Johns, Emily

On 10 November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the Nigerian military government for campaigning against the devastation of their homeland in the Niger Delta by oil companies, Shell in particular. Ken was an activist, writer, political journalist and…

When I gave birth to my child, there he was, he was a boy! So different from me. If he had been a girl, I would have looked ahead at his childhood through the template of my own. I remember thinking: ‘Oh no, I don’t like football, I’ll need to get to grips with boys’ interests and needs’. I nevertheless gave him my dolls’ house furniture and found that he was his own person, didn’t like football anyway, and we did pretty well on gender, power and politics over the next 18 years.

But…

  Chemical bombing of Halabja, 1988, pencil (30 x 42cm).
Osman Ahmed

As the US and Britain threaten to attack Syria on the basis of an alleged chemical weapons attack on the Ghouta suburb of Damascus, confirmation has emerged of US government complicity in Iraqi chemical weapons attacks during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

As PN went to press, UN…

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…

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…

On 23 March, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (the PKK) declared a ‘formal and clear ceasefire’ in the guerrilla war it has been fighting with the Turkish government since 1984, which has cost over 35,000 lives.

While this is the third major PKK ceasefire since 1999, there are signs that this time there may be an opportunity for a genuine peace process.

Jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan (known as ‘Apo’ or ‘uncle’) said on 21 March it was ‘time for the guns to go silent’.

…

Here is a literary biography that gripped me all the way to the end. Robert Leach describes the individual lives of the playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, but the core of this study is their creative relationship. John started his adult life as an architect and Margaretta as an actress. In Leach’s narrative, on an evening in 1956, as John was beginning his career as a highly regarded young writer creating plays for the prestigious Royal Court Theatre, the pair made a pact that…

The bed of the Zayandeh River in Isfahan, 16 February 2013 Photo: Milan Rai

In Isfahan, the swan boats are hooded. Just like our swan boats on the pond in Hastings, they are in their winter sleep, nestled together along the river bank under their red and blue PVC coats. It is seven years since I visited Isfahan. In May 2006, the white swans were being pedalled among the fountains in the Zayandeh River below the many-arched Kadju Bridge.

The roller-skaters are…

Susan Spencer, Patrick Bonner, Milan Rai, Emily Johns & Lois Mastrangelo (l-r) demonstrate for peace on Kadju Bridge, Isfahan, Iran, on 17 February. Photo: JNV

The latest round of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear crisis ended with modest progress, and a firm warning from the United States that: ‘the window for a diplomatic solution simply cannot by definition remain open indefinitely’ (secretary of state John Kerry, 4 March).

At the talks in Almaty…

Shredded Truth: CIA Documents — After the Iranian revolution, Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Although US intelligence officials had shredded confidential documents as the building was being occupied, many of these memos

After a long phoney war, it seems likely that in the next 12 months there will be a serious confrontation between the US, the UK…

They will be meeting officials, civil society groups and ordinary folk in different parts of the country. On their return they will be publishing a pamphlet about Iran, incorporating Emily’s art work from this trip and from her 2007 delegation to Iran.

The trip will cost over £2,000 each – donations to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation are very welcome.

This is a Justice Not Vengeance delegation.

TALKS

To contact Emily and Mil to book a talk in your…

In the last issue of PN, a Jewish reader wrote that she was ‘often very surprised and saddened at the extent of the anti-Jewish feeling and writing in the political Left, and in Peace News particularly’. We promised to reply this issue.

Jen asked whether there was ‘a visible and vocal place for Jews (or Arabs and Gentiles) in the peace movements in general, and in Peace News in particular, who believe in a Jewish…

The Conservative-led government is committing billions to military spending while forcing through massive cuts in jobs and services, and reducing support for badly-needed green technologies.

The government has already spent £2bn on developing and deploying pilotless drone aircraft over the past five years, using some of them to kill an unknown number of Afghan civilians…

It is not enough for the anti-cuts movement to be a defensive, responsive movement. It is not enough to point out the flaws in the arguments for austerity (as the False Economy website does so brilliantly).
If we are going to have a world worth living in, we are going to have to merge together the agendas of the anti-cuts movement, the green movement, the labour movement and the peace movement.

We are already arguing for…