Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Monday called on world leaders to cut enormous expenditure on destruction, saying no one is outside God’s family, including George Bush and Osama bin Laden.
Tutu mentioned the American president and the al-Qaeda leader while speaking at the International Society of Paediatric Neurosurgery conference in Cape Town.
He said ”God wept” when he saw the enormous amounts of money being spent on weapons of death and mass destruction.
”God sees children dying with not enough food and clean water,” he said. ”He sees us spending awful amounts on weapons of death and destruction when not a cent is being spent on diseases that could so easily be overcome.
”Despite the obscene amounts spent on the fight on terror, the war will never be won while people remain desperate.”
Tutu said that all people belong to one family, and that people will ”perish” if they do not learn to share.
”Black, white, yellow, red, Bush and Bin Laden, so-called gays and lesbians, no one is outside of God’s family,” Tutu said.
”Unless we share, we will perish together,” he said.
Tutu said the white Afrikaner doctors and students at the Tygerberg Hospital, of which he and his wife are patrons, are an example of devotion to God.
He said Tygerberg, the training hospital for the University of Stellenbosch, was once an institution that epitomised Afrikaner nationalism and racism in South Africa.
Today, however, the hospital’s white Afrikaans doctors and medical students are working with mostly black patients.
”The devotion of the doctors at Tygerberg Hospital is something to see. A lot of the students there are Afrikaners working with black patients. These doctors could go anywhere in the world, but they chose to stay. It almost makes tears roll down one’s eyes,” he said. — Sapa