Al Hadra, Sahrawi poet Photo: Emma Brown
Across the other side of Algeria from where the Amenas gas installation was hijacked by militia (armed from former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s liberated weapon stores), a very different Islamic resistance movement has been lodged for 35 years.
Largely unnoticed in Western consciousness, their culture draws on moderate Islam, Bedouin traditions and 1960s African socialism. One of their weapons of choice is poetry…
Tip of a mammoth tusk carved as two reindeer depicted one behind the other; approximately 13,000 years old. Montastruc, France. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum
This exhibition, ‘Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind’, brings together for the first time in this country the earliest evidence of art in Europe ranging in age from 10,000 to 40,000 years old.
As a…
Nonviolence training run by Turning the Tide Photo : Turning th e Tide
‘Our colonial masters were brutal in their governance. The independence leaders saw that as their role model, so they too used oppression and brutality to rule. It became generational. We have not been taught alternative ways of making our point.’ These are the words of Malesi Kinaro, executive director of Friends Peace and Community Development, a Kenyan Quaker organisation that in 2009…
Back story
Laura Shipler Chico
When violence erupted after Kenya’s last elections in 2007, Kenyan Quakers were quick to respond – first with humanitarian aid, then listening to people’s stories. Eventually they began to help people process their trauma and knit their communities back together. However, they soon began to see that, in order to build a lasting peace, they needed to speak out…
Despite a torrent of commentary in the British media to mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there has been little or no reflection on what turned the largely-unopposed invasion in March 2003 into a guerrilla war that began two months later.
A double massacre in the largely Sunni town of Fallujah in central Iraq played a crucial role in galvanising the Sunni insurgency.
According to reports, during the US-led invasion in March, Iraqi troops…
David Wearing, co-editor, New Left Project
As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed, power cannot rule by force alone. Hegemony requires that a sufficient portion of the population view the status quo as fundamentally legitimate, or at least unalterable. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman described how the corporate media function in a way that manufactures this popular consent, by framing discourse, promoting certain perspectives…
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’.
…
Stop #8, 2005 Kennardphillips
On 19 March 2003, the United States and Great Britain embarked on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Widely considered one of greatest foreign policy disasters of modern times, the war was only the latest in a series of western military interventions in the country over the course of the last century. A decade on from the invasion, the war is being revisited in British public culture across newspaper articles, television…
Susan Clarkson in Afghanistan with an Afghan Peace Volunteer Photo: VCNV UK
In December 2012, four of us, Susan Clarkson, Mary Dobbing, Maya Evans and Beth Tichborne, went to Kabul, Afghanistan, to stay with the Afghan Peace Volunteers. We went as the first UK delegation of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. VCNV are based in the US and were formed by Kathy Kelly. Several years ago, Kathy wrote in Peace News (PN 2527) about the APV, whom she had met in Bamiyan, and she…
Many of us have beliefs about ourselves that prevent us from doing what we want to do, or being who we want to be. Those beliefs can follow us around like a ghost for large chunks of our lives. At the beginning of the year, I participated in Training for Change’s epic seven-day training for trainers in Margate. I went there expecting to pick up some new exercises and learn the subtleties of group dynamics. What I hadn’t bargained for were some pretty eye-opening realisations about myself.…
Exuberant schoolgirl on a trip to the ancient remains of Persepolis Photo: Emily Johns
In Shiraz, on Day Four, while we were waiting for our minibus to show up to take us to lunch, a man walked by carrying an old rifle. I’m not an expert on guns, but it looked really old, perhaps even a First World War-type Lee-Enfield. (Now that I’m home, I find that these are still used all round the world.) The man carrying the rifle was dressed in civilian clothes, and walked along the road casually,…
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…
Young people are challenging restrictions on physical contact Photo: Milan Rai
A threatened regime
Despite the regime’s defiant bravado, the 34th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution last month was a grim affair. Internationally, the country remains at loggerheads with the US and its partners. Iran’s pivotal ally Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has lost control over much of the country, threatening Iran’s vital overland supply route…
As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there is a general understanding, perhaps even a global consensus, that lies were told to justify the war. The most important of these lies, however, is rarely discussed, or even noticed.
On 25 February, former British prime minister Tony Blair made a last throw at justifying the war: ‘If we hadn’t removed Saddam from power just think, for example, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing now and Saddam…
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…
Protest is alive and well in Berkshire at Aldermaston and Burghfield, the two facilities of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), where all British nuclear weapons have been designed and made. In 1985, Greenham Women set up Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp (AWPC) – and we are still there. Whatever the weather, you can find us on the second weekend of every month outside the ‘Citadel’ (A340) gate – look for the peace flags and banners!
“AWE has a poor safety record, with fires,…
‘On this evidence, the big march was shock and awe from the bottom up; it came within a hair’s breadth of derailing the warmongers and still shapes our politics today.’ Joe Glenton, Afghan war veteran and author of Soldier Box(Verso)
According to polling, over 1¼ million people took part in Britain’s biggest-ever political protest: the 15 February 2003 anti-war march in London against the invasion of Iraq. There is a widespread feeling — among both activists and the…
The December 2012 de Silva report on the assassination of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989 led prime minister David Cameron to concede that there had been ‘shocking levels of collusion’ by the security forces in the killing. Cameron said he was ‘deeply sorry’ to the Finucane family.
The brief flurry of attention in the British media made us at PN reflect on the general level of knowledge and ignorance of the conflict in British activist circles. So here is a poll…
The olive harvest, it’s not as romantic as it sounds, emailed my Aussie friend and fellow IWPSer before I set off for my second ‘tour’ volunteering with the International Women’s Peace Service, based in the village of Deir Istiya in the Salfit governate, in the West Bank.
And in a way my friend was right: gruelling sun, long hours in the sun, and a bit monotonous sometimes. Returning, eating and showering were all we were fit for, but there were clothes to hand-wash (olive-picking…
This banner was designed and made by the women of Llandrindod, Wales in 1981. The banner, which is now in the Bradford Peace Museum, was made for the ‘Women for Life on Earth Peace March’ from Cardiff to Greenham Common which marked the start of the Greenham Common women’s peace camp. Photo: Bradford Peace Museum
