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PN: So, tell us a little bit about this book... how it came about, why you decided to do it now

Rex: I wanted to leave a good record of what happened cos I felt that the existing record was spotty and not particularly correct historically... I just wanted to leave a better record.

Myself, I'm a journalist, throughout my career in Greenpeace in the 1970s, I was also a journalist. I'm still a journalist and - I approached the story as I would approach it as a journalist and as an…

Who are the biggest and most willing purchasers of arms? Tyrants. Why? They need to oppress their own people and to conquer others, to do this one needs the appropriate tools. Who are the biggest sellers and producers of arms? Democracies. Why? They have the market capacity to produce them. Strange bedfellows, but supply and demand brings them together. A cynic would contend that wars and violence are manufactured to make profits, because wars are boom times for almost all involved, except…

Peace News readers will understand the sick feeling many Americans had when we woke up on 3 November and found George Bush had been re-elected. That feeling was deeper because the exit polls on Tuesday afternoon suggested John Kerry would win the election. The exit polls were wrong, Bush won, Kerry lost, and unlike 2000, when the election really was stolen, this time the Bush margin was so clear - over two million votes ahead of Kerry in the popular vote - that the Left must…

During the weeks and months leading up to the London European Social Forum (ESF) there was much controversy as to whether a minority had managed to undermine the democratic nature of the forum itself. The history surrounding the ESF, the World Social Forum (WSF) and the World Economics Forum (WEF) needs to be understood to see clearly how serious a de-democratisation of the ESF could be.

The WEF has been running for over thirty years in different forms, but always acting as a think…

World military spending has returned to Cold War levels. Between 2001 and 2003, world military spending increased by 18 percent to reach US$956 billion - very close to the Cold War peak in 1987. Three quarters of that spending was by high income countries, who together spent well over ten times more on the military than on official development assistance to poorer countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

There is a deep irony in the rich world going to ever-…

January 1986. In the northern hills of Nicaragua, surrounded by Ronald Reagan's murderous Contras, a group of some 300 peace activists from all over the world find their path into Honduras blocked. The US and Honduran mililitaries are conducting joint exercises - no way through for anyone who believes in reconciliation and gentle peace.

Unnerved by the brooding hills and by their just-completed visit to a tiny cooperative where mothers showed pictures of their "Santos inocentes" (…

It is hard to believe that, just ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, new reports of massacres against Tutsis by Hutus have started coming in.

As PN went to press more than 150 Tutsi refugees were reported to have been macheted and shot by a Hutu during a raid on a nearby Burundian military base.

As Peace News went to press the 2004 Olympics had just kicked off.

Like music, sport is often said to be a great bridger of divides. It can bring…

It repeats itself: the main hospital has been closed down by US troops and is being used for military operations, ambulances are being prevented, again by US troops, from moving around the town, which is being pounded from the air while the US and the Iraqi militias, disparate armed groups, fight in the streets and US soldiers drive around with loudspeakers, ordering civilians to leave or be killed.

It could be Falluja in April; this time it's Najaf. I hear that Kut has been bombed…

As Ariana flight 404 from Dubai touched down at Kabul International Airport, its applauding passengers straining to locate family members among those standing on top of the arrivals building, Mosa Gholam personified impatience. And a little aggravation.

It might have been because he hadn't slept for a week. It may have been because he nearly missed the flight after a fellow returnee with an incorrectly named ticket nearly grounded the group in Dubai.

And of course much of…

There can be no peace without the unity of humankind and specific structures of inclusive social justice. That thought reflects the mature form of every major religion. Yet institutional drag across the years, usually draws most adherents of each faith tradition towards the preservation of the institution, rather than to a dynamic response to specific faithfulness in an always-changing world.

In light of that trend, the signs of the times are not propitious for the building of the…

The latest series of revelations regarding the torture and inhuman and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners by Coalition forces make for yet more depressing and horrible news.

However, the dominant discussion - in the west at least - has centred on a misplaced ideal: that the “rules” of war are observed and that citizens should expect their government and militaries to “play nice” and that, accordingly, we should be outraged when they don't.

Not to detract from the terrible…

Despite intense losses in the recently ended war with neighbouring Ethiopia, and a few worrisome signs of incursions on freedom of speech and the press, the hopes amidst the people of the horn of Africa rested on hard-fought victories and advances in areas of education, youth and women's mobilisation, and popular political participation.

Eritrea was poised to be part of the community of nation-states rejecting passive victimisation by the forces of globalisation, a leader amongst…

I write as a lifelong peace campaigner who has been on all the big demos against the Iraq war, and at the same time is very concerned that the peace movement is failing to come to grips with the dangers posed by international terrorism.

The tendency is to blame the US for terrorist atrocities rather than the terrorists themselves, thus making it difficult to confront the issue of terrorism directly. However, terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular pose dangers to peace in…

Colombia's president Alvaro Uribe Velez is, by his own admission, a man of the right. Unlike most recent Colombian Presidents, Uribe is from the land-owning class. He inherited huge swathes of cattle ranching land from his father Alberto Uribe Velez, himself subject to an extradition warrant to face charges of drug trafficking in the USA, until he was killed, allegedly by left-wing FARC guerrillas, in 1983. Uribe Jnr grew up with the children of Fabio Ochoa, three of whom were to become…

Russia after the election is a grim place. With electoral doubts safely swept under the carpet, Putin has been sworn into Office.

Greeted by Putin Youth Rallies in Moscow, and an explosion in Chechnya killing “Putin's man in the region”, Kadyrov, Head of Parliament Hussein Isaev and, at time of going to press, possibly Finance Minister Ely Isaev. No accidental irony this attack: on the Day of Victory. Putin's promise: the liquidation of the terrorists.

Speaking of which - one…

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…

I live in a tiny, remote, impoverished, three-block-long town in the desert of north eastern New Mexico. Everyone in town - and the whole state - knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called for the closing of [nuclear laboratories at] Los Alamos, and that, as a priest, I have been preaching, like the Pope, against the bombing of Baghdad.

One day in December, it was announced that the local National Guard unit for north-eastern New Mexico, based in the nearby…

Angola is one of the countries in the world that has been most affected by war and violence over the past four decades. The country lies devastated, its infrastructure destroyed, its citizens brutalised by four centuries of slavery, colonialism, war, bloody political conflict and corruption. The long guerrila war (since 1961) against Portuguese colonialism under the Salazar dictatorship did not even stop with independence in 1975.

Divided among three rival movements, MPLA, UNITA and…

We receive important personal and social blessings from technology of all kinds, but for a quarter century we have been completely dominated by a seriously unexamined technology of which Sadie Plant (US author of Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture) has written: “The impossibility of getting a grip, and grasping the changes under way is itself one of the most disturbing effects to emerge from the current mood of cultural change.”

This is compounded by
1)…

Well, not quite, but we would like to take the opportunity to say fond farewells and enthusiastic welcomes to volunteers and staff on the PN team and to flag up two opportunities for you to comment on Peace News in its current incarnation and on the kind of Peace News you would like to see in future.

Many thanks to everyone who made a donation to last year's Peace News Annual Appeal. In total, more than £1,000 was…