Sadly our Utopian tour has ended. We’ve been back in London a few weeks and most of our friends have (quite expectedly) asked “So, how was it?”
We never thought that answering this simple question would be so difficult. And yet, how to relate, describe, depict an experience that has changed our lives? How to, without talking our interlocutors into boredom or sounding a little like one has been touched by some “revelation”, express the inspiration, the hope, the energy, the motivation…
The rain freezes as it hits the windscreen, creating a 1970s dappled frosted glass effect not very useful when you're driving in ice rink conditions on thick snow. It's pitch dark and it would really help to see where we are going. The camper van is encased in a layer of ice that gets thicker with each lashing of freezing rain and added to that the heating doesn't work inside. Not a very Utopian setting. Welcome to Serbia.
We are on our way to the northern industrial town of…
May Day has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day since 1890 when it was instituted as a day of commemoration for the Haymarket Martyrs, anarchist labour organisers who were hanged amongst anti-radical hysteria in Chicago in 1888.
It is celebrated with varying levels of enthusiasm and popular involvement across the globe. In every town and city in Spain it remains a day when the libertarian labour movement holds marches, rallies and fiestas; in Moscow numerous reconstituted…
PN How has Fairtrade changed the producers themselves?
HL Guillermo Vargas Leiton, the representative of Coocafe, the coffee co-operative in Costa Rica, used to say: “When you purchase Fairtrade, you’re helping build democracy, because you are enabling farmers to get together at a local level, to discuss what’s happening to them, to understand where their products are going, and therefore actually to learn the skills of making judgements and decisions.”
So Fairtrade is bringing…
In the last month, the government and big businesses have launched a dizzying array of initiatives threatening the expansion of a creeping “surveillance society” – which has lead to two young people being arrested.
The most sweeping proposal is the government’s scheme to store every phone call, sent email, and web page visited over the previous year by British citizens in a giant database. Jonathan Bamford, of the government’s own privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s…
“Of course another world is possible... As a matter of fact, thousands of people are experimenting with new ways of organising themselves for a more just, less destructive society: look at the Zapastistas in Mexico, the occupied factories in Argentina, the Landless peasants in Brazil”.
How many times have we heard or spoken these words? How many times have we felt the uplifting sensation of possibility given by these wonderfully inspirational examples of true democracy in action? But…
DEMONSTRATE Along with the national “Stop Trident” demonstration on 24 February, various opportunities for demonstrating present themselves over the coming weeks. LOBBY Several campaign groups are calling for serious lobbying of MPs on the run-up to the parliamentary debate and vote. CND are asking people to get their MPs to sign EDM 579. A Lobby Pack with details of how to go about this is available on their website. See http://www.cnduk.org or call 020 7700…
If Trident is replaced, it is our money that will pay for it.
Between seven and ten percent of tax raised is used for “defence” spending. Our money equips occupying troops, and subsidises arms companies. Trident provides even more reason to oppose military taxation. Trident will be funded by everyone in the UK, because we all pay tax. This includes pensioners, students and people receiving benefits, who all pay VAT. It would be virtually impossible not to. Withholding income tax is…
Tell us a bit about your involvement with the antinuclear movement.
I first took part in anti-nuclear actions in the early 1980s. I went on the big anti-cruise demonstrations and went to Greenham a couple of times, for events like “Embrace the Base”. I didn't do anything much on the issue after that until the late 1990s, when I started to get alarmed about war and US foreign policy, particularly in relation to nuclear weapons. The two things that worried me were the expansion of NATO…
The 15 February 2003 demonstrations, showed, as The New York Times observed, that “there may still be two super- powers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
On the other hand, the grassroots mobilisation failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq. Media support? The heavy reporting of the British demonstration on 15 February seems to disprove the idea that the mainstream media opposes, under-reports or belittles grassroots movements. A Daily Telegraph columnist was…
Since the Colombia Project was set up 11 years ago, Peace Brigades International has maintained a continuous presence in the regions most affected by the armed conflicts in Colombia.
PBI's aim has been the protection of internally displaced people and of human rights in general. In order to accomplish these aims, the project uses various different working strands. Some of its main “forces” are the presence of observers/international accompaniers, as well as the provision of mental…
Soraya began her human rights work when she became a lawyer in 1986 -- a period which she describes as “a very hard time in Colombian history; it was a time when political assassinations and massacres of a great part of the people's social movement of Colombia were on the rise”.
The collective has been protected by Peace Brigades International (PBI) volunteers, as Soraya and her colleagues suffer threats and intimidation on a daily basis from Colombia's security and paramilitary…
The XVII Brigade of the Colombian Army - the brigade responsible for the killing of eight members of the peace community of San Jose' in February and another leader in November - will not receive US military aid next year, or at least not officially.
The US State Department notes an improvement in the human rights record of various units of the Colombian Army, but the XVII Brigade will receive no aid until it has satisfactorily responded to the complaints about its actions concerning…
On 12 October people gathered outside the Colombian embassy in London to protest in support of the strike in Colombia.
The General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Jeremy Dear, as well as other senior trade unionists and representatives of Justice for Colombia, handed a letter to the acting Colombian Ambassador Cesar Castro to demand that the rights of peaceful protesters in Colombia on the day of the strike be respected and that the security forces not use…
In early October, Colombian conscientious objector Juan Carlos Montoya Munera was forcefully recruited by the Colombian military in the city of Antioquia, and taken to the barracks of the Batallon Bombona Coronel Diaz, where he is being forced to perform military service.
During the same week the Colombian military forcefully recruited a number of youths in the cities of Medellin and Antioquia, also taking conscientious objectors. On 10 October Alejandro Piedrahita, a conscientious…
The settlement that was once at the centre of the peace community of San Jose' de Apartado' is now occupied by police, soldiers and paramilitaries.
However, 15 minutes walk away, the peace community lives. San Josesito de la Dignidad - a new settlement with some 40 wooden houses and around 350 people - has been built up since April as its new centre.
Maintaining daily lifeTimes have become even tougher since the February massacre. Fire-fights between state forces and the FARC…
There has been a Saturday morning peace picket in Stroud's High Street since the build-up to the Iraq war. This is my pitch for selling PN and seasonal white poppies but I've only just discovered -- to my chagrin -- that the picket predates the arrival of our family in Stroud and has been going on since the war in Kosovo.
The picket is small but, as I've lately been made aware, admirably persistent. It has become part of the street furniture so to speak and this year our…
ZZZ: We try to walk the walk, whether we are challenging the Israeli occupation or resolving conflicts locally.
We're living in a pressure cooker. When you are confined to your home or your bantustan, when the economic situation is deteriorating, unemployment is skyrocketing, and trauma among children is increasing, abnormal conditions create abnormal relationships among people. They create displaced anger against each other.
Yesterday we were mediating conflicts between…
Kosh, sub-editor, mid-20's: I am from a lower middle class family; I joined the protests and got beaten up several times and arrested once. Change takes time. People who were suppressing their desires so far have openly started putting their ideas forward. This is the beauty of democracy. Hopefully, things will improve soon.
Dinesh, 22, (ex-member of the revolutionary wing of the students' union Akhil Krantikari): Now I can freely go to other areas in Nepal, which…
Karl Marx saw the red flag with Che Guevera’s silhouetted face on it on my bedroom door. Looking surprised he said: “Che. I read about his life. Tapain leh maanuhuncha? Do you respect him?”
I said yes, I did “respect” him. The question was so sincere that I didn’t feel right to add that Che had also become an over-hyped pop-art icon. It was kind of nice that this young man had no idea about that. Usually kids know the face without knowledge of the revolutionary stuff.
“And…
