This issue of Peace News has been produced against the backdrop of war on Iraq and, in particular, the attacks on Fallujah.
While the editorial team spent their evenings deciding on the right font for a heading, warplanes and mortars struck fear into the hearts of ordinary people thousands of miles away.
It's distressing to see the blatant hypocrisy, lies, inconsistencies and ironies surrounding this war and to realise that many of the public - and, it seems, much of…
Even though Ireland remains officially a neutral state, military landings at Shannon Airport in County Clare have nearly tripled in 2004.
The bulk of these landings are US troops travelling in and out of occupied Iraq. It is estimated that a quarter of the US soldiers currently posted in Iraq have travelled via Shannon. In order to allow the US military use of the airport, the government often turned a blind eye to the military presence. It is not known what the contents or…
Delivering a clear message against war, members of the War Resisters League marched from Ground Zero to the New York Stock Exchange in lower Manhattan on the morning of 3 November.
More than 70 people chose to mark the day after the “election” by voting with their bodies, not just their ballots, to end the war. The group called for the money spent on warfare - now approaching US$200 billion in addition to the annual $440 billion annual military budget - to be spent on schools, jobs…
It repeats itself: the main hospital has been closed down by US troops and is being used for military operations, ambulances are being prevented, again by US troops, from moving around the town, which is being pounded from the air while the US and the Iraqi militias, disparate armed groups, fight in the streets and US soldiers drive around with loudspeakers, ordering civilians to leave or be killed.
It could be Falluja in April; this time it's Najaf. I hear that Kut has been bombed…
The latest series of revelations regarding the torture and inhuman and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners by Coalition forces make for yet more depressing and horrible news.
However, the dominant discussion - in the west at least - has centred on a misplaced ideal: that the “rules” of war are observed and that citizens should expect their government and militaries to “play nice” and that, accordingly, we should be outraged when they don't.
Not to detract from the terrible…
Even the most quixotic of observers must surely have been forced to admit, in the light of the shocking pictures of abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US (and probably British) soldiers and security personnel, that the state of affairs in Iraq is not quite the rosy one that some wish to portray it as.
But while the macabre photos from Abu-Ghraib jail may have shocked many people around the world, they came as no surprise to members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams,…
In a somewhat eccentric version of a road movie, Human Shields follows the 25 people who left England on double decker buses on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
Featuring plenty of interviews with the “shields”, the film shows some of the tensions and anxieties that inevitably began to unfold. Apart from a few admirable exceptions, the voices that we hear at the end of the film are not the same as those we heard at the beginning, illustrating how it was not necessarily those who…
Tired of the tedious and pitifully one-dimensional debates on the Iraq war that dominate the mainstream media? Got a sneaking suspicion that Tony Bliar may not be being entirely honest with us over WMD? Or simply want your convictions backed up with a wide range of well-researched and diverse articles? Buy this book. Despite the admission at the start that it was “produced at some speed”, it really is a quality little number.
It kicks off (after a typically sarky foreword from…
The deployment of Japanese troops in Iraq, which began in January and is the first such operation since the second world war, continues to attract opposition from the majority of Japanese people.
Many view the sending of troops to Iraq as a violation of the country's post-war constitution, which renounced war forever; and though the soldiers are serving in a purely “humanitarian” capacity, there are fears that they could be drawn into armed conflict.
The defence ministry in…
This interview was conducted by email during October 2003.
PN: How and why did this project start, who is involved and what do you hope to achieve?
NP: We began the project after two years work on Electronic Intifada website, which has proved to be an effective tool in communicating a humanitarian perspective on the conflict.
We knew that Voices in the Wilderness would have people on the ground, and this perspective was the most important part of the site…
This, eighth in the series of SchNEWS annuals, follows a predictable formula laid down in its predecessors, and is predictably fantastic.
The standard compilation (of approximately 50 issues of the weekly Brighton-based SchNEWS newsletter, alongside longer features, interviews, cartoons, photos, and material from around the world largely ignored by the mainstream media) covering April 2002 to April 2003 is distinct from previous annuals in the coverage it gives to the anti-war…
Tariq Ali has delved deep into the scholarship on 20th century Iraq to produce his provocative and timely book Bush in Babylon, which takes as its focus the history of Iraqi resistance to the British empire and what this suggests for the future.
Whilst polemical in tone the book is never less than engaging - though the reader should be warned that Ali often asserts interesting claims without providing his sources. Hopefully Bush in Babylon will inspire Ali's readers to delve…
Had they not become leaders in the field of exposing government spin doctoring and propaganda, you suspect that Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber would make pretty effective PR consultants themselves.
I recently spotted Weapons of Mass Deception riding high in the best-seller lists in a mainstream British bookstore. How many of those buying it were seduced by the snappy title and the Saddam/Bin Laden comic-strip on the cover? Those expecting the Michael Moore approach to US…
A few days before the bombing started, my friends Zaid and Asmaa and I decided, when the time came, we would be running through the streets of Baghdad together, tearing down Saddam portraits and letting down the tyres of US tanks. The fatal flaw in an otherwise perfect plan was that tanks don't have tyres, but it reflected what many Baghdadis told me. They did want rid of Saddam, but they wanted to do it themselves, not have the US and Britain invade and rescue - and impose their chosen…
After being massively disrupted by the war, Iraqi society shows some signs of recovery, with volunteers cleaning the streets and collecting rubbish in Baghdad.
After realising that neither the city service, nor the US administration, would do it, a group of young volunteers decided to remove the rubbish piled up in the streets themselves.
The amount of rubbish has dramatically grown in the streets since the beginning of the war, increasing the danger of disease and dirty…
