Yurii Sheliazhenko: A Voice for Peace in Ukraine
Greetings and peace from Kyiv.
I will start with a story of tyranny and courage.
When the Helsinki Final Act was concluded, ten human rights defenders created Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 and were immediately arrested and repressed. And yet, even from Gulag, from a Soviet concentration camp, they managed to write an open letter to signatories of Helsinki Accords, advocating nuclear disarmament and release of prisoners of conscience to comply fully with the Helsinki commitments. The letter said: "The war of ideologies gives rise to a senseless arms race, so the disarmament of hearts and souls is necessary".
I am here today to say the same, that disarmament in international relations starts from the disarmament of hearts, that could have miraculous power: millions on streets in Europe protesting against nuclear sharing. The will of the people ended the cold war; hundreds of thousands of conscientious objectors refusing to fight imperialist wars in Vietnam and in Afganistan and effectively forcing Soviet and American governments to end the wars.
People on the streets challenged militant obsession with sovereignty and nationalism, called to dialogue, disarmament, equality, sustainability and, most of all, respect for human rights. I wish today to see similar crowds demanding their right to refuse to kill and asserting necessity of nonviolent resistance to all violence, warmaking and tyrannies.
Unfortunately, currently people believe more in war than in peace, more in punishment than reconciliation, more in militarism than in common sense, more in violent power structures, governmental and international, than in nonviolent popular movements. In Ukraine, people put their trust in the army and anti-corruption law enforcement agencies. When President Zelensky's inner circle was probed, he accused the agencies of treason, subordinated them to Prosecutor General, his appointee, and abolished independence of prosecutors. People massively went to streets, and Zelensky turned back, or at least he is eager to claim an alibi. The story is not finished yet and scandal reignites. Several years ago, there were also massive protests against alleged surrender to Russia.I am proud that Ukraine preserved a culture of democracy and peaceful protest, our people will never allow anyone to usurp powers of a dictator like Putin, - but I am disappointed that in the contrast with crowds supporting army and law enforcement, cheered by the media, there are only a few people demanding to end the war and refusing to kill, always smeared in dirt, but still courageous enough to protest against militarism and human rights violations.
I was horrified by a story of a man tortured to death by a military recruiter with beating and electric shocks when the poor man was forcibly transported in a bus to a military unit against his will. No wonder that some people stood in the way of another such vehicle and released detained conscripts.
Systemic abuses during military mobilization in Ukraine were reported last months by the human rights commisioners of United Nations, Council of Europe and even of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament.
When the Helsinki Final Act was concluded, ten human rights defenders created Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 and were immediately arrested and repressed. And yet, even from Gulag, from a Soviet concentration camp, they managed to write an open letter to signatories of Helsinki Accords, advocating nuclear disarmament and release of prisoners of conscience to comply fully with the Helsinki commitments. The letter said: "The war of ideologies gives rise to a senseless arms race, so the disarmament of hearts and souls is necessary".
I am here today to say the same, that disarmament in international relations starts from the disarmament of hearts, that could have miraculous power: millions on streets in Europe protesting against nuclear sharing. The will of the people ended the cold war; hundreds of thousands of conscientious objectors refusing to fight imperialist wars in Vietnam and in Afganistan and effectively forcing Soviet and American governments to end the wars.
People on the streets challenged militant obsession with sovereignty and nationalism, called to dialogue, disarmament, equality, sustainability and, most of all, respect for human rights. I wish today to see similar crowds demanding their right to refuse to kill and asserting necessity of nonviolent resistance to all violence, warmaking and tyrannies.
