Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad

CHANGING

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“ And if there is peace without justice, it is not really a sign that we have our civilisation has made progress. We are still seeing the absence of justice even if there is no war.”

TUN DR MAHATHIR MOHAMAD

Founder / Chairman Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War

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irstly I would like to say, “Thank you,” on behalf of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War for your attendance this morning. You have just seen some pictures, a very small number of pictures of war, what war is all about – war is about killing people.

Because killing people is a crime, it is illogical that if you kill one person you may be arrested and charged in court and may even be sentenced to death; but if you kill a few million people, that is glorious. It is this realisation of the contradiction in our perception of things that started this idea that war should be criminalised.

This morning we are going to talk about “Peace with Justice” and the roadmap towards peace with justice. Recently, in Kuala Lumpur, we had a small forum and we invited a number of good speakers, well-known speakers, among them was an American, a fairly well-

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known American, and he was given the floor as the first speaker. His first statement was shocking. He said that in the last 60 years we had enjoyed peace. That is not our impression.

But he very boldly stated that in the last 60 years we had enjoyed peace. And he gave his reason why he thinks that we are enjoying peace in the last 60 years, and his reason is that before, during the First and the Second World War, there were 70 million people were killed.

Since then, only 200,000 people have been killed. Obviously there is peace. We’re not killing as many people as we used to – that is his argument.

Now, maybe it is true for his own country, they are enjoying peace.

They don’t have people – well they do have policeman who shoot people in the back once in awhile – but beyond that, they are enjoying peace. And if they are enjoying

peace, then the whole world must be enjoying peace because their perception is that America is the world. They used to a slogan by General Motors, and the slogan says, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.”

And I suppose, by extension, what is good for America is good for the rest of the world. So, when they are enjoying peace, which is good for America, obviously the rest of the world must be enjoying peace – because they could not see beyond their borders. I’m not antiAmerica. I’m just stating facts.

Because in America they play the game of football, American football. American football is hardly ever played anywhere else in the world. Every year they have what they call “The World Series” where Americans play Americans in America American Football – that is the world. That is “The World Series”. Meaning to say that America is the world.

So, if America is enjoying peace, then the world must be enjoying peace. That is the kind of shortsightedness, misperception, that we find not among some little country somewhere but this is a country that rules the world. They have the power and authority and the means to force people to accept their rules and regulations.

This is the power that controls the world today. And if this power is so short-sighted that it considers itself as the world, then we cannot expect much from them. It is strange to have ignorant people ruling the world, is frightening, because they may make decisions that maybe good for them, but will not be good for the rest of the world. So for them, there is peace and there is justice. And by extension, because they are having peace and justice, therefore the world is having peace and justice. Yes, of course, a few misguided Arabs keep on killing each other – they would have liked to kill a few millions but their capacity kill is rather limited.

But the fact that they are fighting a war – to them it is a war – but to America it is not a war, it is a situation of “peace” because only 200,000 people have been killed.

So until we reach the millions of people who will be killed, then there really is “peace”. So this is the problem of misperception of what things are like in the world today. It is, I think, important that we understand this: That there is no peace and, obviously, there is no justice. There is no justice for the small nations. For the weak nations, justice is only for the strong.

As they say in international relations in the management of this world, “The strong will take what they will, and the weak will submit what they must.” So we must submit to the strong. And if we must submit to the strong, even when the strong is unjust, we have no choice but to submit to the strong. And so we have some kind of “peace”. But it is not peace with justice. And if there is peace without justice, it is

not really a sign that we have our civilisation has made progress.

We are still seeing the absence of justice even if there is no war. But, in actual fact, there is always a war going on and that war prevents justice ever being shown to anyone.

Malaysia is not at war with anyone.

We believe in being friends with everyone. But sanctions are being applied against Malaysia. And sanctions is a form of war. You may remember in history, the sieges of the cities of the past. One way to bring down a country is to lay siege to their capital city – starve them of food, force them to eat rats and vermin, and finally, because of so many deaths, so much hunger, so much thirst, the city goes under and surrenders. So sanctions, sieges, are the same thing: They are a part of war. To say that sanction is not connected with war is wrong because sanction is war by other means.

any reports about those killing.

When I went there, the country was quite peaceful.

