Do you rembmber
Gernica? by Hisatake Kato
The most unpardonable aspect of terrorism is that it is an indiscriminate
murder. The citizens who worked in the WTC towers and who Suppose we torture
terrorists when terrorists tortured our citizens, or we attack terrorists with
biological weapons when terrorists attacked us by biological weapons. It is a
reprisal because it gives the assailants the same suffering as the victims. It
is a reprisal but not justice. For in both cases one and the same principle,
ie. that torture is unjust or that the use of biological weapons, is unjust is
not applied to both the victims and assailants equally.
Suppose we indiscriminately kill the citizens of Afghanistan who treats a
terrorist as a guest because the terrorists killed our citizens
indiscriminately. Then it is neither a reprisal nor justice. It is not a
reprisal, since the citizens of Afghanistan are not assailants. It is not
justice, since the same principle that indiscriminate killing is
unjust is applied equally.
1. When Germany attacked Gernica, a Spanish city, by indiscriminate air
bombardment in 1937, people all over the world burned with indignation.Pablo
Picasso painted Gernica. President Hoover issued a note to confirm“the
principle that killing of civilians is unjust”.
2. But the principle was virtually ignored when it came to WW II in which air
raids were recognized as effective weapons against Japan. They were justified
as an indispensable means to stop the present actions of war. Atomic bombs against
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, air bombardments against Vietnam, air raids during the
Gulf war and air attacks during the civil war in Yugoslavia were justified in
the same manner.
3. If we attack Afghanistan we cannot justify it “as the indispensable means to
stop the present actions of war”. It is “to launch air bombardment against
terrorists preemptively to abort the next attack by the terrorists”. It is a
new precedent of the use of air bombardment. It cannot be justified even if the
air bombardments in Gulf war and the civil war in Yugoslavia can be.
If we who hate the indiscriminate killing by terrorism resort to a preemptive
and indiscriminate air bombardment, we are committing a injustice of
indiscriminate killings. Are we going back to the times of Gernica? Have people
all over the world forgotten the fact Picasso had painted the piece to appeal
to the world that “killings of civilian are unjust”?
September 24, 2001
Hisatake Kato, President of Tottori University of Environmental Studies
kato@kankyo-u.ac.jp
(Please feel free to reproduce, reprint or forward the statement in any form.)
(transl.by Keiichi Kanaya)