Unfortunately, currently people believe more in war than in peace, more in punishment than reconciliation, more in militarism than in common sense, more in violent power structures, governmental and international, than in nonviolent popular movements. In Ukraine, people put their trust in the army and anti-corruption law enforcement agencies. When President Zelensky's inner circle was probed, he accused the agencies of treason, subordinated them to Prosecutor General, his appointee, and abolished independence of prosecutors. People massively went to streets, and Zelensky turned back, or at least he is eager to claim an alibi. The story is not finished yet and scandal reignites. Several years ago, there were also massive protests against alleged surrender to Russia.I am proud that Ukraine preserved a culture of democracy and peaceful protest, our people will never allow anyone to usurp powers of a dictator like Putin, - but I am disappointed that in the contrast with crowds supporting army and law enforcement, cheered by the media, there are only a few people demanding to end the war and refusing to kill, always smeared in dirt, but still courageous enough to protest against militarism and human rights violations.
I was horrified by a story of a man tortured to death by a military recruiter with beating and electric shocks when the poor man was forcibly transported in a bus to a military unit against his will. No wonder that some people stood in the way of another such vehicle and released detained conscripts.
Systemic abuses during military mobilization in Ukraine were reported last months by the human rights commisioners of United Nations, Council of Europe and even of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament.
There is a widespread practice of forced disappearances, arbitrary detention incommunicado in military units, denial in human right to conscientious objection to military service, torture and cruel treatment of objectors in attempts to force them to change their beliefs. A recent report of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection called for release of hundreds of wrongfully detained objectors, 15 of them are publicly named, but even in these cases, when I sent letters to officials here in Ukraine, in response there is denial of human rights and contempt to all calls to release conscientious objectors.
All of it happens in my country. Similar things, even worse, happen in Russia-occupied territories, where all dissent is suffocated and drowned in blood, where even children are forced to learn hate and train for war. But I despise the same policies sanctioned by my own government I voted for, tolerated by my people with whom I live in one country.
I urge you to support the Object War campaign helping to protect conscientious objectors in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus both at home and when they are forced to escape abroad, by doing all realistically possible.
Why Russia could so easily wage war of aggression against Ukraine, destroy our cities, kill our people? Why my people in Ukraine are obsessed with revenge, with an old superstition that justice could be achieved only by violence, by mass murder? Did we forget three nonviolent revolutions that changed our country for better and liberated us from the yoke of Russian imperialism? Why diplomacy and nonviolent action is not seriously used to end the Putin's invasion, and even pacifist Christians are not allowed alternative civilian service instead of the army, contrary to their dignity and fundamental rights?
Why my friend, a Quaker and pacifist Oleksandr Ivanov, is detained in the army, his smartphone taken from him, there are no replies to my complaints and a court order to investigate his illegal conscription remains not executed?
Answer is simple: the so-called sovereign right of conscription that tramples into nothing all human rights. Centuries ago, it was imposed on Ukrainians by Russian empire, and in Soviet union some conscientious objectors were executed. Stalin sent them to Gulag, deported with their families to Siberia. The Empire is gone, Stalin is dead, but his policies on both sides perpetuate the Russian war of aggression and the Ukrainian defensive war.
By the way, it is Europe that allowed Putin to perpetuate his meat grinder. The court in Strasbourg in the case Dyagilev versus Russia decided that the state interests to conscript are more important than individual unwilling to fight wars. If the sovereignty means that citizens could be turned into slaves of militarism and cannon fodder, do you want such a sovereignty? I wish it would be better limited by international law. Conscription is cruel and immoral, like slavery, and it should be prohibited.
Now, do you see prohibition of conscription in Helsinki Accords? No. No wonder they failed.
You might ask how to force the sovereign governments to comply with such a prohibition. I see the hope for nonviolent enforcement of international law in the people's power to protest, to stop violent policies by civil disobedience. We need a world ruled by the people, for genuine needs of people in peace, not for corrupted interests of elites to divide and rule humankind and the Earth,to make nations rivals for profit from war and arms trade.
Fragile reconciliation among predatorial sovereigns, so-called great powers, agreed half a century ago in Helsinki, is now in ruins because it is impossible to bring genuine peace to international relations without bringing peace to every political community and every individual life.
