There are many reasons not to drink Coca-Cola, but this most symbolic of drinks has yet to face a coordinated boycott campaign. However, it is now facing a combination of court cases and international public hearings accusing it of employing paramilitaries to kill and harass trade unionists in Colombia.
Seven Colombian trade union negotiators working for companies associated with Coca Cola have been killed, mostly in the mid-1990s, but there are currently around 50 who have been…
Witness for Peace
The basic method of Witness for Peace has been for US citizens to go to a zone of conflict and report back to their home community what they have seen - in particular, forms of aggression or human rights violations supported by the US government. This played a useful role in putting the brakes on direct US military intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Witness for Peace is now organising several delegations a year to Colombia, visiting a range of peace and human rights…
The term “Peace Community” perhaps evokes an image of utopian pacifist experiments. In Colombia, however, the peace communities have been formed by displaced people and face continued pressure from every armed side. Renouncing the use of arms and collaboration with any armed force, they try to establish demilitarised spaces, neutral to the armed conflict.
Members of each peace community make five commitments:
to participate in community work efforts; to say “No” to injustice and…There is a diverse and rapidly growing movement to end US military involvement in Colombia. The US has backed the Colombian military in that country's brutal civil war since the 1960s, and groups like the Colombia Support Network and the Colombia Human Rights Network have worked for years to draw attention to the suffering of the Colombian people and inspire solidarity with the courageous struggles of Colombia's nonviolent popular movements. That movement has grown dramatically in response…
Colombia has become a model of the extreme use of violence to impose neoliberal globalisation. Every form of social organisation that resists is being eliminated: indigenous people, peasants, workers are assassinated for opposing the objectives of investors. Each year more trade unionists are assassinated in this country than in the whole of the rest of the world.
Coca-Cola and its Colombian subsidiary, Panamco SA participate in this dirty war against social movements. So it is that…
The San José de Apartadó Peace Community See page 23. The “Nunca Más” (“Never again”) Project This group works in the area of recovering historical truths regarding national human rights violations. The Women's Organisation of the People (OFP)See page 28. The Committee for Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP) This committee, based in Medellín and Bogotá and in the Chocó and Urabá areas, provides legal advice and defence work for prisoners belonging to social organisations or members of…
Who said all is lost in Colombia? Women propose stopping the war now
We women saw the unsuccessful peace process between the government and the FARC as exclusionary, not based in the grass roots. Now we view with terror the spectacle of war: a patriarchal concept, both retrogressive and obtuse, has elevated war to the role of midwife of history and humanity, and unfortunately, at present, is defining the destiny of this country and of the world. We know, by the wisdom gleaned from centuries…
The population of Chocó in the north of Colombia is 70 per cent Afro-Colombian, 20 per cent indígena. The zone has attracted the interest of multinationals (because of its reserves of petrol and coal) and of logging companies. And the price of land doubled in one year following president Samper's announcement in 1996 of a new plan for an inter-oceanic link, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
It was in 1996 that the Colombian government launched a counter-insurgency campaign.…
The first Independent Media Centre (IMC) came to life in Seattle in November 1999. It was set up to cover a specific event: the protests against the World Trade Organisation. The Seattle IMC produced a printed publication called The Blind Spot, which was distributed on the streets during the demos, as well as creating a website that became an enormous success.
Since then “independent media” and “open publishing” have become buzz-words among activists everywhere. Indymedia is…
Cultural resistance is, it seems, in the air at the moment. There's been British novelist Nicholas Blincoe, calling for a cultural boycott of Israel by disrupting Israeli folk-singer Noa's performance at a London music festival; the theatre producer who decapitated a marble statue of Baroness Margaret Thatcher as a protest against global capitalism; and George Michael, challenging US foreign policy in the pop charts, an attitude also adopted by a host of high-level-artistic figures in the US…
Some people still reduce Zapatismo to Marcos. Pure racism. An educated white man was surely manipulating those poor, illiterate Mayas. They cannot say what he is saying and even less conceive such a movement... Unabated racism.
But what about the crowds? A year ago, subcomandante Marcos and 25 Zapatista commanders travelled to Mexico City. For the first time, millions were able to see and hear them. Time and again the crowds did not allow the other Zapatistas to speak. Marcos! Marcos…
I started off as a street musician in Dublin in 1986, filling in the hours while my three daughters were at school. The streets get into the bloodstream after a while - the freedom, the fresh air, the uncertainty of it all, the peace.
What started off as a hobby became a part-time earner. Arriving in Dublin with the three girls, I met other musicians, we played together on the streets and had fun. Having studied the Irish language (old and medieval) and being under pressure from…
It has become fashionable again among a few artists and groups in some alternative publishing companies here in France - but also, I believe, in Belgium, Switzerland, the US, Canada, and Britain - to talk about culture and resistance...
For me the topic conjures up this comment: agriculture and culture are both spaces of struggle against the elements, wastelands of liberties, areas of autonomy. This is also the place where the forces, hopes and actions to change the world lie.
…The idea behind this project was to link storytelling - the theme of the 2002 WRI Triennial - directly with the history of the WRI. How, then, to do this? The answer, to WRI worker Roberta Bacic, rested in the large collection of old, dusty, unsorted photographs in the office files.
Why not invite activists and former staff members of the older generation to a working session to identify people, places and times caught by the camera long ago? This group activity would stimulate…
AWOL magazine is the product of a “workshop of artists, activists and revolutionaries”.
Started in 2000 and jointly funded by the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and ROOTS/War Resisters League, AWOL aims to “provide a space for marginalised voices to dialogue to be heard, a place to resist and grow”. The emphasis is on providing an alternative to a dominant culture “saturated with pro-military propaganda”.
In practice the AWOL “project” is a combination…
In Serbia the REX/B92 cultural centre describes itself as “a laboratory for research of new fields of culture”.
The centre is a member of TEH (Trans Europe Halles), network of European independent cultural centres and the coalition of centres for creative development and use of new media (ECB - European independent cultural centres network).
REX projects include
Ring Ring. International New Music Festival (held every year in May, since 1996) Mladi YU vizuelni (Young…The fragile peace of the impoverished African country of Mozambique rests uneasily on caches of thousands of weapons left over from 16 years of civil war.
Albino Forquilha, coordinator of the Transforming Arms into Ploughshares project of the Christian Council of Churches, recently explained to Canadian peace and development activists how this project helps his country.
After the devastation of the civil war, Mozambique has a high level of unemployment and of violent crime. Ex…
A Peace News on antimilitarism - shouldn't that be an easy task for the international antimilitarist magazine? If we thought so before, then working on this issue certainly proved us wrong!
While we engage in antimilitarist practice in our daily work - in the Peace News or WRI office, or in our activism out on the streets, or at military propaganda events - our antimilitarist analysis seems to trail behind. That doesn't mean that we don't know what…
Close to and almost surrounding the Turkish parliament in Ankara are the various headquarters of the military establishment army, navy, airforce, and gendarmerie. Diagonally opposite looms the office of the General Chief of Staff.
It is well known that the armed services have played a very central role in modern Turkey, since the foundation of the Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, himself a military leader. Three democratically elected governments have been ousted…
My son Yinnon Hiller is the first young Israeli to appeal to the Israeli High Court for his human right not to serve in the military on the grounds of his pacifist beliefs and he is one of a fast-growing group of Israeli conscientious objectors.
At a hearing held in February 2002, the panel of judges decreed a second court injunction in favour of Yinnon. The first hearing, held six months earlier, ordered the state to present valid reasons why the military did not accept Yinnon's…
