The United States and Iran are preparing to sign a peace agreement on Friday June 19 in Geneva. The highly anticipated text has been announced many times by Donald Trump. The American president has made a specialty, in recent weeks, of prophesying the imminence of an agreement which ended up happening. The volatility of the American president’s words, the instability of the Middle East, as well as the steps that remain to be taken obviously invite us to be cautious. However, we can rejoice at the end of the war and the reduction in military tensions.
The cautious hope that is ours must also be accompanied by a reminder: peace does not consist only in the silence of arms. Nor is it the fragile balance between enemy forces, more or less armed. In reality, the ceasefire is only a starting point towards peace. A starting point which necessarily involves the search for justice and even, Pope Pius XI already wrote in the 1920s, for charity.
In fact, the road is still long. The signing of the agreement, by the United States and Iran, should not only initiate new thematic negotiations, as both parties plan. It must also contribute to shifting the region into another logic, that of the search for the common good. A common good which requires a release of pressure on the global economy, whose upheavals have caused famines and shortages in recent weeks; but also by the interest of the populations themselves. For weeks, the inhabitants of the region, particularly in Iran and Lebanon, have been experiencing a “hell” repeatedly promised by the American president. It is high time this stopped.
