WORLD CITIZENS CALL FOR EFFECTIVE MEASURES TO STOP ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS AND BUILD PEACE IN LEBANON

Forty years ago, the French pop band Gold topped the charts with a ballad called Ville de Lumière (City of Light), a song whose protagonist was a fighter from one of the warring factions in Lebanon. Crying from afar over his beloved capital, Beirut, the soldier concluded, “I know I will never see you again, City of Light, What have they made of me?”.

The Association of World Citizens (AWC) is appalled to see that a forty-year-old song which should be a beautiful musical memory by now might as well have been written yesterday. Once again, Lebanon is being torn apart by violence, with Lebanese civilians being targeted by the invading Israeli Defense Force (IDF) while Israeli citizens come under attack from the oppressive Hezbollah militia and, over the Syrian border where the Iran-backed militia used to assist the Assad dynasty’s barbaric war on their own people, both the IDF and Hezbollah are striking a nation and people barely starting to heal and build a new future.

None of these three countries needs to have more fighters killed in combat or civilians slaughtered by invading forces. None of the three countries needs to have its own “cities of light” turn dark forever. While the negotiations undertaken between the United States and Iran appear to offer a ray of hope, nothing can be truly resolved if the goal is only, as happens all but systematically in the Middle East, to reach a quick-fix, dead-end ceasefire.

Even though negotiations are undoubtedly needed, these need to finally address the long-term core issues fueling hostility and conflict between Israel and Lebanon, now also involving Syria as an unwilling third party. Having hostilities cease while leaving the causes for conflict unaddressed has only led in the past to such massacres as Sabra and Shatila in 1982, Qana in 1996, and Qana a second time in 2006. Every day that passes places all three countries at risk of a new tragedy of that nature.

Therefore, the AWC calls for urgent, honest, and comprehensive negotiations between all stakeholders with a view to ending the ongoing violence between Lebanon, Israel, and Syria, as well as to finally addressing the core issues between Israel and Lebanon which have already been allowed to create more inhumanity than a land of three faiths can possibly tolerate.

It is up to the leaders of all parties to the current conflict to ensure that, as the song turns forty, no “city of light” gets turned off this time.

Prof. René Wadlow
President

Bernard J. Henry
External Relations Officer

Cherifa Maaoui
Liaison Officer,
Middle East & North Africa