I went to Damascus, the people there are Sunnis, Shias and Christians. And they live at peace with each other. But they have a dictator for a leader – a horrible man who’s killing everybody all the

So today, even Malaysia has to face sanction – of course it is not directed directly at us, but many countries have to accept the fact that we cannot trade with Iran. We have no war against Iran. They are our friends. We want to trade with them, but, “no, you may not trade with them.” So the sanction is not merely applied to Iran; it is applied to countries like Malaysia which maintains very friendly relation with the United States of America, “the world.” So the situation in the world today cannot be called “peace”. We are actually facing war, a global war, with one means or another.

It is not always about shooting and killing people that you saw on the screen just now; but starving people, depriving them of medical facilities, water, is war, is a part of the weaponry of war. And today you see what is happening – in Syria, for example.

Syria used to be quite a peaceful country. Of course it is ruled by a dictator and all the Syrians are being killed all the time – but I didn’t get JUNE 2015 CRIMINALISE WAR

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time. So the ruler must be displaced in order to achieve regime change; and so we see what’s happening in Syria today – a war among brothers, a war among co-religionist, and the horrors of war are perpetrated everywhere.

And among the horrors of war this time is the problem of refugees, people running away from war.

They are to be found in neighbouring countries – living, sometimes, in the open air, no cover at all, exposed to the sun and the cold of the winter. They are without water, without food, without any sanitary amenities. They are the victims of war.

Why? Well, “we need to change the regime.” Yes, I believe that the regime is dictatorial. But count the number of people killed by that regime as against the people who have been killed in the uprisings against that regime.

You look at Iraq. Iraq was one of the best developed Arab countries.

Of course it had a horrible dictator in the name of Saddam Hussein who has “weapons of mass destruction” – within 45 minutes Saddam could launch an attack against London. And so Tony Blair says, “we have to remove this man and his weapons of mass destruction.” Then it was found that he had no weapons of mass destruction and the purpose of the war was changed to removing this horrible dictator. And so the horrible dictator was found, captured, and hanged. But the war goes on. The Iraq which was peaceful before is no longer peaceful now. Every now and again we see people exploding bombs, exploding vehicles filled with bombs, killing people, and certainly, there cannot be peace after the regime change.

Indeed, there is less peace now than there was before the change of the

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regime. And today we see not only war in this country, but also an absence of justice. So, it is obvious that war does not solve anything.

Not even great wars.

Great wars were fought twice – the First World War and the Second World War. And what happened?

These were the wars to end all wars. But they have not ended any war. The First World War did not result in peace because it led to the Second World War; and the Second World War was also fought to put an end to warring as a means of

settling conflicts between nations.

They founded the United Nations – we shall sit around a table and talk our problems over. That was the idea. We will not fight and kill each other. But then we need to give 5 countries special position – they should be give vetoes.

And so the whole idea of solving the problems of the world in peaceful ways was negated by giving veto powers to 5 countries who we trusted, but we now find that they are not to be trusted. They will put

a spanner into the works anytime they can. One country has used the veto more than a hundred times, and we are actually ruled by these 5 countries, and there is no justice that they will uphold. If at all, they make decisions to use war to kill people in order to achieve their ends. So even the United Nations have failed to give us peace with justice.

So what do we do? What is the roadmap towards peace with justice? What we can do lies in our minds. We consider ourselves as civilised people, but actually we are not civilised. We are even more uncivilised, more primitive than the most primitive people of 4,000 or 5,000 years ago.

The people of the Stone Age did kill, did fight, but the damage done is very minimal. We have made progress, tremendous progress. Today, we can wipe out the population of this earth because we have developed weaponry that can do just that. Today when we fight wars it is not about soldiers fighting soldiers.

It is about destroying whole nations, exempting nothing. We kill the old, the young, the babies, the sick, the worn-out – all those people will be killed in our wars.

And the whole country will be devastated. Old monuments will be blown up. There were recently some pictures of these IS people destroying old monuments. But, after all, when you bomb countries, you destroy old monuments as well – only there’s not much publicity.

So, both sides are actually equally primitive; still resorting to killing people in order to achieve your objective.

