8. April 2020

WILPF Italy Statement: Women on Front Line to demand the End of Wars

We support strongly the appeal of UN General Secretary for the immediate ceasefire of all the conflicts.

We the women are the first victims of the great threats impending over humanity: wars, environmental disasters and ecological imbalances, nuclear threat, social inequity and poverty increased by the public debt. Although we are obscured by the atavistic male power, we have been active in order to oppose the dominant negativity, challenging the violence of patriarchal culture and activating ourselves to knock down the “gender barriers” that limit us strongly in the expression of all our potential, functional to an overall improvement of society.

We, the women of the North and the South of the world, relying on an international networking consolidated at Pekin in 1995 ( plan of action), are vindicating long-standing the improvement of our “status” simultaneously with the vindication of the guarantee of the combination peace- development.

The current “global emergency” of the pandemic Covid19 unmasks the uselessness of the “militarized security”, based on the extremely expensive and dangerous arms, nuclear and of other types. We the women appeal to the evidence of facts and reiterate with strength and determination the urgent necessity of the only security worthy of this name: “human security,” i.e. the one that guarantees “all the human rights for everyone”, beginning from the right to health through efficient and globally coordinated sanitary structures.

To demand the immediate ceasefire of all wars means to understand that, in order to come out from the global calamity underway, immediate financial and human resources are needed, and that they must be inverted to solve the urgent sanitary, social, economic problems.

The “after Covid19” must be based on a peace economy, without wars, without fossil fuels, without massive destruction arms, without public debt.
The “after” must be inspired by a real model of sustainable development, inspired, ”nourished” by a deep alliance between human beings and nature.

The 8th of March, in Madrid, the final day of the Second World March for Peace and Nonviolence _ – that walked along 97 countries in 5 continents – we the women relaunched our commitment “with” life so that humanity recover the sense of species and the awareness that all of us are an only person.

Let’s start off the transition to the new world we want calling for:
the end of wars, including the economic ones, in order to realize “human justice” and “climatic justice”
the end of the enemy culture in order to develop and strengthen the culture of solidarity and international cooperation for the safeguard of “common goods” of humanity.

  • Wilpf-Italia (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom)
  • AWMR (Association Women’s Mediterranean Region)
  • WIDF (Women’s International Democratic Federation)
  • DIN-Italia (Donne in Nero)