St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has written to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, and President Joe Biden of the United States, calling for an end to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“I write in a quest for global peace, justice, security, prosperity for all humanity, grounded in the fundamental tenets of international law, the precepts of the Charter of the United Nations, and multilateral engagement,” Gonsalves said in his December 2 letter which was also copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres.
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“I am making a humble plea for an honorable, negotiated end, immediately, to the war in Ukraine,” Gonsalves said in his letter, which was also copied to heads of state and government of members of the United Nations.
Gonsalves in his letter, which his office released to the media on Monday, noted that the war has been raging since February 2022 and has “recently entered a most dangerous phase of escalation which portends unthinkable nuclear Armageddon.
“To civilized men and women across the globe, this war is senseless as it has been brutal and completely unnecessary. It is as though the most powerful and advanced nations of the world have learned nothing of lasting value from the history of humankind.”
He said the main combatants, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, fully backed by the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led principally by the United States, “appear to the bulk of humanity’s eight billion people to be gripped by an extreme condition of unreason, in practical disregard not only of life and limb, blood and treasure of their own peoples but of the knock-on global effects of additional pain and suffering for the rest of us, including possibly the collapse of human civilization as we have come to know it.
“Ordinary men and women across the world have become helpless bystanders to a seemingly inevitable march to their own destruction, even their extinction. Surely, it is beyond time to stop this war which, to most of us, has a tribal ferocity that is well-nigh incomprehensible.”
Gonsalves said he has followed the course of the war very closely from its beginnings and through its various twists and turns.
He said he has read, from various standpoints of the war’s “origins, meanderings, all the accusations and counter-accusations, and the military operations on the ground.
“It is evident to all persons of reason, who also apply their hearts to wisdom, that this war will not end with military triumph for one side or another. Posturing and protracting this contestation on the field of battle make no sense, practically or ideationally.”
The Vincentian leader said it was not his place to prescribe what a likely negotiated peace would look like “but I feel sure, conceptually, that neither side in this war would be completely satisfied with any terms of a peace settlement.”
He said each side must, therefore, be prepared “to arrive, in peace, in a mutually-agreed condition of dissatisfaction.
“In time, this agreed condition of dissatisfaction, which is preferable to continued war may evolve, propitiously, into a more settled bundle of satisfactions.”
Gonsalves quoted from the poem “We are the Cenotaphs,” by local poet, Daniel Williams’ in which he wrote “We are all time, Yet, only the future is ours to desecrate. The present is the past; And the past, our fathers’ mischiefs.”
Gonsalves said his “solemn and urgent plea to the distinguished Presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United States of America, with the assistance of the esteemed Secretary General of the United Nations, is to bring the war in Ukraine to a negotiated peaceful end now, in honor to the actual combatants, their suffering families, and all humanity who are in pain.”
He further quoted early 20th-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who at the time of a heated contestation between colonial Britain and the Irish nationalists, wrote “The Second Coming”.
“I urge that we all listen carefully, and reflect upon, the meaning of Yeats’ profound offering in our current context. Indeed, the heard melodies of these words are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” Gonsalves said, echoing English poet, John Keats.
“The four undoubtedly great leaders whom I address in this missive have an existential obligation not to sleep to dream but dream to change our world for the better. We must not sleepwalk into a nuclear Armageddon; and we cannot continue the current carnage. Let history absolve us,” he further said, echoing Guyanese poet, Martin Carter.
The letter is the second that Gonsalves has written to Putin since the war began.
In his February 2022 letter, Gonsalves told Putin that ‘as a longstanding friend of the Russian Federation, St. Vincent and Grenadines is deeply disturbed at your government’s initiative of a special military operation in the territory of Ukraine, an independent republic.”
In the letter, Gonsalves also told the Russian leader that the government of the Caribbean country understood “your articulation of the legitimate security considerations of the Russian Federation and your perspectives on the political situation in the region of Donbas, inclusive of the declaration of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic”.
Gonsalves, however, had said that Putin’s government stance on the matter at hand, “taken at its highest in your favor, cannot reasonably justify the special military operation upon which Russia has embarked.
“Self-evidently, the metaphoric horse and chariot have been driven through the chatter of the United Nations,” Gonsalves added. CMC
