This summer I participated in my third International Walk for a Nuclear-Free Future, from Geneva to Brussels. This year’s “pilgrimage”, organised by Footprints for Peace and Sortir du Nucléaire, set off from Geneva on 26 April, the 23rd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The walk passed through Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, covering around 850 miles on foot over 10½ weeks, staging events at the World Heath Organisation headquarters in…
At the beginning of April, as London preoccupied itself with the G20, and the Met was busy batoning and shoving over peaceful protestors and newspaper vendors, I travelled to Strasbourg, France, with nine other peace activists who had chosen instead to join NATO’s sixtieth birthday celebrations. Our ad hoc affinity group, “Odd Socks”, consisted of eight Brits (one Anglo-French), a German woman and two Belgian lads.
Five of us were members of the anti-nuclear nonviolent direct…
19 January 2009: Dr Atallah, a physician in Gaza, invited us to meet him in his home in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.
Early this morning, he and his family returned to their home after having fled five days earlier when the bombing attacks on Gaza City had become so fierce that they feared for their lives.
“Believe me, when I would drive from the hospital to the place where my family was staying, I prayed all the way,” said Dr Atallah, “…
Surrounded by kit, I sit facing my friends, cheeks burning so red that they suggest I am overtired. I shake my head, avoid eye contact, unsure how to admit my feelings.
Finally I break, tension flooding out: “I don’t feel prepared; I don’t think I can do it….” I was terrified our actions would be too extreme, that people wouldn’t relate to us…. So many paralysing thoughts.
This is what it’s like when you cease to keep your head down; these are the agonies you experience when…
Most journeys require a return, unless they are fugues or escapes into exiles. We've been on the road for 130 days now, we've passed through eight utopian communities and although we still have another 3 months ahead of us, the thought of coming home is already making us feel quite ill. We thought we might feel homesick, but in fact we have caught another kind of bug, a wonderful infection that has made us lose our immunity to the impossible. We can't go back to our life as a working couple…
Could it really be done? Could over 700 people - many of whom had never met before - not only build and manage a massive camp site on the perimeter of Heathrow, whilst organising a day of mass direct action against the aviation industry, but do so using participatory, consensus decision-making?
This was the utopian vision outlined in the pre-publicity for the `Camp for Climate Action', and from what I saw as a participant during days three to five the answer was yes.
Arriving…
No doubt, this World Social Forum is different. Africa - Kenya & - makes its presence felt. Kenyan and African culture and music are present everywhere at the forum, to the extent that the drums and music do not always have a positive impact on discussions.
But Africa also makes its presence felt in terms of participation and content: on the one hand negatively , as participation from European and Latin American social movements is poor , compared to previous World Social Forums…
A week or so ago the Local Heroes affinity group conducted a gentle forensic raid on the Labour Office in Airdrie, in order to out a dubious hombre by the name of John Reid who has been linked to Al McKayda. This unsalubrious shop is the hole-in-the-wall for the same Reid, when not providing the muscle and the sweet-talking on behalf of the business operations of one Tony Blair.
The complaints against this Saruman lookalike are many and various, but also peculiar due to his…
There was no way I wanted to miss Robert Fisk's lecture in Stirling, so I was not critically put off by the irritating call notice which referred to him as the “revered foreign correspondent”.
“Sound”, “respected”, “influential” would have been fine but “revered” does rather take us into that stratosphere of adulation in which we kneel down and cast aside, like Pilgrim's bundle of sin, all our unworthy critical thoughts. The worry of course was not about Fisk himself, who I imagine…
This year's CND conference took place close to the heart of London's poshistani shopping district -- the West End. Within two minutes of arriving, we had discovered the first two rules of the venue we had managed to break (no bicycles,no gaffa tape, blimey, good job we ditched the dog!). You can't take some people anywhere.
However, the morning quickly moved into the usual round of resolutions and voting, with very little to report. The resolution opposing Trident replacement was…
Being an Indymedia cameraman is becoming a hectic pastime in these, the last days of freedom in the UK. The DSEi weapons convention was a damn fine example of the increasing crackdown on free speech. Independent journalists and activists alike are now on the same level as terror suspects, all rights removed.
Saturday 10 September started peacefully . A hundred pr otesters took to the str eets ar ound Beckton, surr ounded by police, informing residents of the impending weapons…
At midnight on Friday 16 September, we were dropped off at the edge of the forest at Padworth, between the UK's nuclear weapons factories at Aldermaston and Burghfield, for a hike to the fence of Defence Fuel Support Point (DFSP) Aldermaston, we had enough food and water for a week, and huge banners saying, "Nukes Out", "US bases out of UK", "How many lives to the litre", and our flags.
At 1am we threw our bags over the fence and climbed in. We had a long walk/crawl to a…
High Tide is the result of three years spent travelling the world in search of evidence that climate change is taking place now.
Lynas's travels include the experience of ducking England's increasingly excessive downpours; surveying the damage of melting permafrost whilst gathering local opinion on the oil industry in “baked” Alaska; and sealing all windows as unprecedented dust storms whirl in China.
Alongside excellent photos, Lynas's stories show that…
On the last evening of the World Social Forum, I was standing in the Azad Maidan, surveying the crowds and getting ready for the evening's concert. Two eager young men who suddenly came forward and began to introduce themselves interrupted that moment of reverie... “Good evening sir”, said the first, “I am Francisco DSa, from the Citizens Peace Committee of Rawalpindi”. After a few minutes of talking, he said, “Oh, we are hoping to meet with as many Indians as possible while we are here. We…
