers. It is therefore a country of peace. . . . Our children go about with books under their arms, not with rifles on their shoulders. We believe in dialogue, in agreement, in reaching a consensus. We reject violence.

Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope that brings about change, that produces new realities, is what opens man’s road to freedom. Once hope has taken hold, courage must unite with wisdom. That is the only way of avoiding violence, the only way of maintaining the calm one needs to respond peacefully to offenses.

Five presidents in Central America have signed an accord to seek a firm and lasting peace. We want arms to fall silent and men to speak. Our sons are being killed by conventional weapons. Our youths are being killed by conventional weapons.

Fear of nuclear war, the horrors of what we have heard about the nuclear end of the world, seem to have made us uncaring about conventional war. Memories of Hiroshima are stronger than memories of Vietnam! How welcome it would be if conventional weapons were treated with the same awe as the atom bomb! How welcome it would be if the killing of many little by little, every day, was considered just as outrageous as the killing of many all at once! Do we really live in such an irrational world that we would be more reluctant to use conventional weapons if every country had the bomb, and the fate of the world depended on a single madman? Would that make universal peace more secure? Have we any right to forget the 78 million human beings killed in the wars of this century?

The world today is divided between those who live in fear of being destroyed in nuclear war, and those who are dying day by day in wars fought with conventional weapons. This terror of the final war is so great that it has spread the most frightening insensibility toward the arms race and the use of non-nuclear weapons. We need most urgently . . . to struggle with equal intensity to ensure that neither Hiroshima nor Vietnam is repeated.

Weapons do not fire on their own. Those who have lost hope fire them. Those who are controlled by dogmas fire them. We must fight for peace undismayed, and fearlessly accept these challenges from those without hope and from the threats of fanatics.

The path to peace is difficult, very difficult. We in Central America need everyone’s help to achieve peace.

I assure the poet that we shall not cease to dream, we shall not fear wisdom, we shall not flee from freedom . . . we shall not renounce life, we shall not turn our backs on the spirit, and we shall never lose our faith in God.

President Arias’ speech was distributed in English by the Nobel Foundation.

1987 Nobel Foundation.