Features

Most of us have a grand vision, but few of us dare to make our dreams reality. In the 1970s the Atlantis community formed as a therapy community, by the `80s they had ecological communities in Ireland and Colombia. However, their dream was shattered when they lost 6,000 acres of land and two of their young adults at the hands of a band of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces Columbia) paramilitaries.

Lauren Kelley: How did the Atlantis community come to be established in Ireland…

Norman Finkelstein, author and academic, was punished for his principled stand against Israeli brutality by being denied tenure at DePaul University in June 2007. On 12 November, during a whirlwind British speaking tour, and before delivering a talk in Maastricht about Gandhi’s relevance to the Middle East conflict, Norman Finkelstein sat down with Peace News to discuss nonviolence, Gandhi and the role of the intellectual.

Peace News: What are the current peace prospects in Israel…

How would you describe the state of democracy in Nepal one year on from the jana andolan II?

Symbolically, people-power triumphed, thus giving way to some semblance of a democratic dispensation. Structurally, at least on paper, the interim parliament has almost dismantled the old order that derived much of its powers from the palace. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in terms of their aspirations, attitudes and behaviours - the grassroots signs of a democracy in…

On 16 October 1985 (international World Food Day), London Greenpeace -- an independent, anarchist/anti-militarist group originally set up in 1971 by people around Peace News -- launched an annual international day of action against "McDonald's and all they stand for."

The group's leaflets brought together criticisms of McDonald's business practices made by different movements in relation to the environment, workers' rights, cash crops and world trade, nutrition, advertising to…

PN: Tell us a bit about yourself, what kind of work you do and what your focus is - in terms of the reports or opinion pieces you write.

BS: I am a full-time journalist with a visual arts background, but over the last decade the painting has been sidelined bymy professional involvement with journalism - as well as activism in human rights issues, which includes, of course, women's issues and peace issues - and, for the past couple of years, television documentary. (I did an…

PN: For some years now Macedonia has been on the receiving end of “humanitarian” military interventions [see box below for a list of international missions to Macedonia]. NATO peacekeeping forces have been deployed in Macedonia for several years already, and will probably remain there for years to come. Can you briefly explain the different “peacekeeping” missions that have taken place in your country and what their aims were?

Bobi: The first NATO troops arrived in…

The following interview was conducted with filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, who recently produced War and Peace - a three-hour film of epic proportions about the state of affairs in Pakistan and India. We spoke in Toronto during the Hot-docs Film Festival after the showing of his film.

CS: Anand, do you call your self a Gandhian? I am going by what I saw in War and Peace where you trace your relationship to Gandhi through your uncles and other Gandhians in the…

Over the summer there was a minor media storm as, in the run up to 7/7, journalists and politicians heard about Fun Da Mental's new album All is War. It's a provocative and challenging album (see review opposite) and the track that caught the media's attention is called Cookbook DIY. We caught up with main man Aki Nawaz and, at his request, tried to ask him some “hard” questions!

PN: The mainstream media have given you a seriously hard time over the album…

Coskun, you were imprisoned for almost 12 years, from 1979 to 1991, when the rest of your sentence was changed to a suspended sentence. What was important for you in prison and where did you get your strength from ?

The most important source of strength was my belief in being right. But this wasn’t a blind belief. I was objecting to exploitation and human rights violations. I desired democratic and economic development in our country. These were quite simple demands, compared to…

PN: What is your background in relation to Darfur?

ADW: I travelled extensively in Darfur when I first went as a PhD student in 1985. I wrote my first book on famine in Darfur. Subsequently I've spent almost all of the last 22 years working on the Horn of Africa.

PN: What are the origins of the Darfur crisis?

ADW: The underlying factors are the economic and political marginalisation of Darfur, including both Arabs and non-Arabs. Darfur…

Gould: Mrs Thatcher, why, when the Belgrano, the Argentinian battleship, was outside the exclusion zone and actually sailing away from the Falklands, why did you give the orders to sink it?
Thatcher: But it was not sailing away from the Falklands - It was in an area which was a danger to our ships, and to our people on them.
Sue Lawley, presenter: Outside the exclusion zone, though.
Thatcher: It was in an area which we had warned, at the end of April, we had given warnings…

Background

The archipelago Britain calls the Falkland Islands lies 300 miles off Argentina in the South Atlantic.
The islands are known in Argentina as the Malvinas.
Argentina has asserted sovereignty over the islands since the British invasion of 1833.

On 4 and 5 August a group of international peace gardeners visited AWE Aldermaston to plant vines and fig trees both inside and outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Nine were arrested and charged with criminal damage.

Taking inspiration from the biblical text Micah 4:3 - "and everyone shall live underneath their vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid..." - the action kicked off a weekend of events held at Britain's nuclear weapons factory to mark the 60th anniversary…

All over Britain, people came together to commemorate Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days. There were vigils, ceremonies and tree plantings whilst other people chose to raise awareness by leafleting, fasting or floating peace lanterns. This is a round-up of a few of the events that took place:

In Southampton, over 100 people gathered at Bitterne Park United Reformed Church Hall for a meeting with the Mayor, Cllr Edwina Cooke, and Bruce Kent. After the meeting the audience and speakers viewed…

Ippy: Your music is politicised by design, but what did you get into first, music or politics, and when?

Adam: We all know that music (noise) and politics (anything that governs our lives) are every day, act to act, moment to moment continuums that inform and shape our lives. I can say that in 1971 a nine-year-old (who would later become the brilliant but derided political theorist and Kant scholar-professor Arthur Strum) exposed me to Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, as well as…

PN : Do you see parallels between the current ``war on terror'' (and the war on Iraq in particular) , and the Falk? lands/Malvinas war in 1982.

TD: Two parallels strike me. The first is that in the Falklands, there was the Peruvian peace proposals [see box]. Knowingly, when Mrs Thatcher sank the Belgrano, she knew about the Peruvian peace proposals, and wanted to torpedo them. By that time, she didn't want peace. Years later, the same was to happen to Hans Blix. If he'd been…

During the war, the Peace Pledge Union embarked upon negotiations of its own, with the object of obtaining a joint statement from British and Argentinian pacifists condemning the war.

Regrettably, this proved impossible, as the most accessible Argentinian pacifist, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace laureate of 1980, whilst prepared to condemn the military action of both parties, refused to sign a statement that in any way set aside the Argentinian claim in favour of self-…

CAMPAIGNS

One group has been working with the local community to raise awareness about the arms fair and to keep up the pressure on the organisers.

East London Against the Arms Fair (ELAAF) is a group of people who live in London's Docklands area and have protested against the arms fair since it was first held in the area. One of our aims is to inform local people about what is happening on their doorstep and to encourage their support.

To this end we have been…

On the basis of the official invitations from previous DSEi exhibitions, we can say with certainty that representatives from countries engaged in conflict, with poor human rights records and with major development needs will all be in attendance again this year.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's annual Human Rights Report for 2005 considers twenty countries in detail, in which it considers that human rights are a particularly serious problem. Six of these; Afghanistan…