Threat of
War
Vatican: War threatens U.N.’s status
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York
In the wake of Cardinal Pio Laghi’s March 5 mission to
President Bush, the Vatican is continuing its campaign against a war in Iraq,
insisting at a minimum that any use of force must have explicit United Nations
approval.
A related aim of the Vatican’s antiwar drive is to convince
Muslims that if war comes, it is not an anti-Islamic crusade on the part of
Christianity. On that front, Vatican sources were encouraged that before the
Security Council March 7, both the Syrian foreign minister and the Iraqi
ambassador thanked Pope John Paul II for his appeals on behalf of peace.
Despite media reports to the contrary, however, senior Vatican
sources tell NCR there is no Vatican plan for Saddam Hussein to go into
exile in a last-ditch move to avoid war. A report in the Glasgow Sunday
Herald March 9 suggested the existence of such a plan, put forward by Saudi
Arabia and backed by the Vatican.
“There is no Vatican plan,” a senior papal aide told
NCR March 11. “There have been informal conversations at the U.N.
about various possibilities, and we have indicated we would be willing to help
in any way we can. But we are not proposing anything.”
Joaquín Navarro-Valls, head of the Vatican press office,
called the report “completely baseless” March 11.
Over the weekend, Pope John Paul II continued his antiwar
drumbeat.
“The choice between peace and war,” the pope said in his
March 9 Angelus address, “is also a choice between good and evil that
calls all Christians, especially in this Lenten period, to reject the
temptations of Satan, as Jesus did in the desert.”
The pope’s reception of a string of VIPs in the diplomacy
surrounding war in Iraq, including Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain, Jose
Maria Aznar of Spain and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, has been interrupted this
week to create space for the annual Lenten retreat for the papal household.
The pope’s ongoing appeals for peace notwithstanding, Vatican
officials say they believe the decision to go to war is all but a foregone
conclusion on the part of the Bush administration.
“We could avoid a war fairly easily,” one aide said.
“But based on the briefings we have received from the State Department, it
seems this is a decision that has already been made.”
Given that reality, a secondary aim of Vatican diplomacy has
become to at least ensure that if the conflict happens, it does so with the
backing of the United Nations, so as to preserve the framework of international
law.
Laghi emphasized the U.N. role in his comments after the meeting
with Bush.
“A decision regarding the use of military force can only be
taken within the framework of the United Nations,” he said, “but
always taking into account the grave consequences of such an armed conflict:
the suffering of the people of Iraq and those involved in the military
operation, a further instability in the region and a new gulf between Islam and
Christianity.”
As a sign of this commitment to working through the United
Nations, Laghi visited U.N. headquarters in New York March 7, after his meeting
with Bush, and sat in on part of that day’s Security Council
discussion.
In an interview with the Misna news agency, Archbishop Renato
Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, warned that
a strike without explicit U.N. authorization could be a near-fatal blow to the
body’s prestige.
“If, notwithstanding the lack of sufficient votes or the
veto, war were to come all the same, the U.N. would suffer such a humiliating
defeat that I don’t know if it would be able to recover,” Martino
said. “In fact, it would end the scope for which the United Nations was
created: the maintenance of peace and development.”
A senior Vatican official explained to NCR March 11 that in
the view of the Holy See, the real issue in this conflict is whether the
decision is made unilaterally or multilaterally. The official cited comments by
Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s foreign minister, in early
March to all the ambassadors accredited to the Holy See.
“No rule of international law authorizes one or more states
to resort unilaterally to the use of force in order to change a regime or the
form of government of another state because, for example, it is considered to
possess weapons of mass destruction,” Tauran said. “Only, only the
Security Council can make this decision.”
The Vatican’s commitment to multilateralism is based in part,
the senior Vatican official said, on a conviction that it is the best way to
ensure that the strong do not simply impose their will on the weak.
“Today it’s a matter of choosing between the law of
force or the force of law,” as Tauran put the point in his comments to the
ambassadors.
In part, however, the Holy See also supports multilateralism as an
antidote to the rising influence of non-state actors in the United Nations
system, especially corporations and large, well-funded nongovernmental
organizations that often promote agendas, especially on issues of the family
and sexuality, with which the Vatican disagrees.
A truly multilateral U.N. system, in which the smaller and less
powerful states nevertheless are real partners in decision-making, would be
more “democratic,” the Vatican official said, and less susceptible to
manipulation by special interest groups.
Concerning Islamic public opinion, Vatican officials expressed
satisfaction with the March 7 comments of Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq
al-Shar’a and Iraqi Ambassador Muhammad al-Duri before the Security
Council.
“Muslims and Arabs must highly value the recurrent calls for
peace and for averting war made by all the leaders of the churches of the world
over the past months,” al-Shar’a said. “These calls were crowned
by a letter from the envoy of His Holiness the Pope to the U.S. president two
days ago, explicitly stating that war on Iraq is illegitimate and
unjust.”
Al-Duri spoke in similar tones.
“I should not forget here to praise the efforts exerted by
churches throughout the world. In particular I refer to His Holiness the Pope,
who has stressed peace and averting war on Iraq, which, he said, lacks any
moral or legitimate basis,” al-Duri said.
The Vatican has long been concerned that if war is seen by Muslims
as a Western assault on Islam, Christian minorities in the Islamic world might
become targets. In this regard, a Vatican official said he found these comments
“encouraging,” but he wondered whether they would filter down to the
Islamic street.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 21,
2003
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