THE WORLD MARCH OF WOMEN AGAINST WAR IN IRAQ

Opgesteld tijdens de 4e Internationale Vergadering van de Wereldvrouwenmars, maart 2003, New Delhi

March 20, 2003

We, women of the World March representing 35 countries and territories, gathered in Delhi for the 4th international meeting of the World March, state our strongest and most determined opposition to the war that has begun started by the United States government and their allies against the Iraqi people. This unilateral declaration of war breaks with all international standards and with the very spirit of the UN Charter; furthermore, it ignores the will of the vast majority of peoples who have been marching by the millions throughout the world for weeks now. With this war, the United States government and their allies are acting as the cops of the world in order to control the oil market and remake the Middle East region according to their interests.

We, women of the World March, voice our total opposition to the use of armed intervention, which will create additional suffering and destruction in the region and in no way resolve the root problems. On the contrary, it will send thousands of refugees onto the roadways and exacerbate the poverty and humiliation of the affected peoples. In addition, it is likely to inflame the whole planet and aggravate the situation of peoples on all the continents.

We know from experience that war does not resolve the problems of injustice, absence of democracy, and oppression of peoples by dictatorships and outside powers. Women and children are always the principal victims of armed conflict, together with the most marginalized peoples.

Since our last meeting in Montréal in October 2001, when we reaffirmed our desire to live in a world free of war, armed conflicts have multiplied on all five continents. Thousands of innocent civilians have been victims of war cynically qualified as "humanitarian" or "low-intensity"; state violence; economic blockades; occupations; colonialism; genocide; patriarchal oppression ("honour crimes," domestic violence, genital
mutilation, and sex trafficking); and hunger and despair issuing from the intolerable inequality produced by the global economic system.

War fosters the unrelenting growth of the arms industry and military budgets to the detriment of health, education, social security and environmental protection programs.

Governments use it to justify the escalation of xenophobia and the further tightening of their borders, thereby erecting a fortress against immigrants and refugees; to endanger and even suppress civil rights and fundamental freedoms, particularly those of women; and to criminalize any opposition to the current state of neoliberal and sexist globalization.

We, women of the World March of Women:

• support the increasingly numerous voices of citizens and groups that in the United States and elsewhere in the world are calling for a radical change in course;

• demand that UN member States use their power to carry out the emergency application of resolution 377 to convene the United Nations General Assembly to stop the bombing and avoid catastrophe;

• affirm the urgent need for negotiated political resolution of all conflicts-processes in which women must take active part;

• and demand total prohibition of the production and sale of arms and demand
  that the States implement disarmament policies covering both classical arms and nuclear and biological weapons.

We, the delegates of the World March of Women, express our refusal of war by taking to the streets of Delhi together on Thursday, March 20, and demonstrating in a peaceful march.

We appeal to women worldwide to immediately mobilize, in particular by joining in all anti-war actions.