At UN, Costa Rica's president issues ringing call for end to arms trade
19 September 2006 – The president of Costa Rica – a country that has renounced military spending – today issued a ringing call to leaders gathered at the United Nations to do the same, arguing that this would foster more stability than the current proliferation and use of weapons.
“With optimism and vehemence I propose to this Assembly that we take, today, three courses of action that can have powerful effects on the wellbeing of all people,” declared Óscar Arias Sánchez, proposing an end to spending on arms, trade liberalization and the upholding of international law and the UN.
“Since the tragic events of the 11th of September 2001, a little more than $200 billion have been added to global military spending. There is not a single indicator that suggests that this colossal increase is making the world more secure and human rights more widely enjoyed,” he said. “On the contrary, we feel more and more vulnerable and fragile.”
The Costa Rican president suggested that humanity must examine other ways to deploy those resources. “Maybe it is time to realize that with much less than that sum we could guarantee access to potable water and primary education for every person in the world, and maybe there would be enough left over, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez once suggested, para perfumer de sandalo en un día de otoño las cataratas del Niagara ? roughly translated, to perfume the waters of Niagara Falls on one autumn day. Maybe it is time to understand that all this is what would really make us happier and more secure.”
President Arias also quoted former United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a general, who said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
He decried the fact that military spending is on the rise in Latin America “even though it has never been more democratic and there have been very few military conflicts between countries in the last century.” At the same time, he expressed pride in his own country's history of having abolished its army in 1948.
“If today we do not confront the rise in military spending and the arms trade; if we do not stimulate the economies of the poorest countries who invest their resources in life and not in death; if we do not conquer the fears and the hypocrisy that impede truly free trade in the world; if we do not strengthen the institutions and the international norms that protect us against global anarchy; if we do not do all this, we condemn ourselves to walk on the edge of a cliff, to live on the wheel of eternal return, descending like Sisyphus after every peak reached,” he warned.
Calling for a combination of optimism, courage and the will to change, he voiced conviction that “it is time that humanity builds the brightest future we could possibly dream of.”
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