Howard Clark
Few novels are reviewed in Peace News, but then few novelists have the anti-war commitment of Maggie Helwig, a PN contributor, Woman in Black and former member of the WRI Council. This novel, however, is not an anti-war tract but an enthralling work of imagination that gains much of its power from Maggie's serious and multi-angled approach to the reality of war.
The story is set at the false turn of the millennium (remember the panic about y2k chaos?) when the…
I've never reviewed a book before after reading just the introduction. However, I fully recommend this book on the basis of its impact on the person who now has my copy, my partner Yolanda. She teaches 12-14-year-olds in one of those schools that everybody knows is simply not coping - failing its pupils educationally, but also not coping with all the social problems dumped on it in its massified urban environment.
The day after I showed her the book, Yolanda suggested that she do a…
Dozens of Afro-Colombians fled from their home village, Villahermosa in the department of Choco;, in 1997, caught between guerrillas and paramilitaries. Some 6,000 displaced people from 49 villages, including Villahermosa, fled to Pavarondo;. After some months there, the women among them issued a statement:
“We women from Pavarandó want and need our voice to be known in the country and in the world because of what we have been living through for the last nine months…
As popular support waned in the 1980s, guerrilla groups made various attempts to switch to unarmed political struggle. The FARC itself, seeking to negotiate peace in the period 1984-87, set up a political party, the Patriotic Union. In the next five years, at least 2,000 of its leaders and activists were killed by paramilitaries, security forces and members of the drug cartels.
In the early 1990s there was a new wave of negotiations with the government involving guerrilla groups such…
What do you associate with Colombia? Biodiversity? The writer Gabriel García Márquez? The painter Fernando Botero? Or do you think of the world's main source of cocaine, the country with the highest rates of killing and kidnapping, the site of a multi-sided war that has now lasted nearly 40 years?
The point of dedicating this section of Peace News to Colombia is partly to show some of the processes at work behind the headlines, and more still to show what people - Colombians…
"Here I stand", said Martin Luther, "I can do no other"; My initial image of conscientious objection was rather framed by the Protestant tradition of the individual conscience taking a stand against authority, nailing theses to church doors and going to the stake rather than renouncing their faith. I understood it as a personal moral imperative rather than as a political strategy.
That, too, is how I think states have understood conscientious objection (CO). By the end of the…
This 348-page anthology contains the most significant documents of the last 30 years of MOC - the Spanish movement for conscientious objection. The story begins with the pioneer conscientious objector, Pepe Beunza, declaring his refusal to join the military back in 1971 - still in the days of General Franco's dictatorship. It comes right up to the date with MOCs response to the end of conscription in 2000 and a chronology that goes right up to 2002. The texts are mainly short and peppered…
You may have noticed how terms “real defence” and “credible defence” have become popular in CND circles in the past year. They have a hard-nosed ring to them, indicating that the user isn’t a woolly-minded idealist or a wishy-washy pacifist. The Labour leadership’s failure to present a coherent defence policy in the general election seems to have prompted some people…
On November 24, some 400 people sat in rows facing a platform in central London and most of them raised their hands. So was the Anti-Nuclear Campaign launched.
There was little joy about the occasion. The platlorm sat firmly in control of the proceedings throughout the morning session, despite anarchist protests about the set-up and a heap at leaflels about why this was all wrong.…
Many anti-nuclear campaigners in Britain are developing, albeit haphazardly, a direct action strategy against nuclear power. Our co-ordination is higgledy-piggledy but, while the general outlines have not been explicitly agreed, some sort of strategy seems to be emerging. It involves direct intervention and obstruction at sites, at installations or on fuel routes: calling on…
Writing in the afterglow of a beautiful day of guerilla nonviolence at Torness, I’m no longer daunted by the question with which I’ve been shadow-boxing these past few weeks: “exactly how do we intend to reverse the nuclear power programme?”
On that site, I saw for myself the achievement of the people who occupied Half Moon Cottage in creating a symbol for us to rally around…