Just imagine, if at this gathering of people, somebody doesn’t like somebody else – he gets up and takes a knife and plunges it into the

back of his enemy. And when he is asked, “why did you do that?” “Oh, I have a quarrel with him.” So, one solution is, of course, to kill him.

Imagine what kind of society we will be living in if people are free to kill their enemies and no action can be taken against them? But in the community of the nations of this world, such acts are permissible. If one nation does not like the other nation, all it has to do is to bomb that nation out of existence. And it is entirely possible to do that now because our civilisation has made such advances in the art of killing people that we can wipe out whole countries.

So that is the progress that we have made. If indeed we want peace with justice, our mindset, our belief, our value systems, need to be changed.

And the change that must take place is that the perception of war – war is a crime no matter which direction you are looking at, war, it is a crime.

It is about killing people. Massive killing of people.

No discrimination at all. In the old days, they used to have a fight between the leaders to decide who is going to win. That’s fine. But today, you, killing all the people if you can – and you can, because you have the weapons – you can destroy everything.

You can kill on a massive scale, 70 million people in the First and Second World War. That is still our mindset: That the killings in war is legitimate and acceptable.

It is even glorious. The killer will be given medals. The killer will have his statue erected in the park.

And future generations will pay homage to these killers because war is glorious. We don’t have too many monuments to peace but it is because our mindset still glorifies war as a means of settling conflicts between nations, or within nations.

If we reject war as a solution to our conflicts, then we will be making progress towards peace with justice.

It is our mindset, it is our culture – a culture that pervades the whole

world, that war is permissible, killing people is permissible if you call it war. If you don’t call it war, then you may be hanged for it. But if you call it, “in a war,” then you are doing nothing illegal when you kill masses of people. Until we can change that perception of war that it is legitimate and right and proper; until we change that mindset, there will be no peace, and certainly no peace with justice. We need to change our mindset, our thinking, about war in order to achieve, or to map out the way towards, peace with justice.

When we started this campaign way back in 2005, we decided that this is a campaign that should spread throughout the world. It is not easy to change the mindset of people – I’ve spent 22 years trying to change the mindset of the Malays, I did not make much progress I’m sorry to say. But I took on a bigger job: Trying to change the mindset of the whole world.

This little man in this small unknown country is talking big.

Who is he? Doesn’t matter. If people can understand that war is a crime, that it must be rejected, that it must be punished, it will be worthwhile, even for a small man.

I always like to talk about slavery and how slavery was abolished.

It was a very long fight to make slavery a crime. At one time everyone of us accepted slaves to work for us – nations and peoples everywhere had slaves. You find some captives from war, captured prisoners, will be treated as slaves, and that is quite okay. If you find that the colour of his skin is darker than yours, then you should make him a slave, because of skin colour.

You could transport him into your country and make a slave of him.

But some people began to see the wrongness of slavery. And so they campaigned – perhaps only one or two people campaigned. But eventually the word spread. This is something that is a measure of our understanding of the human race –

that they need to be free, that it is legitimate and right for them to be free. And so the fight went on for centuries and eventually we have no more slaves. Recently we find some slaves in Rhodesia. But that is not national. But today we reject slavery. We reject slave trade.

Wilberforce fought for 30 years to put an end to the British and American trade in slaves. So, there is a long journey before us.

We cannot change peoples’ minds overnight, or even over a period of one year or two years. It’s going to be a long struggle to make war a crime. Until in the minds of people war is being categorised as a crime and as a crime people who wage war should be punished, until then we will not have peace with justice.

So with that I would like to welcome you to this forum and I hope that the speakers will contribute towards a process of changing the mindsets of people. It will begin here, but I do hope that it will spread to other countries and other parts of the world.

And there is one thing we can do in democratic countries is that we can demand that candidates for elections must make a pledge that they reject war as a means of solving conflict or you will not vote for them. I would like to compliment Japan, which is the only country which has put into its Constitution the rejection of war as a means of solving conflicts.

Japan has only a defence force.

Unfortunately it is being undermined by certain powers; and I pray and hope the resistance of the Japanese will be strong enough to prevent them from accepting once again that the solution to human relations between countries can be resolved through war. Japan is a model. It should remain a model, and the rest of the world should be taught, or should be subjected to pressure, so that they too would abolish war from their Constitutions – to make war a crime for their countries so that we may eventually have peace with justice.

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