The surreal events of 2001 remain the most haunting and perplexing of the Twentieth Century so far, they may very well remain so until the year 2099. Not only the attacks of September 11th, but so too also the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. Two years later came the nightmare of the Iraq invasion also.
When 9/11 took place, Pope John Paul II was still in the Vatican.
The day after those events, he stated:
I cannot begin this audience without expressing my profound sorrow at the terrorist attacks which yesterday brought death and destruction to America, causing thousands of victims and injuring countless people. To the President of the United States and to all American citizens I express my heartfelt sorrow. In the face of such unspeakable horror we cannot but be deeply disturbed. I add my voice to all the voices raised in these hours to express indignant condemnation, and I strongly reiterate that the ways of violence will never lead to genuine solutions to humanity’s problems.
Yesterday was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity. After receiving the news, I followed with intense concern the developing situation, with heartfelt prayers to the Lord. How is it possible to commit acts of such savage cruelty? The human heart has depths from which schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a moment the normal daily life of a people. But faith comes to our aid at these times when words seem to fail. Christ’s word is the only one that can give a response to the questions which trouble our spirit. Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say. Christian hope is based on this truth; at this time our prayerful trust draws strength from it.
With deeply felt sympathy I address myself to the beloved people of the United States in this moment of distress and consternation, when the courage of so many men and women of good will is being sorely tested. In a special way I reach out to the families of the dead and the injured, and assure them of my spiritual closeness. I entrust to the mercy of the Most High the helpless victims of this tragedy, for whom I offered Mass this morning, invoking upon them eternal rest. May God give courage to the survivors; may he sustain the rescue-workers and the many volunteers who are presently making an enormous effort to cope with such an immense emergency. I ask you, dear brothers and sisters, to join me in prayer for them. Let us beg the Lord that the spiral of hatred and violence will not prevail. May the Blessed Virgin, Mother of Mercy, fill the hearts of all with wise thoughts and peaceful intentions.
Today, my heartfelt sympathy is with the American people, subjected yesterday to inhuman terrorist attacks which have taken the lives of thousands of innocent human beings and caused unspeakable sorrow in the hearts of all men and women of good will. Yesterday was indeed a dark day in our history, an appalling offence against peace, a terrible assault against human dignity.
I invite you all to join me in commending the victims of this shocking tragedy to Almighty God' s eternal love. Let us implore his comfort upon the injured, the families involved, all who are doing their utmost to rescue survivors and help those affected.
I ask God to grant the American people the strength and courage they need at this time of sorrow and trial.
The first official death from the 9/11 attacks was an Irish American Catholic priest, Father Michael Fallon Judge, who was killed during duty as a New York City Fire Department chaplain.
Weeks after, promises of a swift war against the Taliban had led to a cautious approach from the Vatican.
Yet within weeks, it was apparent that a serious humanitarian situation was developing.
In early October, Caritas were already warning of a dire catastrophe. On the 23rd of October, they wrote:
Caritas Internationalis, an international confederation of Catholic humanitarian organisations, has appealed for 11 million dollars to aid the people of Afghanistan.
From its headquarters in Vatican City, Caritas has asked its network to provide funds to care for the estimated two million refugees currently in camps in Pakistan and support health and nutrition programmes inside Afghanistan.As winter approaches, millions of Afghanis on both sides of the border with Pakistan are in desperate need of food and shelter.
The food situation in Afghanistan was already precarious before the current crisis erupted in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, with one out of every four Afghanis dependent on food assistance for survival.
Three consecutive years of drought and 22 years of war have led to economic deprivation and tremendous hardship for the Afghan people, and escalation of fighting has compounded their misery.
Women in particular have suffered greatly. Thousands have been widowed, and many have no means of supporting themselves and their children.
In the wake of Allied bombings across Afghanistan, the United Nations estimates that at least one million more people may attempt to flee across the currently closed border with Pakistan, and over two million more could be internally displaced.
In November of that year, the pope was decrying the unfolding situation:
As we thank God for all that the fields produced this year, we must not forget those brothers and sisters in different parts of the world who are deprived of essential goods, such as food, water, a home and health care. At this time of great international concern, I am thinking especially of the peoples of Afghanistan, who must urgently receive necessary aid. This is a world emergency, which, however, does not allow us to forget that in other parts of the world there continue to be conditions of great and compelling need.
As indiscriminate violence against Afghans rose under Skull and Bones/Fabian Society members George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Pope John Paul II used this World Day of Peace message to speak out against violence that was vengeful and targeted at innocent people.
The World Day of Peace this year is being celebrated in the shadow of the dramatic events of 11 September last. On that day, a terrible crime was committed: in a few brief hours thousands of innocent people of many ethnic backgrounds were slaughtered. Since then, people throughout the world have felt a profound personal vulnerability and a new fear for the future. Addressing this state of mind, the Church testifies to her hope, based on the conviction that evil, the mysterium iniquitatis, does not have the final word in human affairs. The history of salvation, narrated in Sacred Scripture, sheds clear light on the entire history of the world and shows us that human events are always accompanied by the merciful Providence of God, who knows how to touch even the most hardened of hearts and bring good fruits even from what seems utterly barren soil.