The militarized sovereign nations calling themselves civilizations are mockery of any civility with their nuclear weapons able to kill all life on Earth, burn millions of innocent lives, with their conscription, taxation and deceitful propaganda of war.
The corrupt strongman advocate of sovereignty ruling Russia from Kremlin, wages the war of aggression, kills Ukrainians, destroys our cities andwhere is worldwide nonviolent resistance to Putin’s warmaking?
Where people don't believe in nonviolence, NATO and war industry is thriving at the public expense.
There is no way to end the war by surrendering to Putin and NATO our hope for the world without wars.
If you are not ready to resist the war peacefully, the war might happen in your country.
Your militarists will force you to serve in the army because you were not prepared to resist war and militarism nonviolently. If instead of genuine pacifism you appeased Putin and apologized for the Russian war of aggression, believing nonsensical propaganda that Ukraine must stay in the Russian imperial sphere of influence, as an enslaved buffer zone, gullibly accepting the myth that our anti-imperialism is somehow Nazi and instigated by the CIA -- Putin might believe that your country will not resist his lies and aggression, and he will bring war to your country. So you could too once be awakened by explosions of rockets on your streets, and then be dragged to the army kicking and screaming, your taxes will be spent on tools of murder instead of your welfare.
Ask yourself, Did you work enough to avoid that, to prepare your country, your society, your government for nonviolent resistance to war? To find alternatives to defensive war? Because if not, the army, the militarists will take charge when society faces a threat of war and you offered no nonviolent alternatives.
You might be persecuted for calls to peace and nonviolent action like I am, under trial and threat of prison for sending President Zelensky a statement of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement “Peace Agenda for Ukraine and the World”. You might be denied in the right to leave your country during the war and be deprived of protection and asylum in other countries because of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
I urge you to support not sovereignty but nonviolent democratic governance by dialogue, not tyrants and warmakers but conscientious objectors, not sovereign right to conscript for mass killing but the human right to refuse to kill.
A Culture of peace is a basis for implementation of the right to peace, the only path to common security. The delusions of absolute power and legitimacy of violent governance that underlies the concept of sovereignty is antithical to the genuine culture of peace, it is alternative democracy as everyday honest and free speaking on public matters, listening and seeking agreement among people, not beating, scaring and deceiving people into submission.
The international community would get rid of the scourge of war only if peace-centered democratic transformation would start everywhere, in minds, in societies, on our common planet.
So, I am concluding with a call to structural reform and transition from sovereignty to universal nonviolent governance on our common planet, recognition of the necessity of worldwide popular nonviolent resistance to all warmaking and military dictatorships, and the necessity to protect and empower conscientious objectors, because only when everyone will refuse to kill, will there be no wars in the world.
All of it happens in my country. Similar things, even worse, happen in Russia-occupied territories, where all dissent is suffocated and drowned in blood, where even children are forced to learn hate and train for war. But I despise the same policies sanctioned by my own government I voted for, tolerated by my people with whom I live in one country.
I urge you to support the Object War campaign helping to protect conscientious objectors in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus both at home and when they are forced to escape abroad, by doing all realistically possible.
Why Russia could so easily wage war of aggression against Ukraine, destroy our cities, kill our people? Why my people in Ukraine are obsessed with revenge, with an old superstition that justice could be achieved only by violence, by mass murder? Did we forget three nonviolent revolutions that changed our country for better and liberated us from the yoke of Russian imperialism? Why diplomacy and nonviolent action is not seriously used to end the Putin's invasion, and even pacifist Christians are not allowed alternative civilian service instead of the army, contrary to their dignity and fundamental rights?
Why my friend, a Quaker and pacifist Oleksandr Ivanov, is detained in the army, his smartphone taken from him, there are no replies to my complaints and a court order to investigate his illegal conscription remains not executed?
Answer is simple: the so-called sovereign right of conscription that tramples into nothing all human rights. Centuries ago, it was imposed on Ukrainians by Russian empire, and in Soviet union some conscientious objectors were executed. Stalin sent them to Gulag, deported with their families to Siberia. The Empire is gone, Stalin is dead, but his policies on both sides perpetuate the Russian war of aggression and the Ukrainian defensive war.
