Rosemary Ruether replies to Elsa Tamez about her statement for reasons for not visiting the U.S.

----- Original Message ----- March 21, 2003
Letter (of Rosemary Ruether) to Elsa Tamez Professor of Biblical Studies
Biblical University San Juan, Costa Rica

Dear Elsa:

This last Wednesday, just one day before George Bush's long threatened
war against Iraq, began (officially, although one can ask if it ever
stopped, since the Gulf War twelve years ago), I received your letter in which
you declared a travel boycott against the United States and invited all
Christians from Latin America and the Caribbean to join you. I
immediately translated this letter into English and put it out on a number of email
lists, including those of the Graduate Theological Union here at
Berkeley, California. Many people might assume that your gesture is one of
hostility to the United States. I want you to know that I and many others here
greeted your letter with great appreciation and thanksgiving. I regard this
letter as an expression of high regard for how the United States should (and is
not) relating to the rest of the world.

Those of us who know a little history are well aware that the United
States has long behaved like a brutal imperial power toward poorer countries in

Latin America and elsewhere in the "two-thirds" world. Wealthy countries
in Europe, as well as rich elites throughout the world, have long tolerated

this behavior as being mainly in their interests. However since the
election of George Bush and his clique and their opportunistic response to the
September 11 attacks, this more frightening face of the United States
has taken on a higher visibility for conscientious people throughout the
world, including many in Europe and the United States. We see a country with an

overwhelming military budget that is approaching more than half of the
military expenditures of the rest of the world. We see the endless
production of high tech weapons, including new nuclear weaponry, and the

willingness to contemplate their first strike use in war. We see a
government that has announced a policy of preemptive military attack of
any nation that displeases us, without regard for the United Nations or for
domestic and world public opinion. We see this vast power as the
ultimate coercive force behind U.S. monopolization of the wealth of the whole
world at the expense of 85% of the people of the world. In short we see a very
dangerous rogue state whose behavior has sent shock waves throughout the
globe.

In the light of this dangerous conjunction of military and economic power in
the hands of a new stage of imperial empire, it is high time for a world
wide coalition to be formed, that not only voices opposition to this
unjust and violent use of power, but begins to imagine and organize around an
alternative vision of how world affairs needs to be constructed. This vision
has begun to be outlined in international gatherings, such as the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil this January (a gathering
studiously ignored by the U.S. media). This coalition needs to take many concrete
actions to critique the present U.S. policies and to envision alternatives
to them.

I believe that travel boycotts by theologians, church leaders and academics
can be one important gesture in that direction. Like the academic boycott of
travel to South Africa during the apartheid years, such gestures need to
operate in concert with many other strategies of boycott and alternative
organizing. One needs to remember that those anti-apartheid boycotts
were promoted by anti-apartheid South Africans themselves, not because they
hated their country, but because they loved their country and wanted to see it
liberated from the blight of apartheid. In a similar spirit I support
your gesture of travel boycott of the United States. I would like to see it
extended to Asian, African, Middle Eastern and European countries that
oppose the war. I think the boycott probably should be applied to
Britain as well, although I regard the United States as the primary culprit. Most
others in the "coalition of the willing" are more in the category of the

"coalition of the bribed and coerced," but without Britain's support the
United States' isolation from the rest of the world would be much more
evident.

Perhaps world wide Church bodies should announce a travel boycott
against the United States until the U.S. withdraws completely from Iraq. I would
like to say, until it renounces a policy of preemptive strikes against any
nation, but perhaps that is too long term a goal at the moment. If bodies,
such as the World Council of Churches and other world Christian
organizations, announced that they would promote no meetings in the
United States until it withdrew from Iraq that would send a message that might
at least make some Americans "stop and think." Most U.S. Americans have a
hard time taking seriously moral disapproval by the rest of the world. We
really do think we are the "best" country in the world, not only in wealth and
power, but also somehow in moral principles. We dismiss criticism by the
rest of the world as "anti-Americanism," motivated by low motives, such
as "jealousy" of our success. The message needs to come across to Americans
that this criticism is serious and is building.

