Earlier this year, the Dongria Kondh, an indigenous Indian people dubbed “the real Avatar tribe”, won a major victory over the British mining company Vedanta which had hoped to turn the tribe’s sacred mountain into a bauxite mine (see PN 2520, 2526).
While the Na’vi people in James Cameron’s Hollywood epic defended themselves in a violent clash, the Dongria Kondh’s real-life victory was the result of a well-coordinated nonviolent effort by activists in India and Britain.
Living…
There are similarities between the UK government’s attitude towards the poor and that in Canada. So said AJ, an active member of Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), on a visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh in mid-September.
AJ told me how people in Britain have a tendency to look upon Canada with affection when actually it is an “a***-hole of a country”. Later, at a meeting in Edinburgh’s Drill Hall, AJ drew comparisons between the UK and the experience in Ontario.
Back in…
In this bumper summer issue of Peace News, we bring you good news from all around the world – from Australia where Ploughshares activists (pictured above) who pleaded guilty to breaking into a top secret spy base were nevertheless found not guilty by their judge, to Serbia, where charges were dismissed against six anarchists initially charged with international terrorism for protesting at the Greek embassy.
In Washington DC, in the US, there were acquittals for 24 human rights…
A new anti-nuclear movement, “Stop Nuclear Power”, has organised two protest camps at Sizewell, the intended site for one of the first of a new wave of UK nuclear power plants. The second camp took place on 23-26 April, around the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Over 50 protesters and a nuclear white elephant camped on power station property near existing reactors. There were workshops, a tour of the proposed new reactor site, and a blockade using tape labelled “nuclear…
Focusing on the 1919 general strike in Seattle – the first in the US – Revolution in Seattle is a dense, journalistic account of early twentieth-century radical agitation in Washington state.
Originally published in 1964, and now republished to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1999 “Battle of Seattle”, Harvey O’Connor’s memoir of this forgotten chapter in US history is a timely tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn’s belief in documenting “people’s history”.
As the…
The Catholic Worker is a paper. It’s a house of hospitality for homeless people. It’s a communal farm. It’s a soup kitchen. It’s a movement. It’s radical, pacifist, anarchist, and Catholic. It’s 77 years old as of May Day 2010.
Dorothy Day meant to start a labour paper to announce to the unemployed of the Depression era that the Catholic church has a body of social teaching capable of re-shaping society along the lines of justice and peace. Little did she know what she was in…
In March, almost all 27 protestors appearing before Belmullet district court in Ireland were cleared of charges in connection with the “Shell to Sea” campaign.
Shell to Sea opposes Shell’s Corrib gas project to bring ashore gas from the sea off the west of Ireland.
During hearings, 25 of the activists had their cases dismissed or charges withdrawn. Of the remaining two, one was put on probation and one was sentenced to five months for assaulting three Gardai (police officers),…
Espousing participatory democracy and direct action, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the iconic American New Left group of the early 1960s, played a key role in organising the first major demonstration against the Vietnam War in 1965.
Recognising that it was necessary to change the political and economic systems in order to stop “the seventh war from now”, it tried and failed to organise an “interracial movement of the poor” before disintegrating, destroyed by various Marxist…
In the run-up to Hollywood’s Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles in February, an advertisement was placed in Variety, the US film industry magazine, calling on director James Cameron to support a small people locked in struggle with a rapacious mining enterprise. [1]
Stephen Corry, director of the charity Survival, which campaigns on behalf of indigenous people, drew parallels between the plight of the Dongria Kond in the state of Orissa, India, and the fictional Na’vi people…
Venezuela Speaks! attempts to counter the one-dimensional focus of the Western media on president Hugo Chavez by highlighting the central role that grassroots social movements have played in pushing the Bolivarian Revolution forward.
As one activist explains: “With Chavez or without Chavez, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Edited by three Venezuela specialists, Venezuela Speaks! is made up of in-depth interviews with 29 radicals and activists – from…
This rousing film – one of a series of seven films under the heading Have You Heard from Johannesburg? – documents the successful campaigns leading to the sports boycott of apartheid South Africa in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Following the launch of the “Stop the Seventy Tour” in September 1969, Fair Play highlights the coming together, in Britain, of students, trade unionists and committed citizens in mass, direct action against the South African rugby tour.
Only a few months…
On 10 February, in Castlebar circuit court, Ireland, local fisherman Pat O’Donnell was sentenced to seven months in jail for “breach of the peace” and “obstructing a Garda” (police officer) for taking part in protests against Shell’s Corrib gas project in Rossport. Pat said: “All I am trying to do is protect my family and the seas that are our livelihood. My family has fished these waters for five generations – I have no authority to sell the rights to these waters.”
Write to: Pat O’…
In 1969, Fred Hampton was a charismatic African-American community organiser leading the Black Panther Party in Chicago, and was on the verge of taking on a leadership role within the national Black Panther organisation. In Chicago, in just one year, Hampton had successfully organised a “free breakfast for children” programme and a free Panther health clinic. He had brokered peace between the largest gangs in the city, and moved some way towards converting them from criminality to radical…
On 11 December, Rossport activist Maura Harrington was jailed for nine months for causing €160 damage to a Shell net on Glengad cliffs, after refusing to be bound over to keep the peace. This action was part of a campaign against Shell’s Corrib gas project off north-west Ireland, near Rossport.
25 other campaigners against the project were also tried that week, resulting in three suspended sentences and fines.
Sadly, the death of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London on 1 April was not an isolated case. Over 1000 people have died in police custody in the last 40 years - yet no one has been found responsible. Many families who have lost loved ones in police custody are still campaigning for justice after many years, including the families of Sean Rigg, Brian Douglas, Harry Stanley, Roger Sylvester and Christopher Alder.
The United Campaign Against Police Violence (UCAPV) has been…
