Nobel Peace Prize to the hibakusha: ‘Message for today's wars'
Fr Alberto Berra, a PIME missionary in the city of the first atomic bomb in 1945, speaks about the decision to award the prize to the association that gives voice to the victims who still bear the signs of the explosion from almost eighty years ago. “They feel they have received a mission: to be a voice for the world” because, as Pope Francis said in Hiroshima in 2019, “it is not only the use of atomic weapons that is immoral, but also their possession.”
Hiroshima (AsiaNews) – “It is not a recognition of the past, but a choice that looks at today's international situation. Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the hibakusha is an appeal to the world that is talking again about the use of these terrible devices,” says Fr Alberto Berra,
The PIME missionary, from Italy, spoke to AsiaNews from Hiroshima about the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the Nihon Hidankyo association, which brings together the victims of the terrible bombs dropped by the United States in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Japan since 1990, Father Berra has been carrying out his ministry for many years in the city marked by the first of the two atomic explosions that 79 years ago, killing over 148,000 or about 62 per cent of the city’s population, together with a heavy legacy of illnesses that emerged, in some cases many years after the blast due to radiation.
Another 74,000 people died three days later by the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The PIME missionary has seen the hibakusha tell their stories many times in the Garden of Peace, the park adjacent to the museum that commemorates that great tragedy in the heart of Hiroshima, where the Genbaku Dome stands, the dome of the Exhibition Hall melted by the heat of the explosion, which has become the symbol of the atomic explosion.
All Japanese schoolchildren visit the Garden of Peace, stopping at the heron-shaped monument that commemorates the thousands of children killed on 6 August 1945.
“In the hibakusha’s stories there is all the horror of war and its consequences," he explains. “Of course, all wars leave death and destruction in their wake. But never before had it happened in such a heartbreaking form and with consequences on the body that last over time, for some even today, after almost eighty years.”
Hibakusha “feel they have received a mission: to be a voice for the world.” Their association, Nihon Hidankyo, to which the Oslo Committee awarded the Nobel Prize today, was founded in 1956, eleven years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
They had remained silent for years to cope with their sufferings; but it was the hydrogen bomb experiments conducted by the United States on the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, again exposing the local population and fishermen to the dangers of radiation, that convinced them that they had a message to communicate to everyone.
According to the most recent data from the Japanese government, released last March, about 107,000 survivors from the two explosions are still alive, with an average age of 85.6 years. A few dozen are still able to volunteer at the Garden of Peace in Hiroshima.
“Please abolish nuclear weapons while we are still alive," Toshiyuki Mimaki, Hiroshima Prefectural Confederation of A-bomb Sufferers Organisations, said today after the announcement.
For Fr Berra, this “is a task that they continue to feel very much. A few months ago, for example, one of them, well in his eighties, started studying English to be able to speak to a greater number of people passing through Hiroshima. It is truly a mission to the whole of humanity.”
It is a message that Hiroshima wants to continue to convey. “The words spoken in the Garden of Peace by Pope Francis during his 2019 trip were also very important for our Church,” the PIME missionary said, “when he clearly said that it is not only the use of atomic weapons that is immoral, but also their possession. This Nobel Prize in some way is also an opportunity for us to repeat this.”
A recent initiative promoted by the bishop of Hiroshima goes precisely in this direction, bringing together local Catholic communities and some dioceses in the United States. “It is called Partnership for a world without nuclear weapons," says Fr Berra.
The dioceses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki launched this appeal together with those of Santa Fe in New Mexico and Seattle in Washington State, where the US conducted its nuclear research and testing. This is a way to accept Francis’s triple invitation to remember the victims of almost 80 years ago, to walk together towards a world without nuclear weapons, and to protect the generations of tomorrow.”
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06/08/2020 10:04
