Visit of Nobel Laureate
Adolfo Perez Esquivel visits Friends House
A Nobel Peace Prize winner visited Friends House on Monday and encouraged Quakers to keep campaigning for peace. Argentine activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel renewed his friendship with British Quakers with whom he had worked during the Falklands War thirty years ago.
He is one of seven Nobel Peace Prize winners who have signed a letter to David Cameron urging him to adopt a less warlike attitude to the Falklands and to engage in dialogue with Argentina. He told the Friend it would be ‘a big help’ if Quakers were to write their own letters to Downing Street to back up the request.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 after years spent resisting military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Friends campaigned for his release when he was imprisoned and tortured by Argentina’s former military junta.
Adolfo’s journey to Britain was easier this time than it was then. UK authorities prevented him from entering the country during the war in 1982. British Quakers joined other peace campaigners in travelling to Paris to meet him there. On Monday, he met with Marigold Best, who had liaised with him on behalf of British Friends during the Falklands War, and saw the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Quakers (see photo).
He told the Friend he is concerned by two aspects of the UK government’s current attitude to the Falklands: the ‘absence of a willingness to dialogue’ and the significant increase in the British military presence, which is ‘not good for anyone in the region’.
He said: ‘The president of Argentina has publicly stated her willingness to dialogue and this has been reiterated many, many times, but dialogue has to take two’.
Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian peace campaigner who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, was one of the other laureates to sign the letter. Signatories included Desmond Tutu from South Africa and Mairead Corrigan Maguire from Northern Ireland.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel is pleased to see British Friends still campaigning against the arms trade. ‘Britain and the US sold lots of arms to regimes in Latin America,’ he said. ‘Those same arms that they used to suppress their own people were also used in the military action in the Malvinas.’
Countries in Latin America are still struggling to pay off debts accumulated by former dictators who bought weapons from the West. He urged Quakers ‘to support the efforts to cancel those debts’.
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