Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the March 16, 1988 gassing of the town of Halabja, which is north-east of Baghdad and whose backdrop is the mountains that make up part of the Iran-Iraq border. This attack killed upwards of 5000 civilians, mostly women and children, injuring thousands more as Iraqi planes dropped chemical bombs on the town.
Having previously visited the town in April 2009 I returned to Halabja on…
Back in November I wrote a blog piece for Peace News about what was essentially a media blackout on cross-border attacks by the Turkish military into the northern regions of Iraq. These Turkish attacks into Iraq have a long and deadly history, taking and disrupted many lives and have historically, in the main, been largely under-reported or simply unreported. It is in part…
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) have upheld Mani Hamid's complaint – “the police had wrongfully arrested him, assaulted him and violated his human right to protest.” (please see back history below (1)). He is currently pursuing prosecution of the police for misconduct and solicitors for negligence. Mani is teaching himself about Human Rights law and is determined to take these cases up to the International Human Rights courts.
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The jubilant celebrations I witnessed in Palestine when the UN General Assembly voted for an observer state status are in direct conflict with the grim reality on the ground. All non-violent demonstrations that resist the occupation of Palestine are deemed illegal and suppressed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) – relabelled to reflect its real role as the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF). Any place where a demonstration…
Today is the third anniversary of the earthquake that struck just outside of Port-au-Prince, the densely populated capital of Haiti.(1) The UN estimated that in the wake of this earthquake more than 220,000 people died and over 300,000 people were injured, fracturing families which directly affected 750,000 children…
Thanks to your generosity we've already reached our original goal of raising £1,250 towards the costs of publishing Ian Sinclair's new book "The march that shook Blair: An oral history of 15 February 2003" (see below). However, further backing is still very valuable, as this will enable us to do additional promotional work for the book; and pay for some of the unpaid work that has already…
Whilst today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation it is also the anniversary of another historic event, although one that is little known by comparison, that actually saw the end to slavery, Haitian independence.
It is widely accepted that the signing of the Emancipation…
On 27 December Poland finally ratified the landmine ban treaty and in doing so brought the whole of the European Union into the treaty with all 27 nations now committed to the international treaty. Having doing so, Poland has also left the United States as the only NATO country not to have ratified the treaty.
Poland signed the treaty in December 1997 but had resisted ratifying it and bringing it…
“The problems started for me at eighteen,” Madleen Kulab said quietly, sitting just meters from the shore of the Mediterranean. “The police and port authorities did not want me to sail as a woman.” Though Madleen has emerged from this recent challenge, receiving a permanent permission to fish from the Gazan Interior Ministry, this is not the first hardship she has stared down and overcome in her lifetime.
As Gaza’s only professional fisherwoman, Madleen’s sailing career began at an…
Omission is a key part of the propaganda model proposed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their classic text on the subject and it can also be used to ascertain bias within the media. Whilst recent media attention has rightly been focusing on military actions in the Middle East in relation to both Syria and to Israel there has been a virtual blackout on reporting when it comes to this month’s military incursions by Turkey into the predominately Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
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Having recently rejoined Merseyside CND, and believing that membership of an organisation necessarily entails participation in its activities, I decided to attend this year’s Hiroshima commemoration in Liverpool, part of which was a film screening at our local social centre. The documentary had originally been shown on BBC4 and concerned the attack on Hiroshima itself, particularly the logistics of…
Sixteen anti-nuclear protesters - half of them Japanese - gathered outside the Japanese embassy in Piccadilly, London on the morning of Friday 10 August, for the second week running, in a demonstration organised by London-based group Kick Nuclear http://kicknuclear.org. This was in solidarity with weekly demonstrations taking place…
In Britain 47% disapprove of US drone strikes, against 44% who approve. Along with the US and India, Britain is an outlier on this: witness the "disapprove" rates for Greece (90%), Egypt (89%), Jordan (85%), Turkey (81%), Spain (76%), Brazil (76%) and Japan (75%). (It may be worth pointing out that the question asked - with its reference to "target[ing] extermists" - was somewhat leading: "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States conducting missile strikes from pilotless aircraft…
Following long-term Parliament Square peace campaigner Maria Gallastegui's unsuccessful High Court challenge of the blanket ban (literally) on 'sleeping equipment', tents and other structures in Parliament Square under the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (PRASRA) 2011 (Part 3), which came into force last December, resulting in the removal on 3rd May of her last peace box and tent (Maria has since lodged an appeal with the Court of Appeal), Maria has continued to sleep…
