(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Costa Rica is the peace movement's favorite example of a country that uses its resources to meet people's needs and interests instead of building military strength. The country has simply closed down its military, and is one of the very few countries that can rightly call itself a nation of peace.
Positive role models and examples of good practice are very important sources of inspiration, not least today when so many decisions go against the peace movement's hope for a world based on the premises of a culture of peace.
Anti-militaristic stance
The documentary A Bold Peace (En brave peace, 2016) by Matthew Eddy and Michael Dreiling is therefore very useful. The film shows Costa Rica's path to demilitarization, the country's fight against US interference in the area, the fight against multilateral corporations and against growing inequality.
President José Figureres converted the military to civilian use.
The film shows how the people in Costa Rica through various trials have strengthened their anti-militarist attitude and how proud they are of being a country that uses its resources on education, health and the environment – rather than on weapons. People in Costa Rica express that they are happy to have managed to keep away the fear that they, a tiny country, would be swallowed up by someone bigger. But who wants to attack a friendly country with no military forces and who doesn't want to fight anyone? A country that believes more in international law than military force, as they were also proven when Nicaragua invaded and took an area of land. A country that, with the help of a young law student, managed to get out of "the coalition of the willing" that the US had established to go to war in Iraq. A country with great moral weight. The film should be shown in the school curriculum.
Jose Figureres
Costa Rica was already demilitarized in 1948. The visionary, and down-to-earth, Jose Figureres Ferrer – called Don Pepe, the thinker and the farmer, three times president of Costa Rica – carried out a revolution against the ruling elite in collaboration with communists and Catholics.
A peace proposal for Ukraine that would involve the US withdrawing the nuclear weapons it has deployed in Europe.
Inspired by socialist utopian thinking and Tolstoy's pacifism, he converted the military to civilian use. With great courage he stood up to dictators. Symbolically, he smashed a military wall with a sledgehammer to make way for cultural activities and university studies. Figureres, who had a Catalan background, strengthened democracy by giving women and people of color the right to vote, and as president in 1949 he had Article 12 written into the constitution that Costa Rica should be without military power: "The army as a permanent institution is prohibited." It is somewhat similar to Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, called the peace clause or the pacifist clause, which assassinated Prime Minister Abe intensely tried to get rid of, but only – to great protest – got watered down in 2015 with a new so-called self-defense clause.
By closing down the military, and keeping a strong police force for law and order, Costa Rica has been able to use its resources on education, health and the environment. Instead of an army of soldiers, they have built one «army of teachers». The population today has a much higher level of education than the surrounding countries. Costa Rica is also at the top of the Happy Planet Index, which ranks countries based on their environmental commitment and happinessn and the health of its inhabitants. In the Dutch database on happiness, Costa Rica is also at the top in terms of self-reported happiness. «Happy are the mothers who don't have to å bury his sons, fell in strife», it is carved in stone at the country's important peace university, established by the UN General Assembly in 1980. In 2020, Costa Rica made 1 December "Day for the Disbanding of the Military", to celebrate and commemorate President Figureres' important decision.
Oscar Arias
Costa Rica has been under pressure both from the surrounding countries in Central America and from the United States. When US President Ronald Reagan tried to establish a US military base in Costa Rica, politicians managed to avoid a confrontation by making the country a neutral state based on the Hague Convention of 1907, which provides protection to small countries that do not want to take a stand in conflicts between larger countries or alliances.
... illegal to make war material on Norwegian soil.
When Óscar Arias was president of Costa Rica, he was not only concerned with peace in his own country. He set himself the goal of creating peace throughout Central America and worked intensively with the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to end the civil wars. In 1987, a peace plan was signed. The countries were to limit the size of the army, ensure freedom of the press and hold free and open elections. External influence was to be limited. In the same year, Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Among other things, Arias has used the prize to build up the Arias Foundation with a number of projects also in South America and Africa.
Óscar Arias is still a tireless spokesperson for disarmament and a culture of peace. I have had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times at the World Summit of Nobel Laureates, the annual summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners, established by Mikhail Gorbachev. Óscar Arias appears there as a great source of inspiration. This summer, together with Jonathan Granoff, he put forward a peace proposal for Ukraine which would involve the US withdrawing the nuclear weapons it has deployed in Europe, in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey in return for Russia not deploying nuclear weapons in Belarus. Europe, and the world, will end up in a much less dangerous situation and that will be able to provide a starting point for real peace negotiations.
