Milan Rai
Britain doesn’t need an Armed Forces Day, recently invented by Gordon Brown. We already have Remembrance Day. What Britain needs is an Unarmed Forces Day - when we can remember those people, like Tom Hurndall, Rachel Corrie, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, who dedicated their lives to nonviolent social change.
Unarmed Forces Day is a Peace News initiative. It is a celebration of the power of nonviolence, a call for real support for our damaged veterans,…
Russian social movements are struggling with Putin's repression and economic “liberalisation”, the war in Chechnya, neonazis and the mafia. (Organised crime apparently now controls over 20% of Russia's gross domestic product.)
On 14 and 15 April, unauthorised “Dissenters' Marches” in Moscow and St Petersburg by the new liberal-led coalition “The Other Russia”, were met with arrests and police beatings.
Veteran radical Boris Kagarlitsky observes that, “As things stand today, the…
Anti-virals
Two years ago, we helped to initiate a letter to the Guardian signed by, among others, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Caroline Lucas, John Pilger, Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Winner) and Hans von Sponeck (former UN Assistant Secretary-General).
The letter said that humanity faced a massive global threat from pandemic influenza, which might kill over 60 million people – 96% of them in the global South, and called for an end to corporate patents that…
Having been the first person to be prosecuted (and convicted and imprisoned) for organising an unauthorised protest near parliament, it seems to my dubious honour to be, perhaps, the last person the Crown Prosecution attempted to prosecute under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.
I was summonsed to Horseferry Road court on 7 May for reading the names of the Afghan dead without police permission on 7 October last year. After I pointed out that I had not…
The tragic death of Ian Tomlinson has cast a pall over the public reputation of British policing. As the eyewitness accounts (and photograph) in this issue indicate, and as the legal report compiled by the Climate Camp demonstrates, there was, on 1 April, a systematic pattern of brutal action by the police forces dealing with nonviolent protesters in the City of London.
It is shocking, but nevertheless true, that the mainstream media would not have scrutinised this criminal police…
On 9 April, 14 peace and social justice activists were arrested at Creech US Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, in what is believed to be the first act of mass nonviolent civil disobedience against the military use of pilotless drones. “Predator” and “Reaper” drones have reportedly killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see Gabriel Carlyle’s analysis on p2 for more details).
The Creech 14, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, were arrested…
Ian Tomlinson, 47, was a newspaper seller on his way home from work on 1 April.
6pm: Eyewitness Ross Hardy sees four riot police drag Mr Tomlinson to the pavement after he does not move out of the way of a police van, standing in the road.
7.15pm: Photographer Anna Branthwaite sees Mr Tomlinson pushed to the ground by a policeman near Threadneedle Street: “he did actually roll…. [he] bounced because of the force of the impact…. The officer hit him twice with a baton when…
As PN went to press, Iran and the United States were preparing to make significant peace offers (or at least gestures) to each other. Iran’s proposal is almost certain to include international co-ownership and joint operation of its enrichment facility, the “consortium” option rejected by the US and Britain in the past.
In this delicate situation, Israel, predictably was doing its best to provoke a wild statement from Iran that might destabilise diplomacy. Thus the threats to bomb…
Western attention has focused once again on the plight of women in Afghanistan, as the result of the Shia Family Law, passed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai in March. The law, which gives Shia husbands enormous legal powers over their wives, provoked 300 women to mount an almost-unprecedented demonstration outside a madrassa run by one of Afghanistan’s most powerful Shia clerics, Mohamad Asif Mohseni, on 15 April.
Another view
Nelofer Pazira, Afghan-Canadian film-maker…
Peace News invites local and national peace groups in Wales, Scotland and England to join us in celebrating “Unarmed Forces Day” on 27 June, when the Ministry of Defence intends to celebrate “Armed Forces Day” (with a service and a fly-past at Chatham Docks, and parades in other towns and cities). “Unarmed Forces Day” will have two main messages.
Celebrate nonviolence!
Our first message is that we want to celebrate people who have used and are using nonviolent means to seek…
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), remarked of US president Barack Obama on 11 March: “He is not going to say by 2020 I’m going to reduce emissions by 30%. He’ll have a revolution on his hands. He has to do it step by step.”
Within the mainstream, the kind of protest and turmoil that might be thrown up by a strict climate policy amounts to a “revolution”.
Frankly, we do need that kind of revolution. We need to force political…
The British press has been marking the 25th anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike of 1984-5, a shattering event for many of us who lived through it. The strike was one of the major events of postwar British history, marking a turning point for owners and managers, supported by the state, in exerting their authority over working people.
The strike was ignited by a government programme of pit closures aimed at breaking the power of the National Union of Mineworkers, and thereby…
e began our last editorial with these words: “The Israeli assault on Gaza has left many of us angry and sick at heart.” Our last front cover depicted the horrible wounds of a Gazan teenager. The photograph was taken by a Totnes peace activist (in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement), who wrote our front page story, and sent us the accompanying image. This picture left some readers feeling angry and sick.
One letter from an experienced activist said: “I did not need the…
When are we going to wake up? When is the war in Afghanistan going to become a burning issue in this country? When is it going to become a burning issue for the British peace movement?
As we approach the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, we see a welcome, if belated and timid, awakening of concern about the war in mainstream circles in both Britain and the US. What about the peace movement? If we are honest with ourselves, neither the traditional peace movement nor…
On 12 February, after a surprisingly brief trial (the judge cut the presentation of complex evidence down to one day), peace activist and former Nottingham University student Hicham Yezza came closer to being deported from Britain after a jury found him guilty of lying to immigration officials about the expiry of his visa – “securing avoidance of enforcement action by deceptive means”.
Sentencing is due on 6 March, at which point the government is likely to resume its campaign to…
