Jan 26th, 2003 there was an anti-war protest in Prague. Here is the petition from its participants:
Open letter to President George W. Bush and Ambassador Craig Stapleton:
Forty-seven years ago, a woman named Lisa Kalvelage stopped a shipment of
US chemical weapons from being sent to Vietnam by standing on a loading
platform and telling her story. She was born in Germany before World War
Two, and after the war she married an American solider. When she applied to
accompany her new husband to the United States, she was asked what she had
done during the war. She said she was only a child. So, she was asked what
her parents did and the answer was: "Nothing." Her permit was refused
because an American consulate official said that she had not learned her
lesson about responsibility. Through this, she learned that silence is
complicity. She eventually did move to the US but she never forgot that
lesson, and when she saw another war being waged in her name she stood up
to protest.
Every war is different, but they all share one thing-the use of vast,
brutal and destructive violence which leads to further violence. I stand
with Lisa Kalvelage. You may not wage war in my name. I hereby officially
declare my dissent. I stand with the hundreds of thousands of Americans who
protested against war with Iraq last week. I stand with the 60 percent of
Czechs who do not want anything to do with your war. I also stand with
Russians against the war in Chechnya, with Israelis who protest brutality
against their neighbors, with Muslims the world over who decry so-called
"Islamic" terrorism, with Pakistanis and Indians who struggle against
nuclear war and with all those who are willing stick their own necks out in
order to make a contribution to peace.
I am well aware that war harms everyone involved, even those who cruise
above it in bombers. They return with scarred souls. If you send our
soldiers to fight, you must not only consider that they may die but also
that they will bring the violence home to our countries. If you arm
desperate groups in northern Iraq in order that they do your bidding, they
will carry your weapons into new wars. And, as so many times before, your
weapons will be turned against you, and against us. If you destroy a
country with bombs and uranium dust, you can not expect it to have a
positive result. The violence will create more violence.
I ask you not to use my tax monies to send Czech soldiers into a chemical
war or to buy the bombs you will drop on cities where innocent people live.
We need those funds here in the Czech Republic to repair our cities
devastated by floods. We need that money in America to secure health care,
to eradicate hunger and to revive education. We all need it to repair our
shaken climate and our battered earth.
This is my please. Find another way to make your economy turn. War will
bring us no future. War will not defeat those who commit violence against
us. Should we need justice, we must turn our attention and our resources
towards international law to see that it is enforced like the laws of any
single country. This will take time, hard work and patience but, until we
make this change, we will perpetuate a feudal system of ever-increasing
misery.