Own Ministry of Peace
Costa Rica is one of the few countries that has established its own Ministry of Peace. Peace activists and politicians in many countries have worked purposefully over the years to establish a national peace ministry or directorate. So far it exists, as far as is known, only in Costa Rica, South Sudan, the Solomon Islands, Nepal and Ethiopia. But the idea is not new. Already in 1963, Harold Wilson, then British leader of Labour, expressed that he wanted to create a separate ministry for disarmament. Well over 50 years later, Jeremy Corbyn followed up as leader of Labor and appointed a minister for peace and disarmament in his shadow cabinet.
In Ethiopia, which had had a long-term war with Eritrea, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, with a background in peace studies, appointed a powerful, female peace minister. Both Abiy and Corbyn were encouraging role models. But Corbyn was unfortunately ignored in England, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy has recently used military means of force in his own country.
No one flees Costa Rica, and no one attacks.
When Costa Rica established the Ministry of Justice and Peace, Óscar Arias supported the establishment as an "inspiring approach that promotes both our fundamental social transformation and culture of peace, which distances us from violence and motivates us to become a peaceful society based on mutual understanding, harmony and non-violence'. For Oscar Arias was this so important that he sent a letter, apparently also to Norway, with a request to stop aid to countries that do not commit to establishing a ministry of peace.
In the international arena, Costa Rica is an active promoter of peace and disarmament, and the country's foreign policy is about resolving conflicts through dialogue and diplomatic means. For example, Costa Rica's UN ambassador had Elayne White a leading role in the negotiations that led to the UN Nuclear Weapons Prohibition, TPNW. Elayne White received the Sean MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau in 2019. Costa Rica was also one of the first states to ratify the nuclear weapons ban.
Costa Rica's diplomats were also central to the UN negotiations on The Right to Peace – first in the Human Rights Council in Geneva, then in FN in central New York. When civil society wants to raise peace-related issues in the UN, Costa Rica is the most natural place to ask.
When, in great impatience, I wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres early this spring and asked him to get to Moscow and Kyiv as soon as possible to achieve a ceasefire and peace agreement, an initiative that several international peace organizations and a number of former UN employees joined in, I asked both the Norwegian and Costa Rican UN delegations for assistance.
Non-violent means
Óscar Arias emphasizes that Costa Rica has no enemies and needs no army. No one flees Costa Rica and no one attacks. In any case, the size of their defense would be irrelevant and insufficient since the surrounding countries are larger and have the possibility of a stronger military defense. Imagine if such a realization could reach Norway! No matter how large a military defense Norway builds up, it will always be too small.
Maybe better then to build friendships and get together? Perhaps our parliamentarians could even be inspired to change our constitution, as Costa Rica has done, so that it becomes illegal to make war material on Norwegian soil?
If Finland and Sweden now become members of NATO, there will be very few neutral countries left in our part of the world, few countries that will be able to contribute unaided to negotiations and peace-promoting measures in tense situations – only Ireland, Switzerland and Austria. Instead, several countries should include in their constitutions that the country shall not participate in any war or armed conflict and not in any way help any country to prepare for war or other armed conflict, but that the country will instead actively promote international peace and justice by non-violent means.
Non-Aligned Nations
120 countries, primarily in the southern hemisphere, are members of the Organization of Non-Aligned Nations and 17 countries are observers. This is a significant proportion of the UN's 193 member states. The movement started in the 1950s as part of the decolonization processes. The Organization of Non-Aligned Nations was formally founded in 1961 by strong leaders such as Nkrumah in Ghana, Nehru in India, Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt and Tito in Yugoslavia. The new, free states wanted to be "positively neutral" towards the major power blocs and be given the peace to develop their own governance systems. They were not least opposed to what Nkrumah called nuclear imperialism. They did not want to be part of an East-West power struggle, but wanted closer contact between Africa, Asia and Latin America. Perhaps it is time to stop calling the countries in the South derogatory the Third World, while we in the West are the First World? Perhaps the non-aligned countries will now show the way?
This is an extract from a presentation at the Peace Symposium
in the Hardanger Academy for Peace, Development and the Environment, 29 July 2022.
Breines is former president of the International PEACE Bureau and former UNESCO director.
