Call to People of Faith to Resist Capitalist Globalisation
and Work Together for Life-Enhancing Alternatives

PEACE FOR LIFE CONTINUATION COMMITTEE

2005 December 17

Peace for Life formed itself in response to a new chapter in global hegemony: the advent of the borderless war, the militarisation of the neo-liberal globalisation agenda-employing state terrorism to consolidate and expand economic, political, cultural and military domination. The United States in its unrivalled position as a lone superpower is the new empire, escalating its global dominance and taking more and more the function of world governance in the interest of capitalist owners. September 11 became the pretext for the war on terror; Afghanistan the first victim of its show of force, and to the ‘axis of evil,’ a warning. But it was the invasion and occupation of Iraq that the depravity of imperial expansionism revealed itself.

As a multi-religious movement for peace and justice engaged in building people’s solidarity and in mobilising faith-based resistance to the war on terror and destructive forces of corporate globalisation, we at Peace for Life have chosen to hold a roundtable on “WTO, the Empire and Religious Wars: Taking the Faith Communities to the Front Lines” in Hong Kong to coincide with the World Trade Organization (WTO) 6th Ministerial Conference (13th to the 18th of December 2005) and join the thousands of protesters belonging to the growing global alliance against free-market globalisation.

Our Common Cause

“WTO Kills Farmers!” chant the Korean farmers in protest as they plunged the frigid waters of the Hong Kong Harbour in a symbolic gesture that says no obstacle is too formidable to stop them in their resistance. And all throughout the week-long mass action, they together with other anti-globalisation protesters from all over the world march and shout with their fists in the air. They stage performances and rituals, conduct sit-ins, and, on few occasions, clash with riot police, suffering pepper spray, tear gas, batons, fire hoses, and imprisonment for some. They gather to protest against WTO and its policies. We come in support and in solidarity, and to strengthen our ranks. We come to plan our courses of action and take part in the struggle to overturn the gospel of free trade and liberalised economy.

Within the gleaming walls of the heavily fortified Hong Kong Convention Centre, government ministers and leaders of international organisations and trade decide the fate of the livelihood of millions worldwide. There, the representatives from the industrial North and those from the global South compromise to make a fair deal and thresh out differences for the furtherance of free trade. But we see the problem with WTO not merely as an issue of “fair deal.” The problem with WTO is that it is there at all, an exclusive club controlled by the world’s business colossi, clearing the way for finance capital, subjecting all available resources wherever to the logic of capital accumulation, opening them for exploitation by multinational corporations, and convincing state governments that free trade along with free movement of capital-human and environmental costs notwithstanding-is the only way to prosperity.

In our grossly unequal world, the total liberalisation of the world economy and trade will result in even greater tragedy. Policies and measures imposed by the IMF, World Bank and WTO towards this end have crippled economies and weakened the social fabric: exacerbating venality within state bureaucracies, existing inequalities in various aspects of power relations, and mass poverty. For the majority of the world’s people, women and children especially, the liberalisation agenda means suffering the violence of depredation-loss of jobs, destruction of farms, demise of emergent national industries, compromised food security, erosion of social services, growing insecurity, environmental degradation.

Dictates of Our Faiths

As people of faith, we confess to religion’s complicity. Religion today, more than any other time within the last century, has become a major justification of social and political action. The Christian Right, not only in the United States but worldwide, is in the forefront of ideologies that justify economic, political and military hegemony. Guilty, too, are the other churches that are not unambiguous in their rejection of imperial capitalist globalisation for they obscure the life and death issues that threaten humanity and the earth.

We feel for the victimised-both for those who in the face of suffering, despair, alienation, and insecurity are driven to nihilism and collective fury to become the victimiser; and their victims of terror, made to suffer for the sins of their leaders. We see religion as a source of strength and unity; it is also fountain of hatred and terror. Empire builders have always exploited religion to make the spread of empire (and the rise of emperors) a divine inevitability, and to transform their enemies into devil incarnates, blamed for the miseries of humanity and to whom people’s rage should be directed. Empires fostered religious wars.

We believe that religious bigotry can be confronted by forging solidarity among faith communities in a common struggle against all forces of injustice and exploitation. We are committed to mobilise faith communities to work with people and people’s movements to unleash the original power of faith for peace built on justice and to develop an inter-faith movement of this resistance against imperial globalization and of common work for life-enhancing alternatives.

We celebrate the courage to take action and heroism in the struggle for a better world and the fullness of life; the spirituality of resistance that sees God’s mission in context and recognises faith as social obligation and moral responsibility that operates in the realm of social justice, economic order, political organisation, cultural development, and integrity of creation.

We challenge everyone in the faith communities to recognise that peace can only realized by unmasking the powers, their religion, systems and institutions that perpetuate war and injustice; and that the struggle against empire is integral to this.

We take cognisance of the World Council of Churches 9th Assembly in February 2006 and acknowledge the momentousness of its theme “God, in your grace, transform the world.” The imperatives of transformation, however, require analysis of concrete lives of people and local realities as well as power relations and control of resources at the global level.

We see the World Council of Churches’ Decade to Overcome Violence (DOV) as a challenge to the Christian community to root out and address the sources of violence, including economic structural violence. We urge greater engagement of the ecumenical community in the process of resistance against neo-liberal globalization and work for “Alternative Globalization Addressing People and Earth” (AGAPE).