Feature

A campaign for real security

Two respected anti-war groups have merged. Andrew Haines explains why the new campaign, MEDACT, is urgently needed

A new organisation has been formed to bring together health professionals concerned with the preventing and ending conflict with others concerned with environmental degradation and underdevelopment.

MEDACT (Medical Action for Global Security) says in its founding statement that national security is indivisible from global security, and in future this must embrace the prevention of war and conflict by addressing its causes, which include hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, and the depletion and misuse of resources.

MEDACT was formed by merging the two previous UK affiliates of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) -- the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons and the Medical Association for Prevention of War -- combining (and extending) their aims, membership, and resources.

It first task has been to redefine the concept of ‘security’, to include recognition that it has social, cultural, economic, environmental, health, and political dimensions as well as military ones. Either security is collective and shared, or non-existent. MEDACT highlights the ethical responsibilities of health professionals in relation to war and the denial of human rights, and to the protection of children and future generations.

A key issue on MEDACT’s agenda during the next two years will be the health and environmental effects of military activities, both in war and in peace time: this will include campaigning for a ban on indiscriminate weapons such as landmines, the cause of so many casualties amongst civilians; calling for a total ban on nuclear tests; working with the IPPNW Commission to uncover the health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons production; campaigning for a reduction in military expenditure and diversion of resources to vital needs, such as health care, environmental protection, and development; and training health professionals in mediation and conflict resolution techniques.

MEDACT will be urging that HCFCs should be included in the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances. It also plans to highlight the massive transfer of resources from poor to rich which happens every year, in the form of debt repayments from South to North as well as inequitable terms of trade. Such a flow is unsustainable and against the long term interests of rich and poor alike.

At MEDACT’s launch conference in London in April, there was a consensus that health professionals have a key role to play in addressing these issues. The conference heard from Dr Eric Hoskins of the plight of Iraqi civilians, particularly children, in the wake of the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed on Iraq. Dr Aurora Bilbao of Spain, vice-president of IPPNW, reported on the recent educational campaign focused on the leaders of the CIS republics to limit, reduce, and finally abolish nuclear weapons in the region. Dr Robin Coupland of the International Committee of the Red Cross described hand grenade injuries in the refugee population of Cambodia.

The military machine is a formidable opponent. The US Department of Energy intends to spend $1.9bn on research and development for nuclear weapons next year, only $60m less than this year. According to Ruth Leger Sivard (World Military and Social Expenditure, 1991): ‘Next year the global military machine will spend $950bn, almost $500m a day. In the next decade, despite cuts in military spending, over eight trillion dollars is due to be spent on ‘world security’, most of it by the rich North’.

It is not enough to strive to prevent a recurrence of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we commemorate in August each year. Health professionals must urge the reconstruction of our global civilisation away from weapons of massive conventional firepower, away from the solution of conflict by violent means, and towards the search for answers to such urgent problems as widespread disease, poverty, famine, over-population and the deteriorating global environment.

These are enormous objectives. We cannot attempt them alone. But we have strong links with effective international organisations such as IPPNW, Greenpeace, United Nations Association and a range of professional organisations.

MEDACT accepts that in the words of Lester Brown, president of the World Watch Institute: ‘Building an environmentally sustainable future depends on restructuring the global economy. It also calls for major shifts in human reproductive behaviour and dramatic changes in values and lifestyles. Doing this quickly adds up to a revolution... If this environmental revolution succeeds, it will rank with the agricultural and industrial revolutions as one of the great economic and social transformations of human history’.

MEDACT’s president, Sir Raymond Hoffenberg, says: ‘If we are to achieve Health for All by the Year 2000, if we are to tackle the problems of development and the environment, and if we are to prevent disasters like Chernobyl, we must continue to campaign for real disarmament on grounds of health, common sense, and a practical commitment to a sustainable future’.

MEDACT welcomes participation from all health professionals both in activities at local group level and in helping to define and implement policy at national level. If you are interested, contact MEDACT, 601 Holloway Road, London N19 4DJ.