Global south

1 March 2010Feature

Security guarantees for non-nuclear-weapon states

At the War Resisters’ International Triennial in Ahmedabad, I met a 100%, thorough-going Indian unilateralist. He’s spent his life critiquing the Indian nuclear power programme and, since India acquired the Bomb, arguing for unilateral nuclear disarmament.

He’s the kind of person who, in Britain, would be fervently supportive of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and trying to use it as leverage to force the major powers towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. When…

1 February 2010Feature

How local peace efforts in Northern Uganda were trumped by the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants

“Can they not see what they are doing? They will cause the war to continue”. John-Bosco1 looked at me, pointing to the day’s copy of the New Vision newspaper open on the café table. It was hard to know how to answer this question; I had been struggling with it for months.

John-Bosco was a night watchman with a family growing up amidst the conflict. He was one of the first people to welcome my wife and I to Gulu, Northern Uganda, when we arrived in 2001.

Now it was…

1 February 2010Feature

Milan Rai blogs from the War Resisters International gathering

The War Resisters International Triennial (now held every four years, in a cunning ploy to avoid police detection and repression) is being held here in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, at Gujarat University or “Gujarat Vidyapith”. Coming from the recent ice, snow and slush of southern England, Ahmedabad is jarringly hot – but not too hot, dusty but not too dusty. The university, which was closed down three times by the British authorities during the national freedom struggle, was founded by Gandhi…

25 January 2010Blog

<p>Milan Rai reports from the WRI Triennial in India</p>

On the second morning (the third day) of the Triennial, we had our first “reflectors” session. The reflectors were five people who had been chosen to give their reaction to the conference so far. There were four women (all English-speaking, one African, one Australasian, one European, one North American) and one man (Spanish-speaking, Latin American).

Incidentally, this reminds me of something Jai Sen said about the book he co-edited: World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. They set…

24 January 2010Blog

<p>Milan Rai reports from the WRI Triennial in India</p>

What was the “breaking news” I promised at the beginning of the last posting? Well, yesterday I sat in on a discussion group that decided to put forward a major proposal to the council of War Resisters International, suggesting an investigation of the feasibility and desirability of WRI addressing the extent to which climate change, and in particular the threat of runaway climate change, affects the anti-militarist and social justice struggles it is currently involved in, or supporting.…

24 January 2010Blog

<p>Milan Rai reports from the WRI Triennial in India</p>

The breaking news just doesn’t stop.

After lunch yesterday (23 January) we broke up for workshops. For some reason we had two workshop slots of differing lengths, and there was also the option for many of them of continuing the workshop after the break. The first slot (2 hours) I went to hear Bela Bhatia talking about the conflict in the state of Chhattisgarh, where police and Maoists are fighting a vicious war in a tribal area. (Tribal people are known as “adivasis” or “earliest/…

24 January 2010Blog

Milan Rai reports from the WRI Triennial in India

Can international conferences like this be justified? Lots of my friends think not. I have breaking news from Peace News on this score – the survey they dared not print. Well, no one has not dared to print it, actually, but it dramatises the story.

Earlier today, in the morning plenary session, we had a searing moment which really made the whole thing worthwhile. We had two plenary speakers. One was Samarendra Das, who has been working for 16 years with poor communities facing…

3 December 2009Comment

Climate Justice Action is a new global network of people and groups committed to take the urgent actions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. The network is open to individuals and groups that agree with our Networks Goals, Principles for Working Together and Call To Action.

Among the many groups that are part of the network are: Climate Watch Alliance (Nepal); Focus on the Global South; Friends of the Earth (Engand, Wales and Northern Ireland); Human Rights Defenders…

3 December 2009Comment

Rich countries and corporations have grown wealthy through a model of development that has pushed the planet to the brink of climate catastrophe. They have over-used the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Drastic measures now have to be taken to prevent runaway climate change, making it impossible for poor countries to grow their economies in the same way. Put another way, the rich world has “colonised” the earth’s atmosphere. This process has mirrored and perpetuated…

1 November 2009News in Brief

The Fairtrade drinks producer Cafédirect reported on 9 October that the incomes of small-scale tea and coffee farmers could fall by up to 90% in the next 15 years.
Farmers are being forced to move uphill an average of three to four metres every year – in Kenya, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua – to escape pestilence and disease caused by rises in temperature.
At the end of September, a report for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank predicted that, by 2050, climate change…

1 November 2009Review

OUP, 2009; ISBN 978 0 199 571 79 6; 320pp; £19.99

As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.

Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new…

3 September 2009Comment

The British Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) was set up in 2002 in response to the attempted military coup in Venezuela, aims to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty and independence, and to defend the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution, especially by promoting and strengthening links with Venezuelan trade unionists. For a period, VSC was organising international computer link- ups between British and Venezuelan trade unionists. VSC has also promoted and undertaken solidarity tours to…

3 July 2009Comment

The British Tamils Forum (BTF) organised peaceful protests in central London (including the demonstration of over 200,000 Tamils on 11 April 2009) to show solidarity with their brethren in Sri Lanka and to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

BTF is an umbrella organisation bringing together individuals and Tamil community organisations for three main aims: To highlight the humanitarian crises and human rights violations perpetrated by the government of Sri…

1 July 2009Feature

13 years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni human rights activists Shell was brought to court in New York for complicity with the Nigerian government for these state murders.

The Ogoni were to use US Alien Tort Statute but Shell settled with them out of court on 8 June with a payment of $15.5m (the equivalent of four hours profit for Shell), seemingly to prevent evidence about their corporate entanglement with the Nigerian military dictatorship reaching the…

1 July 2009Review

Zed Books, 2008, ISBN 978 1 842779 50 7; 320pp, £12.99

This book is not an easy read in any sense of the term and hardly anyone emerges from its pages with much credit. It lays bare, in great detail, the origins of the present conflict in Darfur and how it has unfolded in recent years. Needless to say, the true picture is considerably more complex than that presented by the mass media which, in any event, were somewhat late upon the scene.

“Until March 2004, Darfur’s crisis unfolded in the typical manner of African civil wars, unremarked…