PALERMO – “We call for the commitment of your governments to launch a process to declare the Mediterranean a sea of peace, which unifies peoples and their cultures. A demilitarized, denuclearized and neutral Mediterranean”. This is the request contained in the open letter send on 1 January, World Peace Day, to the governments of the coastal countries by the “Convention for the Rights of the Mediterranean”, signed in Palermo last March by 97 personalities and associations. “Wars – says the letter – are a holocaust of human and non-human lives, a waste of assets and public resources, bringing about also a deterioration of the environmental conditions. The presence of nuclear plants in itself constitutes a danger”.
“War – states the Convention – is the result of a system which is obsessed by economic growth and that pushes for competition and grabbing of resources and markets”. “The companies on the market, involved in the production of weapons are becoming rich by withholding resources from civil economy.
War economy is becoming the continuation of market economy”. “In order to have Peace win – concludes the Convention – what needs to be done is to leverage cultural resources, democratic ethos, people’s search for justice which persist even when they are oppressed”, because: “peace must be preserved through negotiation, non going after impossible full victories”.
Almost all Mediterranean countries are currently involved in armed conflicts or they are close to becoming involved.
Conflicts which are alimented by foreign interferences and that make the Mediterranean the area with the highest number of on-going conflicts in the world.
