Disarmament is Urgent

The world lives in permanent distress. According to the source you follow, right now several dozen war conflicts are active throughout the world. And although the press is partial and does not talk about everyone because they are very distant or it’s not convenient, ignoring it, as well as supporting any form of offensive, can only mean suffering, death, and other associated evils that leave a deep mark on the peoples with forced displacement, the poverty it generates, in turn, hunger, disease, illiteracy, much more aggressiveness, and a long list of harms, especially for civilians and the vulnerable population.

Wars should never happen, therefore, this Disarmament Week, proclaimed 45 years ago by the United Nations (UN), is the opportunity to more than ever claim that living in peace is the only way to coexist, and that Dialogue, not violence, is the option to solve disagreements.

Disarmament should be a priority. It’s true that since 2015 it has been one of the Sustainable Development Goals for the 2030 agenda, however, we are very far from achieving it. There are many doubts about this because we don’t see the proliferation of weapons decreasing, on the contrary, everyday people are increasingly buying weapons because they say that only then do they feel safe, and this industry is more developed, therefore, large-scale confrontations are more accurate, and cruel.

A good example of this is the illicit trade of weapons worldwide, and the mass shootings that take place all the time in the United States, where statistics indicate that there are around 300 million firearms; it is also demonstrated by the terror that Palestinians are experiencing today due to the constant siege by Israeli forces with the aim of eradicating them from the face or the earth, and other incidents in several parts of the planet, from small combats between local gangs, to large-scale conflicts that involve nations and their governments.

Usually, during the last week of October, the community of countries that make up the UN focuses on diagnosing how much has been done and how much remains to be done to eliminate the weapons that cause so much harm to us. However, in the more than four decades that this organization has been advocating for disarmament, humanity has only shown regression, plus the aggravating factor of the possession of nuclear material, which, if used, would cause a real disaster.

As long as it’s a passive activity of just reviewing, askin, and promising, so much warning mechanism will be useless to us if we don’t manage to stop the production of killing instruments and gradually stop its use. It’s true this seems like a utopia, which will be very difficult to eliminate, but it sounds so human to dream of a world where we don’t kill each other, where we can solve all conflicts through peaceful confrontation.

The only conclusion is that we’ve failed in the purpose of raising awareness in different societies that having a weapon will not guarantee us more security, but rather will inoculate us with the possibility of using it. We think we have it under control, but we don't even know how much equipment there is, we just know that it’s already too much.

The worrying thing is that governments still want to demonstrate their power at any cost, and that, in general, not even the victims of war events react in favor of disarmament, but instead respond by wanting to entrench themselves despite the risks that they experienced; we continue to hear how children, adolescents, and sensitive people manage to circumvent every structure that should keep them away from these tools and keep ending the lives of others or their own. And thus, endless examples that demonstrate how far we are from getting rid of all devices of extermination.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff