ゲルニカを忘れないで（英文）
Do you remember Gernica?
The most unpardonable aspect of terrorism is that it is an indiscriminate murder.
The citizens who worked in the WTC towers and who were on board the hijacked planes were killed.
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”? （transl.by Keiichi Kanaya）
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.)