Arias Backs Diplomacy as Means to End Gulf War

Central America’s most famous peacemaker, former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, on Thursday urged world leaders not to abandon diplomacy as a means of ending the Persian Gulf War.

“When peace is at stake,” said the winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, leaders “do not have the right to be impatient.”

Lack of patience, Arias added, “is a way of provoking war.”

His remarks were made before a crowd of about 900 at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, where he was given an honorary doctorate. Arias, 50, who has earned graduate degrees in law, economics and political science, stepped down as president of Costa Rica last May after serving a constitutionally mandated single four-year term.

In his address, entitled “The Role of Political Participation and Education in the Survival of Democracy,” Arias said he supported the United Nations’ condemnation of Iraq and the use of economic sanctions.

But Arias, who now heads the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Development, contended that it was a mistake to set the Jan. 15 deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. He warned that the “trap of time constraints” served the interests only of those opposed to peace.

Recalling his own frustrations in drafting the peace accord signed in 1987 by the presidents of all five Central American republics, Arias said that each time a deadline is reached without an agreement, “the enemies of peace celebrate the apparent failures of our efforts.”

He won hearty applause when he questioned the motives for U.S. military action, asking, “If Kuwait would have been covered with banana plantations, coffee fields and sugar farms . . . instead of oil wells . . . would the same risks have been taken?”