Plans are afoot for CND to attend several festivals this year including Shambala, the Greenpeace Fair and Glastonbury. At Glastonbury, CND will have two areas – an information tent close to the Pyramid Stage and a campaigning tent in the Green Futures field. Our main focus this year is to raise awareness and get people involved in the “No Trident Replacement” Campaign.
The MoD’s first report on the replacement process (called the “Initial Gate”) is due in September this year – the…
Having been the first person to be prosecuted (and convicted and imprisoned) for organising an unauthorised protest near parliament, it seems to my dubious honour to be, perhaps, the last person the Crown Prosecution attempted to prosecute under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.
I was summonsed to Horseferry Road court on 7 May for reading the names of the Afghan dead without police permission on 7 October last year. After I pointed out that I had not…
On 9 April, 14 peace and social justice activists were arrested at Creech US Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, in what is believed to be the first act of mass nonviolent civil disobedience against the military use of pilotless drones. “Predator” and “Reaper” drones have reportedly killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see Gabriel Carlyle’s analysis on p2 for more details).
The Creech 14, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, were arrested…
b> We’ve decided to focus on carbon trading in the financial sector, a system of legal and financial support that the G20 leaders are giving to climate criminals, by targeting the European Climate Exchange (Bishopsgate, London) on 1 April.
Carbon trading, like the financial system that led to the current economic crisis, is characterised by incredibly complicated accounting procedures that very few people really understand. The European Climate Exchange is one of the world’s…
At around 11pm, despite all the problems with effective decision-making, those of us still at Climate Camp in Bishopsgate orchestrated a controlled retreat. By this point I was right up against the police line on the south end of the camp.
We were walking with our arms linked, being pushed by a line of police using their riot shields. They kept pushing us, but when we got as far as we’d agreed we sat down. Shortly afterwards, they tried pulling people out of the line – they didn’t…
British commentators have been greatly impressed by Obama’s “new” strategy for the wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan (unveiled on 27 March, after PN2508 went to press), with the Independent’s leader writer claiming that it represented a “[complete] U-turn… shift[ing] the focus on to civilian projects and training”. “Fears in some quarters that the US planned an Iraq-style military ‘surge’, to be preceded by demands for many more combat troops from supposedly lily-livered European allies, were…
Hamas features in the European list of terrorist organisations. Is this fair? Hamas, like many other movements in the Middle East, is essentially a political party with a military wing. It is not homogeneous.
I know one Hamas mayor with posters of Gandhi and Martin Luther King in his office. I know others understandably consumed with bitterness. Their supporters are an even more diverse bunch.
Many Palestinian Christians cast their votes for Hamas, an avowedly Islamist…
The atmosphere when I arrived with most of the other campers at 12.30pm and throughout the day was excellent – there were workshops all afternoon, a working kitchen, compost toilets, a farmers market, music - samba, Céilidh, guitars, folk bands – a real carnival feel. The event was entirely peaceful all day with the police calm and friendly, some walking through the camp, at least one holding a daffodil and at least one seen hugging a protester!
At 7pm, the mood changed…
My sympathies go to the family and friends of Ian Tomlinson. At the G8 in Germany in 2007, the peaceful demonstrator next to me was beaten to the ground by a policeman wielding a similar baton, probably supplied by the same arms manufacturer. Unprovoked, another policeman punched my wife.
Intimidation and violence are not confined to London or “The Met”; they are the stock-in-trade of police the world over when dealing with peaceful democratic protest. Peaceful, I hear some…
As PN went to press, Iran and the United States were preparing to make significant peace offers (or at least gestures) to each other. Iran’s proposal is almost certain to include international co-ownership and joint operation of its enrichment facility, the “consortium” option rejected by the US and Britain in the past.
