News
The resolution of the Middle East crisis will be achieved through addressing the root causes of injustice, not through violence or by attacking children.
That view was expressed by Dr Nora Bayrakdarian-Kabakian, World Council of Churches (WCC) Central Committee member, at a media briefing on the Middle East during a meeting of Central Committee, Geneva, August 31.
Dr Nora Bayrakdarian-Kabakian, a member of the Armenian Apostolic Church and political science professor in Lebanon, said the majority of civilians killed in the recent conflict in Lebanon were women and children.
"Nobody has the right to end the life of children," she said. "Wars have rules. You are not supposed to attack children."
Following two decades of war since 1975 there had been a process of rebuilding the structure of the multi-confessional society, she said, but suddenly Lebanon was involved in a disproportionate war.
She said it would take over a decade for Lebanon to recover to the situation it had reached earlier this year.
Also speaking at the media briefing was the Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America.
He said the world was facing a moral catastrophe in the Middle East and it was the duty of the churches to raise this to the consciousness of the international community.
Mr Granberg-Michaelson said the destruction of Lebanon and the sending of missiles into northern Israel had no moral justification.
He said the churches had to say that might did not make right. They had to create a climate in which warring parties could be brought to the table and in which all UN resolutions on the Middle East could be taken up.
Israel's use of cluster bombs when it was clear a cease-fire was imminent, and Hezbollah's firing of un-aimable missiles in the direction of civilian populations in northern Israel were moral, not just legal issues, he said.
Mr Granberg-Michaelson said the image of Christianity in Muslim countries did not represent the spectrum of Christian conviction in the US and UK. The identification of those governments' activities in the Middle East with right-wing Christian beliefs marginalized the position and witness of Christians in the region.
Affirming the appeal of WCC general secretary Samuel Kobia for the ecumenical movement to do more than make statements, he said the actions of western churches in their own political contexts, and actions of solidarity between the churches, were required to build bridges to transcend political differences.