SEOUL (APEN) – The National Clergy Conference for Justice and Peace (NCCJP) has opposed the forthcoming visit of former American president George W Bush to South Korea to attend a peace prayer rally.
The NCCJP warned that Bush’s visit will be confronted with tremendous resistance from the awakened Christians and civil society organizations in the country.
The rally is going to be held “under the critical pressure from those who genuinely hope for genuine and lasting peace, the NCCJP said in a statement, and added that “our history is going to record it as an absurd scandal of certain ill-bred Protestant Christians bereft of basic socio-historical consciousness.”
Bush has been invited by a Protestant group as part of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War.
Reverend Kim Sung-Bok, chairperson of the NCCJP deplored the ignorance of the Protestant group who invited Bush for “pro-American flunkeyism.”
The NCCJP is an ecumenical body whose membership is based on individuals.
It has actively participated in the struggles for justice and peace since its founding in 1984.
The ecumenical body termed Bush “as a virtual war criminal because in his presidency he invaded Iraq with no evidence of bio-chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and slew hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.”
His war on terrorism has been “well known as a deceitful mask of the American egoism and expansionism that practically secured monopoly of oil resources and established a strong military base in the Middle East,” the clergy group said.
According to the statement, “he was notoriously blasphemous in uttering the sacred words, “God” and “Justice,” while doing wickedness and unbridled use of violence against the weak. Above all, he is the very person who named North Korea as an “Axis of Evil” and thereby blocked any peaceful approaches to resolve the grievous divisions in the Korean Peninsula.”
Under his presidency, “conflicts were exacerbated in the global dimension, democracy and human rights regressed, and people’s life became miserable and tragic,” the statement noted.
“The Protestant group preparing the rally has made a great blunder,” the NCCJP said, and urged the hosts and the chairperson of the preparation committee of the prayer rally to cancel it.
