Dr. Andreas Uhlig

Peace Negotiations NOW

This is the edited transcript of the presentation delivered by Andreas Uhlig to Panel 1, “Stopping the Doomsday Clock—The Common Good of the One Humanity,” of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 22 conference, “For World Peace—Stop the Danger of Nuclear War: Third Seminar of Political and Social Leaders of the World.”

Dr. Uhlig is a retired company managing director. He began to build an alliance of organizations and citizens in the German city of Dresden, to stop the war in Ukraine and the policy of confrontation. The alliance he has founded bears the name “Citizens’ Initiative Peace Negotiations NOW.” He spoke in German, with simultaneous English translation and closed captions. The full proceedings of the conference are available at the Schiller Institute website.

Good morning and good afternoon, dear friends! My name is Andreas Uhlig. I am a co-organizer of a peace group in Dresden. Our group includes activists from the Dresden Peace Vigil, the International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, members of the BüSo (Civil Rights Movement Solidarity), and the party Die Linke. We are in the process of organizing a rally for Nov. 26, under the slogan “Peace Negotiations NOW.” This is currently the most urgent demand: to end the war in Ukraine. Diplomacy must once again do justice to its task.

For good reason, it was standard practice in past years, not to send weapons to crisis and war zones. The NATO states have completely abandoned this principle. They want us to believe that weapons shorten the war. Does NATO want to shorten the war from one year to half a year? That hasn’t happened. To how many years do they want to shorten it? What will the country look like then? Where’s this policy heading?

In reality, the war is being prolonged. More and more people are dying on both sides, more weapons increase the risk of further escalation. We demand that our governments be consistent and forceful in their commitment to peace negotiations. Not to do so is reckless, also toward the Ukrainian people and, at best, it only serves the arms industry and interests of U.S. geopolitics, which want to maintain their unipolar world order.

The training of Ukrainian military personnel in Western Europe also makes us, de facto, participants in the war. The consequences are incalculable. The impact of a Ukrainian missile in Poland, a few days ago, showed how quickly false accusations can lead to the brink of a world war. But the war has already reached us as an economic war. In several waves of sanctions, which began even before Feb. 24, the prosperity of European countries is being put at risk, and peoples in the Third World are being driven into hunger, because of the lack of grain and fertilizer supplies from Russia and Ukraine. It is said that the sanctions are intended to force Russia to end the war. Indeed, the German government admitted on Nov. 8, that it has no knowledge of any concrete impact of the sanctions on the Russian government’s decisions regarding warfare in Ukraine.

The EU states apparently have no plan for whether and to what extent sanctions will be lifted once the war is over. In fact, the sanctions are aimed at ruining Russia, but here, in our home countries, they are fueling inflation. Many are protesting massive increases in energy prices. A report on the economy in the Saxony region says:

The mood in commerce is at rock bottom. Companies have their backs to the wall. Some companies are plagued by existential fears.

That’s why we demand a stop to all sanctions, economic and financial blockades, from which people around the world are suffering. Sanctions do not end wars.

Thank you very much.