Millius Palayiwa, director of Fellowship of Reconciliation
Photo: Jordana Jarrett
The current director of England’s Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR) was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the middle child of parents who sacrificed for their children’s prosperity. For 40 years, his father worked as a ‘kitchen-boy’ for a white man, making only £8.10 a month. His father agreed to work without pay if the man would pay for all seven children to attend primary…
A school trip in Isfahan, Iran Photo: Milan Rai
On 23 June, a home-made bomb was discovered outside the Aisha mosque in Walsall in the West Midlands. 150 people were evacuated. No one was injured as the device was made safe.
Arson or attempted arson attacks have taken place at the Grimsby Mosque & Islamic Community Centre; the Zainabia Islamic Centre in Milton Keynes (30 people were inside at the time); the Al Falah Braintree Islamic Centre in Essex; the Masjid E Noor…
The theme for this year's Camp is "Taking a lead from the Global South", and the Camp will be featuring Mohamed Moghazy from the Egyptian Committees to Defend the Revolution, award-winning Nigerian performer Tayo Aluko and Dora Estella Munoz Atillo, a community organiser from the remarkable Nasa community in Colombia.
Welcome Dora!
This year, Peace News Summer Camp is honoured to be hosting Dora Estella Muñoz Atillo, a community…
I want to give a warning shot to anti-oppression trainers and activists. My bottom line is this: we need to stop applying theory onto people’s experiences, wielding it like a weapon to describe what we believe whether we actually see it in a room or not. It’s not smart organising, creates intense backlash, and shrinks – not grows – our movements.
An organiser recently shared with me an example of what I’m talking about.
He was working in a union that represents workers at a…
Wambunga Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara outside the High Court, London. Photo: Leigh Day
More than 60 years after Britain declared the Kenyan ‘Emergency’, the British government has been forced to provide compensation to over 5,000 Kenyans for atrocities committed during its counter-insurgency campaign.
During the Emergency, an anti-colonial coalition, Mau Mau, responded to British imperialist control in Kenya. As a result, thousands of Kenyans in Kikuyu, Embu and Meru areas were…
The most serious threat of nuclear terrorism comes not from some fragmented, vengeful jihadist network, but from the western states who form the nuclear core of the NATO alliance, who have issued repeated threats against non-nuclear weapon states in the Global South.
It is in fact official policy that Britain will use or threaten to use its nuclear weapons to preserve its economic and financial advantages throughout the world. You just have to join the dots.
This is one of the…
Fletcher went to Kenya in December 1954 as a colonial social worker ‘rehabilitating’ women and girls in British detention camps and prisons for Mau Mau militants and sympathisers. She resigned in protest after trying to improve conditions for seven months.
Labour MP Fenner Brockway waved a copy of Peace News in a house of commons debate on Kenya on 6 June 1956, quoting Fletcher.
Fletcher had witnessed children of 11 and 12 being held in prisons in Kenya, and gave details,…
Waterfalls in Agua Azul, Chiapas, Mexico.
photo: Deisy560 [CC-BY-SA-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
On 24 April, Juan Vázquez Guzmán, indigenous Tzeltal, aged only 32, the father of two small children aged four and seven, a human rights defender and much-loved community leader, was gunned down in the doorway of his home.
The territory and community for which Juan gave his life was the communal landholding (ejido) of San Sebastián Bachajón, in the jungle…
Each year a fast is held in Paris (or in the Paris area) between Hiroshima and Nagasaki days (6-9 August) calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons in general, and the abolition of French nuclear weapons in particular.
The fast is organised by the Maison de Vigilance, which has been demonstrating against French nuclear weapons since 1984.
A movement, a campaign, and a spiritual home for opponents of nuclear weapons which organises monthly protests in…
Mohamed dresses for the UK summer
Peace News Summer Camp is proud to announce that Mohamed Moghazy, an organiser from the Egyptian Committees to Defend the Revolution, has accepted our invitation to speak at our camp at the end of July.