This is the hope which sustains the Church at the beginning of 2002: that, by the grace of God, a world in which the power of evil seems once again to have taken the upper hand will in fact be transformed into a world in which the noblest aspirations of the human heart will triumph, a world in which true peace will prevail.
Recent events, including the terrible killings just mentioned, move me to return to a theme which often stirs in the depths of my heart when I remember the events of history which have marked my life, especially my youth.
The enormous suffering of peoples and individuals, even among my own friends and acquaintances, caused by Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, has never been far from my thoughts and prayers. I have often paused to reflect on the persistent question: how do we restore the moral and social order subjected to such horrific violence? My reasoned conviction, confirmed in turn by biblical revelation, is that the shattered order cannot be fully restored except by a response that combines justice with forgiveness. The pillars of true peace are justice and that form of love which is forgiveness.
But in the present circumstances, how can we speak of justice and forgiveness as the source and condition of peace? We can and we must, no matter how difficult this may be; a difficulty which often comes from thinking that justice and forgiveness are irreconcilable. But forgiveness is the opposite of resentment and revenge, not of justice. In fact, true peace is “the work of justice” (Is 32:17). As the Second Vatican Council put it, peace is “the fruit of that right ordering of things with which the divine founder has invested human society and which must be actualized by man thirsting for an ever more perfect reign of justice” (Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 78). For more than fifteen hundred years, the Catholic Church has repeated the teaching of Saint Augustine of Hippo on this point. He reminds us that the peace which can and must be built in this world is the peace of right order—tranquillitas ordinis, the tranquillity of order (cf. De Civitate Dei, 19,13).
True peace therefore is the fruit of justice, that moral virtue and legal guarantee which ensures full respect for rights and responsibilities, and the just distribution of benefits and burdens. But because human justice is always fragile and imperfect, subject as it is to the limitations and egoism of individuals and groups, it must include and, as it were, be completed by the forgiveness which heals and rebuilds troubled human relations from their foundations. This is true in circumstances great and small, at the personal level or on a wider, even international scale. Forgiveness is in no way opposed to justice, as if to forgive meant to overlook the need to right the wrong done. It is rather the fullness of justice, leading to that tranquillity of order which is much more than a fragile and temporary cessation of hostilities, involving as it does the deepest healing of the wounds which fester in human hearts. Justice and forgiveness are both essential to such healing.
It is these two dimensions of peace that I wish to explore in this message. The World Day of Peace this year offers all humanity, and particularly the leaders of nations, the opportunity to reflect upon the demands of justice and the call to forgiveness in the face of the grave problems which continue to afflict the world, not the least of which is the new level of violence introduced by organized terrorism.
It is precisely peace born of justice and forgiveness that is under assault today by international terrorism. In recent years, especially since the end of the Cold War, terrorism has developed into a sophisticated network of political, economic and technical collusion which goes beyond national borders to embrace the whole world. Well-organized terrorist groups can count on huge financial resources and develop wide-ranging strategies, striking innocent people who have nothing to do with the aims pursued by the terrorists.
When terrorist organizations use their own followers as weapons to be launched against defenceless and unsuspecting people they show clearly the death-wish that feeds them. Terrorism springs from hatred, and it generates isolation, mistrust and closure. Violence is added to violence in a tragic sequence that exasperates successive generations, each one inheriting the hatred which divided those that went before. Terrorism is built on contempt for human life. For this reason, not only does it commit intolerable crimes, but because it resorts to terror as a political and military means it is itself a true crime against humanity.
Importantly, he wrote:
There exists therefore a right to defend oneself against terrorism, a right which, as always, must be exercised with respect for moral and legal limits in the choice of ends and means. The guilty must be correctly identified, since criminal culpability is always personal and cannot be extended to the nation, ethnic group or religion to which the terrorists may belong. International cooperation in the fight against terrorist activities must also include a courageous and resolute political, diplomatic and economic commitment to relieving situations of oppression and marginalization which facilitate the designs of terrorists. The recruitment of terrorists in fact is easier in situations where rights are trampled upon and injustices tolerated over a long period of time.
It was because of this point that the Washington Post noted in 2002 that:
The Vatican, however, has been reluctant to endorse the U.S. military response to the terrorist assault and pointedly called for the military to exercise care to prevent the harming of civilians. John Paul has declined to declare the fighting in Afghanistan a "just war," an official option open to him.
In his Easter message that year, he prayed:
In how many corners of the world do we hear the cry
of those who implore help, because they are suffering and dying:
from Afghanistan, terribly afflicted in recent months
and now stricken by a disastrous earthquake,
to so many other countries of the world
where social imbalances and rival ambitions still torment
countless numbers of our brothers and sisters.
Over the next number of years, Afghanistan became no less violent, but the world’s attention turned instead to the new nightmare of the Iraq War, which was far more vehemently opposed by the Vatican.
