Being church today in Africa by Samuel Kobia

The first year of the third millennium has been permanently marked by the events that have radically changed the world as we have known it. The bombings on September 11 of New York City and Washington, DC in the USA must be condemned for their gross violation of the sanctity of life. While the destruction of the icons of economic and military might of the only superpower in the world could well be considered as a dramatic way of expressing grievances, there is no justification whatsoever for the violent ending of lives of thousands of innocent people.

In response to the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon President Bush declared what he defines as "the first war of the twenty-first century". As church we must take the language of war extremely seriously because it means more destruction of more innocent lives. From a Christian perspective it is not ethically and spiritually acceptable to speak lightly of war. The perpetrators of the bombings must be made to account, but that ought to be done within the context of a broader commitment to justice and in the framework of international law.

To justify the bombing of Afghanistan the US evokes Article 51 of the UN Charter on the right to self-defense. But as Geoffrey Robertson, a leading British human rights lawyer, correctly argues, "self-defense is a primitive doctrine, severely limited in a necessity which is instant and overwhelming."

In our view it would have been preferable to use the precedent set by the UN Security council in dealing with crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia or genocide in Rwanda. While awaiting for the coming into being of the International Criminal Court, the UN Security council could have been asked to establish an ad hoc tribunal to try the prime suspect Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government key leaders who have harbored and supported him and his Al Qaida organisation. That approach could have met wider acceptance internationally than the indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan that the US and her allies have opted for. As Robertson further observes, "the murder of enemy leaders cannot be a legitimate objective of any modern war. It was, admittedly, Churchill's preferred fate for top Nazis, but Truman insisted on that trial at Nuremberg because "'undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt, fairly arrived at, would not sit easily on the American conscience to be remembered by our children with pride.' Tony Blair should remind the US President of those words…" It is very unlikely that many Americans today are aware of those well thought-out views of their former president.

But besides talking of war we must look at the situation more critically. We should be concerned with the language of war from the White House because it exhibits the mentality of religious dualist fundamentalism strikingly similar to the language of the Taliban. Whether it is Christian or Muslim, fundamentalism and religious extremism is dangerous, as we know from history. The dual-istic mentality that only sees "good and evil", "right and wrong", and refuses to accept the moral ambiguity of human existence suggests that the only way to respond to violence is through violence. The leader of the only superpower in the world goes on to intimidate the weaker nations: you are either on our side or on the side of the terrorists, there is no third way! He asks us to condemn the killings of innocent people by the terrorists (which we of course do), but in the same breath he asks us to support the killings of other innocent people by Americans and British (which we of course cannot do). Our answer should be to denounce and condemn any killings of innocent people anywhere in the world and by anybody in the world. As Christians we must say very clearly that there is an alternative way; the way of cultivating peace with justice for all; the way of restorative justice which provides true peace and security for the nations and peoples of our world.

We should gain a clear perspective of what is at stake. The world is being led on the warpath not only because of the loss of six thousand lives, but more so because the security of the rich has been threatened. We are all well aware that the security of millions of poverty stricken Americans alongside that of the majority of two-thirds of the world population is in a permanent state of threat. Their security is threatened by not only the silent violence of hunger, starvation and disease, but by real violence that leads to death, albeit in less dramatic ways than the events of September 11th. But the death of the millions of the wretched of the earth does not threaten the security of the rich and powerful and therefore does not motivate the President of America to lead the world to war against poverty and injustices. Nor did the death of hundreds of Kenyans at the hands of terrorists elicit similar response from the White House. It may well be that September 11th could have been avoided if America had declared war against terrorism after the East Africa bombings of 1998. But those who died then, by the hundreds, were not Americans but Africans whose lives matter little to the rich and powerful in the USA.

The church is called to lead in seeking for the root cau-ses of the increasing violence in the world. The September 11th bombings should serve as a wake-up call to humankind in the twenty-first century. One of the lessons to learn from those events is that security does not flow from the fountain of riches and military might. Rather security can only be guaranteed by just relations between nations and between peoples. The other lesson to learn is that the security and safety of the few will be an illusion until the security of the majority can also be realised.

The reality of September 11th compels us to ask again what kind of world human beings have been busy building in the preceding centuries of the second millennium and whether it serves humanity well to maintain the status quo.

While Africa might consider it as a noble duty to join the world in condemnation of the perpetrators of the terrible events of September 11th, Africans should also feel ethically bound and gather the courage to tell the Americans and their European allies to review their foreign policies and the way they have hitherto been running the world. Their policies towards Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) for instance, have in no small measure, directly and indirectly caused the death of millions of innocent people. The current war in the DRC, which is a legacy of the American and Belgian involvement, has claimed the lives of an estimated three million people.

If the twenty-first century will be a time to right the wrongs of the previous centuries, then it must be characterised by repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. The unacknowledged and unrepented wrongs of the past must be dealt with honestly and fully in order to recover the dignity of the victims and reclaim the humanity of the perpetrators. That would be a huge step towards the realisation of restorative justice.

In this context even the church needs to repent. The church has contributed to the building of a world that perpetuates injustice, oppression and exploitation. Even in Africa the church has served as a lubrication of the wheels of oppression during the colonial period. In the post-colonial time some sections of the church in Africa have condoned despotic leadership and sanitised political tyrants. But the church, at all levels including internationally, must insist on ethical dimensions of relations between nations.

Excerpt from an address by Samuel Kobia at the 2001 graduation of St. Paul's United Theological College, Limuru.
Rev. Dr Sam Kobia, from Kenya, is executive director of the Cluster on Issues and Themes of the World Council of Churches.