In this delicate situation, Israel, predictably was doing its best to provoke a wild statement from Iran that might destabilise diplomacy. Thus the threats to bomb…
Western attention has focused once again on the plight of women in Afghanistan, as the result of the Shia Family Law, passed by Afghan president Hamid Karzai in March. The law, which gives Shia husbands enormous legal powers over their wives, provoked 300 women to mount an almost-unprecedented demonstration outside a madrassa run by one of Afghanistan’s most powerful Shia clerics, Mohamad Asif Mohseni, on 15 April.
Another view
Nelofer Pazira, Afghan-Canadian film-maker…
The clever young things at Plane Stupid recently came up with a great idea for forging closer links between environmental activists and concerned residents threatened by the proposed third runway at Heathrow. The idea was to twin residents up with existing affinity groups, and for each affinity group to support their resident in their fight against the new runway, ultimately helping them defend their homes if necessary.
To get the campaign off the ground, an initial group of activists…
In 2008, a small group of women in Kandahar, Afghanistan, decided to gather in a public square to pray for peace with justice in Afghanistan on International Women's Day. They expected only a few women to show up, but more than 1500 women gathered in Kandahar that day. This year on Women's Day thousands of women across Afghanistan demonstrated for peace and women's justice wearing sky-blue scarves to highlight unity and solidarity across generations, languages, geographic locations, ethnic…
Obama’s Guantanamo
On coming into office, US president Barack Obama promised to shut down the US prison camp for suspected terrorists on Guantanamo within a year and to fight terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals”. As our last issue went to press, Obama quietly indicated that he will continue to deny the right to trial to hundreds of terror suspects held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, a place human rights lawyers call “Obama’s Guantanamo”. Bagram…
In the wake of so much loss, grief and destruction, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how Gaza will ever recover. This is compounded by the fact that despite Israel’s massive assault officially ending in January, the Israeli military continues to attack the strip almost daily. Most of the international journalists have left and the international community considers the war as being over, but Palestinian civilians are still being killed and injured on a regular basis. Fishermen and…
Short, wispy silver hair surrounds her freckled and slightly worn face. She speaks with a decisive tone, and though the tongue in which she speaks is unfamiliar to me, I was fascinated by the story of Hana Ibrahim when I met her in February at SOAS in London.
The lifelong Iraqi resident began campaigning for women’s rights about ten years ago and founded the Women’s Will Association, an Iraq- and Syria-based NGO, in Baghdad in 2004 and Gender magazine, which discusses women’s rights…
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), remarked of US president Barack Obama on 11 March: “He is not going to say by 2020 I’m going to reduce emissions by 30%. He’ll have a revolution on his hands. He has to do it step by step.”
Within the mainstream, the kind of protest and turmoil that might be thrown up by a strict climate policy amounts to a “revolution”.
Frankly, we do need that kind of revolution. We need to force political…
As PN went to press, Iran was digesting US president Barack Obama’s surprise New Year (Nowruz) message to the Iranian people. It appears that both the Obama speech and British prime minister Gordon Brown’s recent initiative are designed to mask an unwillingness to accept a compromise on the Iranian nuclear crisis that is supported by former diplomats and by the government of Iran itself. In his 554-word video speech on 20 March, Obama offered a “new day” (but no specific proposals) to both “…
The Free Gaza Movement is, at the time of going to press, preparing to break the Israeli siege on Gaza again. They hope to send a cargo ship (with building supplies and medical equipment), and a passenger boat (with at least 50 passengers), and are appealing for funds to enable this to happen. Whether or not they succeed in acquiring additional boats, they will be des Spirit of Humanity, which was turned back by Israeli gunboats in January, intends to depart for Gaza in mid-March.
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As Israel commits brutal war crimes in Gaza, it also continues to covet the land of Palestinians living in the West Bank. The 790km-long apartheid wall snakes through the occupied West Bank annexing Palestinian land to Israel.
Israel is also progressing with the annexation of the entire eastern section of the West Bank, known as the Jordan Valley, the most fertile region of the West Bank, which constitutes a further 28.5% of the land inside the 1967 green line.
Israel already…
