Global south

The War Resisters International Triennial (now held every four years, in a cunning ploy to avoid police detection and repression) is being held here in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, at Gujarat University or “Gujarat Vidyapith”. Coming from the recent ice, snow and slush of southern England, Ahmedabad is jarringly hot – but not too hot, dusty but not too dusty. The university, which was closed down three times by the British authorities during the national freedom struggle, was founded by Gandhi…

“Can they not see what they are doing? They will cause the war to continue”. John-Bosco1 looked at me, pointing to the day’s copy of the New Vision newspaper open on the café table. It was hard to know how to answer this question; I had been struggling with it for months.

John-Bosco was a night watchman with a family growing up amidst the conflict. He was one of the first people to welcome my wife and I to Gulu, Northern Uganda, when we arrived in 2001.

Now it was…

On the second morning (the third day) of the Triennial, we had our first “reflectors” session. The reflectors were five people who had been chosen to give their reaction to the conference so far. There were four women (all English-speaking, one African, one Australasian, one European, one North American) and one man (Spanish-speaking, Latin American).

Incidentally, this reminds me of something Jai Sen said about the book he co-edited: World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. They set…

What was the “breaking news” I promised at the beginning of the last posting? Well, yesterday I sat in on a discussion group that decided to put forward a major proposal to the council of War Resisters International, suggesting an investigation of the feasibility and desirability of WRI addressing the extent to which climate change, and in particular the threat of runaway climate change, affects the anti-militarist and social justice struggles it is currently involved in, or supporting.…

The breaking news just doesn’t stop.

After lunch yesterday (23 January) we broke up for workshops. For some reason we had two workshop slots of differing lengths, and there was also the option for many of them of continuing the workshop after the break. The first slot (2 hours) I went to hear Bela Bhatia talking about the conflict in the state of Chhattisgarh, where police and Maoists are fighting a vicious war in a tribal area. (Tribal people are known as “adivasis” or “earliest/…

Can international conferences like this be justified? Lots of my friends think not. I have breaking news from Peace News on this score – the survey they dared not print. Well, no one has not dared to print it, actually, but it dramatises the story.

Earlier today, in the morning plenary session, we had a searing moment which really made the whole thing worthwhile. We had two plenary speakers. One was Samarendra Das, who has been working for 16 years with poor communities facing…

Rich countries and corporations have grown wealthy through a model of development that has pushed the planet to the brink of climate catastrophe. They have over-used the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Drastic measures now have to be taken to prevent runaway climate change, making it impossible for poor countries to grow their economies in the same way. Put another way, the rich world has “colonised” the earth’s atmosphere. This process has mirrored and perpetuated…

Climate Justice Action is a new global network of people and groups committed to take the urgent actions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. The network is open to individuals and groups that agree with our Networks Goals, Principles for Working Together and Call To Action.

Among the many groups that are part of the network are: Climate Watch Alliance (Nepal); Focus on the Global South; Friends of the Earth (Engand, Wales and Northern Ireland); Human Rights Defenders…

The Fairtrade drinks producer Cafédirect reported on 9 October that the incomes of small-scale tea and coffee farmers could fall by up to 90% in the next 15 years.
Farmers are being forced to move uphill an average of three to four metres every year – in Kenya, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua – to escape pestilence and disease caused by rises in temperature.
At the end of September, a report for the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank predicted that, by 2050, climate change…

As a young South African lawyer, Albie Sachs defended his clients on charges brought under apartheid laws, was detained and tortured with sleep deprivation, went into exile, and lost an arm and an eye when South African security agents put a bomb in his car.

Following the end of apartheid, Sachs was appointed to the constitutional court by Nelson Mandela. This book is the fascinating story of an activist and lawyer given the opportunities, first to help write his country’s new…

The British Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC) was set up in 2002 in response to the attempted military coup in Venezuela, aims to defend Venezuela’s sovereignty and independence, and to defend the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution, especially by promoting and strengthening links with Venezuelan trade unionists. For a period, VSC was organising international computer link- ups between British and Venezuelan trade unionists. VSC has also promoted and undertaken solidarity tours to…

The British Tamils Forum (BTF) organised peaceful protests in central London (including the demonstration of over 200,000 Tamils on 11 April 2009) to show solidarity with their brethren in Sri Lanka and to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

BTF is an umbrella organisation bringing together individuals and Tamil community organisations for three main aims: To highlight the humanitarian crises and human rights violations perpetrated by the government of Sri…

13 years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni human rights activists Shell was brought to court in New York for complicity with the Nigerian government for these state murders.

The Ogoni were to use US Alien Tort Statute but Shell settled with them out of court on 8 June with a payment of $15.5m (the equivalent of four hours profit for Shell), seemingly to prevent evidence about their corporate entanglement with the Nigerian military dictatorship reaching the…

This book is not an easy read in any sense of the term and hardly anyone emerges from its pages with much credit. It lays bare, in great detail, the origins of the present conflict in Darfur and how it has unfolded in recent years. Needless to say, the true picture is considerably more complex than that presented by the mass media which, in any event, were somewhat late upon the scene.

“Until March 2004, Darfur’s crisis unfolded in the typical manner of African civil wars, unremarked…

This isn’t a book about humanitarian relief, or really about the aid delivered by aid agencies at all. Instead its about the much bigger sums which rich countries’s governments contribute to African infrastructure, governance and welfare systems on a regular basis.

Most African countries receive more than 10% of their GDP in aid, and a few, like Sierra Leone and Burundi, receive more than 30 per cent. Aid received on this scale has an enormous impact, but not necessarily a good one,…