Obviously I am not interested in a boycott that would further isolate U.S.
Americans from global criticism. We are already isolated enough. Our
mass media is largely an extension of the ideology of our national
government. Most Americans hear no alternative opinions or realities, which accounts
for their docility toward these policies. We need to hear criticism in ways
that make us wake up. Such criticism must come from people from the
two-thirds world particularly. We need to ask how this voice can be heard.
Publishing their views here is one important way. Hearing people such as yourself
in person is also vital. I don't want your voice to be silenced by your
boycott, but rather to be amplified. This is why I have translated your
letter and sent it out across the United States. Such a boycott needs to
be known, and its critical message amplified. This is one small step toward
building a global coalition of those who really believe that "a different
world is possible."

With heartfelt thanks,

Rosemary Ruether
Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology
Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, California


A Letter from Elsa Tamez to the Christians of Latin America

Friends of Latin America and the Caribbean Theologians Leaders of
Christian Churches Christians in General

In September of 2002 I made a promise not to travel to the United States
if President George W. Bush invaded Iraq; that decision has caused me to
cancel important commitments for this year. This option, which was made within
a circle of friends, I now want to make public because, on seeing how the
negotiations have unfolded and how the anguish in the world fearing war
and its consequences, and upon seeing how religion has been manipulated to
legitimate an act of cruelty, my indignation as a Christian theologian
and as a human being has reached its climax. The culminating deception of
Bush's foreign policy that impelled me as a theologian to share publicly
my decision was the final part of one of his press conferences in which he
affirmed that during the Iraqi war he would be praying for his soldiers
and for the people of Iraq. This, for honest Christians, is a total inversion
of Christian values that see in Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace and in
God the fullness of love and mercy. How is it possible to bombard a people
with weapons of mass destruction and pray for them at the same time!

I am united with the worldwide rejection of this war, and as a Christian
theologian I am united with the efforts and voices of Christian leaders
and theologians, Catholic and Protestant. As inhabitants of the planet we
are spectators of one of the most revealing episodes in the history of
humankind and one of the saddest. The agonizing struggle that large and small
countries are experiencing has centered most of all on a legal decision:
to approve or reject the attack on Iraq. Many elements are at stake, among
them: U.S. economic interests and power and the loss of similar interest
and power by rich countries that oppose the war. The poor countries matter
only because of their votes, and in these moments they are being pressured
and bought. Only the voices of the civilian population of all the
continents--intellectuals, artists, women's organizations, workers and
unemployed people, farmers, housewives and students of all countries,
visible in marches and surveys, including a large part of the people of
North America--manifest the true sense of "No to War." No more innocent
victims in anyone's name, not the law, not security, not liberty, not God.
If during the Persian Gulf War 150,000 people were killed, the
provisions of another war, with all the technological advances, will greatly surpass
the first war. If to capture Noriega they killed more than 5000 Panamenians
and to find Osama bin Laden already many tens of thousands have died in
Afghanistan, how many hundreds of thousands will need to be sacrificed
to level is lost if Washington launches the attack without the approval of the United Nations. This situation for Christians is a return to "suppress the truth by wickedness
(injustice)", Rom. 1:18, where structural sin becomes more and more visible, as in the
time of the Roman Empire.

But we as theologians know that the only law of God is grace, mercy and love
of neighbor; the only valid legality is that which is put to the service of
humanity because the law, pervaded with God's wisdom, was created to be
at the service of the human being, and not the human at the service of
legality. There are Christians who think they are doing the right thing
by approving of the war against Iraq. These persons are deceived: to make
war on a people already weakened and impoverished by the embargo--unjust but
legal--is very far from God's nature. God is known by God's grace and
mercy, and God calls us to act in the same way. In light of the facts, no
pretext at all is valid for bombarding a people: not dictator Saddam
Hussein nor any possible resolution by the United States or the United Nations
in favor of war.

From this small country, Costa Rica, a nation without an army and with
90% of the population against the war, I invite my theological colleagues,
church leaders, and all Christians in general throughout Latin America
to abstain from travel to the United States as a protest against the war
and to join the existing struggle against all chemical weapons and weapons of
mass destruction in any country of the world, beginning with those Western
countries that, surely, occupy the first places.

Elsa Tamez Theologian Professor of the Latin American Biblical
University
Member of the Ecumenical Department of Investigations
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