Eleven CODEPINK anti-war activists were arrested on 4 October after a 50-strong sit-in in Bernie Sanders’ senate office in Washington DC, USA.
Sanders, a left-winger, has voted for more weapons to Ukraine and has criticised Democrats who’ve called for peace talks. ‘I am appalled that no Democrats are saying what the majority of American people are saying: We need peace talks, not more war,’ said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK, and author of…
On 8 November, Choi Jungmin (pronounced ‘chwéh chong-min’) and seven others from South Korean peace group World Without War (see PN 2667) were found ‘not guilty’ of disrupting an arms fair.
On 22 September 2022, Jungmin and her colleagues, Ji Hyeseong, Joo Youngho, Kim Eunmi, Kim Han Minyeong, Lee Yongsuk, Park Jaeyoon and Yeo Jeewoo entered DX KOREA 2022, just outside Seoul, South Korea.…
The UK public overwhelmingly supports an immediate ceasefire in Israel-Palestine.
Indeed, in a 19 October 2023 YouGov poll 58% said that there should 'definitely' be an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Palestine, with a further 18% saying that there 'probably should' be such a ceasefire.
Though the UK government continues to offer…
With the UK government offering “unequivocal” support for Israel - and Labour's leadership not far behind it – nonviolent protest could play a critical role in protecting Gaza's civilians.
By taking to the streets in our hundreds of thousands, flooding MPs' inboxes with letters and emails and staging savvy nonviolent direct actions, there's the possibility of setting limits on or even terminating British support for Israeli war crimes and apartheid.
But many people are…
Thank you (in Korean) to everyone who contributed to the fundraiser for the eight South Korean peace activists from World Without War who were told they will be fined $15,000 for protesting inside the DX arms fair near Seoul in September 2022. (PN 2667)
We have heard from Jungmin that the DX Eight did raise the $15,000. PN transferred over £1,000 from the UK (finance worker Gabriel…
In September, there was a reunion in London of the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) affinity group ARROW, something like 20 years after the group folded. Folk who had not seen each other for decades came together to catch up; it was a wonderful afternoon.
For me, ARROW was where I learned how to work with other people in a non-hierarchical group, or a group that was trying to put equality into practice. ARROW was my peace movement university. We didn’t just do actions, though we did a…
At the War Resisters’ International gathering in London in June, I kept hearing about the amazing work of the South Korean anti-militarist group, World Without War. After many years of hard work, they won the right for conscientious objectors to do ‘alternative’ non-military service instead of being conscripted, despite South Korea being a highly-militarised state still officially at war with North Korea. The group has pulled off many creative and daring nonviolent actions over the years…
Some recent news from the Russian human rights monitoring group OVD-Info.
19 May
The Miass city court in the Chelyabinsk region sentenced local resident Sergei Korneev to two years in a penal colony after he allegedly posted an anti- mobilisation message on a social media network. After allegedly suggesting that Russian soldiers break military equipment and weapons, Sergei was arrested back in February. He was found guilty of making a public call
to carry out…
On 25 January, after a 10-day trial at the central criminal court in Dublin, Edward Horgan and Dan Dowling were found not guilty of criminal damage for a nonviolent action at Shannon Airport almost six years previously.
On 25 April 2017, the two peace activists were arrested at Shannon Airport, on the west coast of Ireland, and charged with causing criminal damage by writing graffiti on a US navy aircraft.
They were also charged with trespassing at Shannon Airport. The words ‘…
The British anti-war movement needs to realise how close it came to detaching Britain from the 2003 invasion of Iraq. UN weapons inspectors were about to throw a wrench into US war plans – we came close to giving them the time they needed.
On 11 March, ‘Wobbly Tuesday’, the MoD was reportedly ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq’.
Peace News editor Milan Rai is the author of War Plan Iraq: 10 Reasons…
Anti-war campaigners took to Russia’s streets on 21 September after the government there announced that it would be calling up 300,000 reservists to fight in its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Brutal repression had put a stop to mass protests earlier in the year (see PN 2659), but the new announcement led to a new surge in protests.
It was reported that, in the hours after president Vladimir Putin’s speech on television launching the new policy, at least 300 people…
Activists are exploring the possibility of setting up an Unarmed Civilian Protection team at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant in Ukraine ‘to prevent a nuclear explosion that would impact Ukraine – and the world’. A deliberate attack or an accident at Zaporizhzhia could create a Chernobyl-like disaster.
On 30 September, it was reported that 30 people were killed when a Russian missile struck a civilian convoy waiting to go into Zaporizhzhya. According to the authorities, there were…
On 24 February, at 5am Russia invaded Ukraine. Waking up in the next few hours, many Russian citizens were shocked when they found out what had just happened. Among those who would not welcome such an invasion, it was a common belief that Putin was merely bluffing by threatening the West with a full-scale war. It turns out that we were wrong.
By 2022, the mass opposition movement in Russia was pretty much destroyed, so there were not many influential political forces that called on…
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) won a victory over Transport for London (TfL) at the end of March.
CND had asked to put up an advert on London’s public transport system, which is run by TfL, in late 2021. It shows a nuclear weapon broken in two by the peace symbol and asks: ‘Why are we getting more nuclear weapons? We could be investing in healthcare, renewable energy, education.’
TfL refused at first, saying the ad is ‘party political’, but has now been forced (by…
Russian citizens continue to protest against the invasion of Ukraine despite harsh repression by the Russian authorities. As of 27 March, 15,106 arrests and detentions at anti-war actions had been recorded by the human rights monitoring group OVD-Info, who provided the following information. These arrests took place in 151 Russian cities, starting from the day of the invasion, 24 February.
That protests continue is astonishing, given the level of harassment, physical brutality and…