The wars in Afghanistan were unfortunately called a ‘crusade’ by George W. Bush, who was a member of a secret society called Skull and Bones. This perception has all but disappeared today in the West, but it was a powerful one at the time and it was a powerful one in the Islamic world, even though the ghouls of the Bush’s Republican Party and and Blair’s Labour Party, the twin evils of neoconservatism and neoliberalism were as antithetical to Christianity as they were to Islam.
Pope John Paul II’s warning about restraint in seeking justice against terrorism was not listened too unfortunately.
The tortures of innocent Afghan civilians by American soldiers at Bagram prison are comparable to any stories from Concentration Camps or Gulags in the Twentieth Century.
645 prisoners had been held there in total over a number of years. A report in the New York Times (which must bear some responsibility for the crimes they are reporting on) stated:
(W)hat happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations. The investigative file on Bagram, obtained by The Times, showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs -- the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq
Two of the prisoners at Bagram were innocent Afghanis who were brutally murdered in a sadistic style that that Taliban would flinch at.
One of them, Mullah Habibullah, was killed from a pulmonary embolism thanks to repeated blows to his legs.
Another, Dilawar of Yakubi, was an innocent taxi man who was imprisoned because of false information provided to avail of a bounty. This is a sketch of his torture.
His cause of death was something you would scarcely see in a film like Schindler’s List. They included, a black hood pulled over his head limiting his ability to breathe, knee strikes to the abdomen, Over 100 peroneal strikes (a nerve behind the kneecap), being shoved against a wall, being pulled by his beard, having his bare feet stepped on, kicks to the groin, being chained to the ceiling for extended hours, slammed his chest into a table front. Female soldier Sergeant Selena Salcedo admitted to mistreating Dilawar and received a rap on the knuckles for it.
Dilawar’s brutalised legs
The New York Times wrote:
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. "Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying. Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
During torture, he would scream ‘Allah’ which elicited laughter from the American soldiers, who delivered more peroneal strikes in order to hear the screams again. This lasted for 24 hours.
Dilawar
NATO soldiers who served in Afghanistan will recall that they followed orders and most did what was asked of them, but with defeat after 20 years, Pope John Paul II’s words ring true. An entire nation was targeted for the crimes of the few (who had Saudi, not Afghan passports).
It is not easy, but forgiveness and desire for peace is always the least injurious course of action, not only towards others, but also towards ourselves.
But what does forgiveness actually mean? And why should we forgive? A reflection on forgiveness cannot avoid these questions. Returning to what I wrote in my Message for the 1997 World Day of Peace (“Offer Forgiveness and Receive Peace”), I would reaffirm that forgiveness inhabits people's hearts before it becomes a social reality. Only to the degree that an ethics and a culture of forgiveness prevail can we hope for a “politics” of forgiveness, expressed in society's attitudes and laws, so that through them justice takes on a more human character.
Forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil. The measure of such a decision is the love of God who draws us to himself in spite of our sin. It has its perfect exemplar in the forgiveness of Christ, who on the Cross prayed: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).
Forgiveness therefore has a divine source and criterion. This does not mean that its significance cannot also be grasped in the light of human reasoning; and this, in the first place, on the basis of what people experience when they do wrong. They experience their human weakness, and they want others to deal leniently with them. Why not therefore do towards others what we want them to do towards us? All human beings cherish the hope of being able to start all over again, and not remain for ever shut up in their own mistakes and guilt. They all want to raise their eyes to the future and to discover new possibilities of trust and commitment.
9. Forgiveness therefore, as a fully human act, is above all a personal initiative. But individuals are essentially social beings, situated within a pattern of relationships through which they express themselves in ways both good and bad. Consequently, society too is absolutely in need of forgiveness. Families, groups, societies, States and the international community itself need forgiveness in order to renew ties that have been sundered, go beyond sterile situations of mutual condemnation and overcome the temptation to discriminate against others without appeal. The ability to forgive lies at the very basis of the idea of a future society marked by justice and solidarity.
By contrast, the failure to forgive, especially when it serves to prolong conflict, is extremely costly in terms of human development. Resources are used for weapons rather than for development, peace and justice. What sufferings are inflicted on humanity because of the failure to reconcile! What delays in progress because of the failure to forgive! Peace is essential for development, but true peace is made possible only through forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not a proposal that can be immediately understood or easily accepted; in many ways it is a paradoxical message. Forgiveness in fact always involves an apparent short-term loss for a real long-term gain. Violence is the exact opposite; opting as it does for an apparent short‑term gain, it involves a real and permanent loss. Forgiveness may seem like weakness, but it demands great spiritual strength and moral courage, both in granting it and in accepting it. It may seem in some way to diminish us, but in fact it leads us to a fuller and richer humanity, more radiant with the splendour of the Creator.
My ministry at the service of the Gospel obliges me, and at the same time gives me the strength, to insist upon the necessity of forgiveness. I do so again today in the hope of stirring serious and mature thinking on this theme, with a view to a far-reaching resurgence of the human spirit in individual hearts and in relations between the peoples of the world.
