Gijs de Vries, counter-terrorism coordinator
Council of the European Union
Wetstraat 175
B-1048 Brussel

mass mortality justifies terrorism

I sent you a copy of my letter to Peter Clarke on the ethics of terrorism, and you sent me a short reply (7 September 2004) stating that democracies resolve issues by peaceful means. That may be true, but it does not necessarily make the outcome morally acceptable. You chose to ignore the ethical issues I raised, such as the role of democracy in perpetuating global inequality.

Last week, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) published the State of World Population Report 2004 - and its statistics on maternal mortality give a classic example of the inequalities, and the suffering they cause. The ratio between maternal deaths, per 100 000 live births, in Europe and in sub-Saharan Africa, is 24 to 920, a factor of 38. (For the EU alone, that ratio would be higher). The 'lifetime risk of maternal death' is 1 in 2400 in Europe, but 1 in 16 in sub-Saharan Africa. A woman is therefore 150 times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth, simply because health care is worse. This is, according to UNFPA, "the highest differential of any public health indicator monitored by WHO" - and it is entirely due to differing health care standards.

Almost all maternal mortality would be prevented, if the health care standards of the developed world applied globally. About 500 000 lives would be saved each year. Yet the EU simply refuses to provide sufficient aid or funds for that purpose. The individual EU member states refuse to do that either. The order-of-magnitude cost is at least € 100 000 million, to provide EU health care standards, with a global birth rate of 130 million per year. When you were a minister in the Netherlands cabinet, it refused to give such massive aid. Your own party, the VVD, certainly opposes aid on this scale, and so do its partners in the liberal group in the European Parliament. I don't know of any political party in Europe, that even suggested this scale of aid. And so about 500 000 mothers die every year, leaving millions of children without a mother, and all that suffering is totally unnecessary.

There can be no doubt, that this is a justification for political violence, directed at changing the present policies - 'terrorism' in the EU definition. The 500 000 excess deaths are not a natural disaster, they are the result of a deliberate decision by democratic electorates, to preserve their own prosperity, at the expense of other people's lives. The issue has been 'resolved by peaceful means', but the result is morally unacceptable. It is the same story with the AIDS pandemic, where much of the mortality is avoidable with EU treatment standards. Changing these policies, against the will of the democratic majority, is by definition not possible inside the democratic process itself.

Paul Treanor