So, as well as the usual delights of PN Summer Camp – a warm and welcoming atmosphere, fascinating fellow campers, beautiful countryside, wonderful childcare and friendly campfire evenings – we are going to hear…
Mike Walli (63), Megan Rice (82), and Greg Bortje-Obed (57), from left to right,
carry symbols of life and truth (see box). Photo: Transform Now Ploughshares
On 7 May, the first day of the Ploughshares trial, giant blindfolded puppets walked towards the crowd, carrying a huge cardboard nuclear weapon.
Sue, dressed as a jester, announced: ‘Our first citizen believes that what she is carrying is… a bicycle! (Cool!) Our second believes that what he is carrying…
We had decided to break the rules. Not a big thing for people whose temperament or life experience leads them to a defiant attitude toward authority. But we happened to be mostly middle-class people, heavily-conditioned to fit in, to obey the rules. Our socialisation had led to professional and, for the students, academic success.
And here we were, with a priority that required breaking the rules. For us, a big thing.
Twice before, Earth Quaker Action Team…
The biggest-ever US demonstration against climate change
brought 35,000 activists from 30 states to Washington DC
in February. Photo: 350.org / project survival media
The world’s most important CO2 monitoring station recorded short-term CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million (ppm), a level not seen for three million years.
Measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (and elsewhere) show CO2 concentrations are now…
Memorial for deserters by Nikolaus Kernbach in Stuttgart.
Photo: Ohne Rüstung Leben, Stuttgart
Most friends in the peace movement are familiar with the name of Franz Jägerstätter. There were other conscientious objectors who, like him, refused to fight Hitler’s war of aggression and paid the ultimate price. A few of these are pictured in Lars G Petersson’s book Deserters (2005), which mainly focuses on the 30,000 German soldiers who deserted while on…
Consensus decision-making has been growing more widespread in a variety of movements, from environmental activists, to co-operatives, to the recent explosion of Occupy camps. Rebecca Smith of Seeds for Change told PN: ‘We have seen a change in meeting culture in Britain, towards a greater awareness of the value of participation and the methods that make it possible.’
“The first step is learning to be honest with yourself."
Seeds for Change, a training and support network, has…
Peace News Summer Camp:
Jameela singing in the evening
This year’s Peace News Summer Camp (25-29 July) is something unusual in British peace movement terms; it’s a major event that has been put into the hands of activists of colour – people whose heritage is from the Global South (Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East). Beyond the peace movement, it’s hard to think of any major, regular activist event in the UK that has been mainly…
Ian Dury, writer of the song ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, playing in
Hamburg. Photo: MALTE CC-BY-3.0 VIA Wikicommons
Our day-long protest on 9 April ended with us tweeting the story of Karen Sherlock. Karen was a disability rights campaigner who, despite suffering from a multitude of health conditions, was assessed by private company Atos Healthcare as potentially capable of working, and she was put in the ‘work-related activity group’ (WRAG). Thanks to rules put in place with the…
PN co-editor tummy-to-tummy with the forces of the State Photo: Marta Lefler
In the unlikely event that anyone were to ask where I was when I heard that Margaret Thatcher had died, I’ll be able to say that I was attempting to get into the department for transport (DfT) to search for secret documents.
Specifically, I was at their London HQ for ‘Operation Disclosure’: a two-day attempt by the anti-road group Combe Haven Defenders to find and distribute the DfT’s secret…
Cheap and powerful
Texting can put important or urgent information directly into your supporters’ hands. Combe Haven Defenders (CHD) are the latest campaign group to venture into mass texting of supporters – here’s how and why they do it (cheaply).
In addition to Facebook, Twitter and their Wordpress blog, CHD has relied heavily on texting to keep people updated.
Over 90% of…
Street art, corner of Saxon Street and Norman Road,
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. Photo: Milan Rai
This month, building on a wave of peace activism, a three-month peace pilgrimage will begin on the Scottish island of Iona, travelling across and then down the east coast of Scotland towards London. The message of the Pilgrimage for Peace and Economic Justice is the same as that of a series of events last month.
In April, the Scrap Trident coalition held a major…