By the way, it is Europe that allowed Putin to perpetuate his meat grinder. The court in Strasbourg in the case Dyagilev versus Russia decided that the state interests to conscript are more important than individual unwilling to fight wars. If the sovereignty means that citizens could be turned into slaves of militarism and cannon fodder, do you want such a sovereignty? I wish it would be better limited by international law. Conscription is cruel and immoral, like slavery, and it should be prohibited.
Now, do you see prohibition of conscription in Helsinki Accords? No. No wonder they failed.
You might ask how to force the sovereign governments to comply with such a prohibition. I see the hope for nonviolent enforcement of international law in the people's power to protest, to stop violent policies by civil disobedience. We need a world ruled by the people, for genuine needs of people in peace, not for corrupted interests of elites to divide and rule humankind and the Earth,to make nations rivals for profit from war and arms trade.
Fragile reconciliation among predatorial sovereigns, so-called great powers, agreed half a century ago in Helsinki, is now in ruins because it is impossible to bring genuine peace to international relations without bringing peace to every political community and every individual life.
The militarized sovereign nations calling themselves civilizations are mockery of any civility with their nuclear weapons able to kill all life on Earth, burn millions of innocent lives, with their conscription, taxation and deceitful propaganda of war.
The corrupt strongman advocate of sovereignty ruling Russia from Kremlin, wages the war of aggression, kills Ukrainians, destroys our cities andwhere is worldwide nonviolent resistance to Putin’s warmaking?
Where people don't believe in nonviolence, NATO and war industry is thriving at the public expense.
There is no way to end the war by surrendering to Putin and NATO our hope for the world without wars.
If you are not ready to resist the war peacefully, the war might happen in your country.
Your militarists will force you to serve in the army because you were not prepared to resist war and militarism nonviolently. If instead of genuine pacifism you appeased Putin and apologized for the Russian war of aggression, believing nonsensical propaganda that Ukraine must stay in the Russian imperial sphere of influence, as an enslaved buffer zone, gullibly accepting the myth that our anti-imperialism is somehow Nazi and instigated by the CIA -- Putin might believe that your country will not resist his lies and aggression, and he will bring war to your country. So you could too once be awakened by explosions of rockets on your streets, and then be dragged to the army kicking and screaming, your taxes will be spent on tools of murder instead of your welfare.
Ask yourself, Did you work enough to avoid that, to prepare your country, your society, your government for nonviolent resistance to war? To find alternatives to defensive war? Because if not, the army, the militarists will take charge when society faces a threat of war and you offered no nonviolent alternatives.
You might be persecuted for calls to peace and nonviolent action like I am, under trial and threat of prison for sending President Zelensky a statement of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement “Peace Agenda for Ukraine and the World”. You might be denied in the right to leave your country during the war and be deprived of protection and asylum in other countries because of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
I urge you to support not sovereignty but nonviolent democratic governance by dialogue, not tyrants and warmakers but conscientious objectors, not sovereign right to conscript for mass killing but the human right to refuse to kill.
A Culture of peace is a basis for implementation of the right to peace, the only path to common security. The delusions of absolute power and legitimacy of violent governance that underlies the concept of sovereignty is antithical to the genuine culture of peace, it is alternative democracy as everyday honest and free speaking on public matters, listening and seeking agreement among people, not beating, scaring and deceiving people into submission.
The international community would get rid of the scourge of war only if peace-centered democratic transformation would start everywhere, in minds, in societies, on our common planet.
So, I am concluding with a call to structural reform and transition from sovereignty to universal nonviolent governance on our common planet, recognition of the necessity of worldwide popular nonviolent resistance to all warmaking and military dictatorships, and the necessity to protect and empower conscientious objectors, because only when everyone will refuse to kill, will there be no wars in the world.
- Yuri Sheliazhenko
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