All posts by CPNN Coordinator

About CPNN Coordinator

Dr David Adams is the coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network. He retired in 2001 from UNESCO where he was the Director of the Unit for the International Year for the Culture of Peace, proclaimed for the Year 2000 by the United Nations General Assembly.

Pope Francis meets ‘The Elders’ to discuss global concerns

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION

An article from the Vatican Radio

Pope Francis had a private meeting at Santa Marta on Monday afternoon [November 5] with members of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders working for peace and human rights around the world. The Elders was established 10 years ago by former South African President Nelson Mandela and is currently marking the group’s 10th anniversary with a campaign called “Walk Together” – continuing Mandela’s long walk to freedom.


Left to right: Elders Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi Annan, Pope Francis with an assistant, Elders Ricardo Lagos and Mary Robinson, and an unidentified participant.

Just after the audience, Philippa Hitchen spoke to two of the founding members of The Elders, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson, former Irish President, former UN high commissioner for human rights and, more recently, UN envoy on climate change. Philippa began by asking Kofi Annan about the issues they were able to discuss during their papal audience…

Listen here.

The former UN leader says it was important for four representatives of the group to come to the Vatican because they share many common interests and values. He says they wanted to engage with Pope Francis and “discuss how we can work together, how we can pool our efforts on some of these issues”.

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Question related to this article:
 
Where in the world can we find good leadership today?

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Peace, migration, climate change, gender equality

Among the areas of discussion, he continues, were the questions of migration, nuclear weapons peace, mediation and conflicts, as well as climate change and gender equality, that is “the importance of giving women a voice and respecting their role”. He adds “I hope this will be the first of many meetings”.

Shared efforts to be a voice for marginalised

Former Irish President Mary Robinson says the group came to express “an appreciation for the role he is playing and the fact that he, like The Elders, is trying to be a voice for the voiceless and the marginalized, trying to deal with the most difficult areas of conflict.

She says they also spoke about countries including Venezuela and Congo, as well as focusing on climate change, all issues, she notes, where “the pope has given leadership”.

Common values, common sense of purpose

Robinson says she was also struck by the “warmth and affection and humour” in their meeting. “I was very struck by how relaxed the pope was with us, how much he joked”, she says, adding that Pope Francis seemed to “feel at home” as they discussed “common values, a common moral purpose, common problems”

I think he could be a future ‘Elder’, Annan says and Robinson quips, “I think he’s a Super Elder”.

[Editor’s note: Additional comments will be posted in the coming days on the website of the Elders]

(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for this article.).

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION, global

Gainesville, Florida, USA: Nancy Hardt: Reducing abuse, improving health go hand in hand

. . DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION . .

An article by Nancy Hardt for the Gainesville Sun (reprinted according to terms of Creative Commons)

Our local peace-building efforts were highlighted at the United Nations in September. After using data and maps to identify neighborhoods with health inequities, we brought services that within four years resulted in a reduction in unintended pregnancies, a reduction in premature births, and a stunning 45 percent reduction in cases of child abuse and neglect.


caption: A patient gets looked over by a physician assistant and University of Florida medical student in the UF Mobile Outreach Clinic in 2016. [Alan Youngblood/Staff photographer)

We did this by reducing stress. Stressed people have bad, sad or scary things happening in their lives.

Three interventions included health care; provision of concrete family supports such as food, clothing and shelter; and links to services for victims of domestic violence.

Health professionals staffed a free clinic on wheels that visited identified neighborhoods on a regular schedule. Many women requested pregnancy testing. If their tests were negative, our nurse asked each woman whether she was happy or sad with that result.

We learned that vulnerable women did not always have the luxury of choosing the day or time for sex, or even the partner for sex, so they were relieved to hear they were not pregnant. We offered them long-acting reversible contraception free of charge.

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Question related to this article:

 
How can culture of peace be developed at the municipal level?

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When the sheriff looked at our map for health, she noticed that her hot spot for service requests overlapped with ours. Review of call data showed that the most common call was for domestic violence.

New training for sheriff’s deputies included asking questions such as, “Has your partner ever threatened to kill you? Do you think your partner is capable of killing you? Does your partner have a gun? Has your partner ever threatened to commit suicide? Has your partner ever choked you? Has your partner ever harmed your pet?”

Victims who answered yes to three or more of the questions learned they were at risk of being murdered by their partner. Victims were offered a phone to speak to Peaceful Paths, our domestic violence service provider. Further, a team of law enforcement, victim’s advocates and child advocates reviewed the high risk cases, providing well-being checks and looking out for victims should they wind up in court.

The third intervention was Partnership for Strong Families’ neighborhood resource centers, providing concrete family supports. The bad, sad or scary things that stress families may include not having enough food, having the electricity turned off, being evicted by a landlord, or needing clothing for a job interview or cold weather.

Peace4Gainesville and the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding are collaborating. Brain research tells us that resilience to stress can be developed at any stage of life, and these efforts pay big dividends when children and their young parents benefit. No expensive equipment is needed to learn breathing techniques, mindfulness skills and other ways to control our internal emotional state — which, when uncontrolled, leads to violent behavior.

In order to make peace, we must start here, at home. We all have a part to play in sowing seeds of peace.

Dr. Nancy Hardt is a professor emerita in the University of Florida College of Medicine who lives in Gainesville. She was invited to address the United Nations High Level Forum on the Culture of Peace on Sept. 7 to describe practical steps taken to reduce inter-generational violence in Alachua County.

DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION, North America

The Spiritual Sources of Legal Creativity: The Legacy of Father Miguel d’Escoto

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION

A blog by Richard Falk (abbreviated)

[Preliminary Remarks: What follows is the modified transcript of a talk given at Fordham University School of Law honoring the memory of the recently deceased Maryknoll priest, Father Miguel d’Escoto, who had been both the Foreign Minister of Sandinista Nicaragua and President of the UN General Assembly, as well as pastor to the poor in the spirit of Pope Francis, an extraordinary person who fused a practical engagement in the world with a deeply spiritual nature that affected all who were privileged to know and work with him.] . . .


Father Miguel d’Escoto

He was motivated by a belief, undoubtedly reflecting his religious faith, in the potency of right reason, and on this basis conceived of international law as a crucial vehicle for realizing such a vision, embracing with moral enthusiasm a kind of ‘politics of impossibility’ in which considerations of justice outweighed calculations of feasibility or the obstacles associated with geopolitics. It is with an awareness of the trials and tribulation of Nicaragua and its long suffering population that Father Miguel turned to law as an imaginative means of empowerment.

Let me illustrate by reference to the historic case that Nicaragua brought against the United States in the early 1980s at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It was a daring legal flight of moral fancy to suppose that tiny and beleaguered Nicaragua could shift its struggle from the bloody battlefields of U.S. armed intervention and a mercenary insurgency against the Sandinista Government of which he was then Foreign Minister to the lofty legal terrain that itself had been originally crafted to reflect the values and interests of dominant states, the geopolitical players on the global stage. But more than this it was a brilliant leap of political imagination to envision the soft power of law neutralizing the hard power of high tech weaponry in a high stakes ideological struggle being waged in the midst of the Cold War.

Such an attempt to shift the balance of forces in an ongoing conflict by recourse to international law and the World Court had never before been made in any serious way. It was a David and Goliath challenge that the World Court as the highest judicial institution in the UN System had yet to face in a war/peace context, and it turned out to be a test of the integrity of the institution.

Let me recall the situation in Nicaragua briefly. The United States was supporting a right-wing insurgency, the counterrevolutionary remnant of the Somoza dictatorship, a single family that had cruelly and corruptly ruled Nicaragua between 1936 and 1974 on behalf of corporate America (the era of ‘banana republics’), leaving the country in impoverished ruins when the Somoza dynasty finally collapsed. The Somoza-oriented insurgents were known as the Contras, and were called ‘freedom fighters’ by their American sponsors and paymaster because they were opposing the Sandinista Government that had won a war of national liberation in 1979, but was accused by its detractors of leftist tendencies and Soviet sympathies, which was the right-wing ideological way of obscuring the true affinity of the Sandinista leadership with the teachings of Liberation Theology rather than with the secular dogmatics of Marxism. It was a way of depriving the people of Nicaragua of their inalienable right of self-determination. The United States Government via the CIA was training and equipping the Contras, and quite overtly committing acts of war by mining and blockading Managua, Nicaragua’s main harbor and its lifeline to the world. . . .

It was these interventionary undertakings that flouted the authority of international law and the UN Charter. Father Miguel’s addressed the UN General Assembly in his capacity as Nicaragua’s acting Foreign Minister, vividly describing the conflict with some well-chosen provocative words: “It is obvious that the war to which Nicaragua is being subjected is a U.S. war, and the so-called Contras are merely hired hands serving the diabolical objectives of the Reagan Administration.” Later in the same speech he condemned the U.S. Government for recently appropriating an additional $100 million “to finance genocide against our people.” [Address to UNGA, Nov. 3, 1986] . . .

It may not seem so unusual for a small country to take advantage of a potential judicial remedy, but in fact it had never happened—no small state had ever gone to the World Court to protect itself against such military intervention, and to do so on behalf of a progressive government in the Third World in the midst of the Cold War seemed to many at the time like a waste of time and money that Nicaragua could ill afford.

It is here where one begins to grasp this potentially revolutionary idea of relying upon the spiritual sources of legal creativity. Father Miguel was convinced that what the United States Government was doing was legally and morally wrong, and that it was an opportune time for the mice to fight back against the predator tiger. It was an apt occasion to act by reference to horizons of spirituality. . . .

The outcome of the Nicaragua narrative is too complicated to describe properly, but in short—counsel for Nicaragua persuaded the Court that it had jurisdictional authority, at which point the United States petulantly, yet not unexpectedly, withdrew from the proceedings correctly realizing that if it could not prevail at this jurisdictional phase it had virtually no chance to have its legal arguments accepted at the merits phase of the case. . . .

What was rather intriguing from a jurisprudential point of view was that despite its much hyped boycott of the proceedings and accompanying denunciation of the jurisdictional finding, the U.S. in the end quietly complied with the principal finding in The Hague, namely, that the naval blockade of Nicaragua’s harbors was unlawful. As would be expected, the USG never acknowledged that it was complying, nor did Nicaragua dance in the streets of Managua, but the cause/effect relationship between the judicial decision and compliant behavior was clear to any close observer. . . .

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Question related to this article:
 
Where in the world can we find good leadership today?

(Article continued from the column on the left)

For me this Nicaragua experience was a compelling example of Father Miguel’s achievements that followed directly from his deep commitment to the horizons of spirituality and decency. It was far from the only instance. Let me mention two others very quickly. One of my other connections with Father Miguel was to serve as one of his Special Advisors during his year as President of the UN General Assembly thoughout its 63rd session, 2008-09. As continues to be the case, life could become difficult for any leading UN official who openly opposed Israel. Father Miguel was deeply aware of the Palestinian ordeal and unabashedly supportive of my contested role as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. When I was detained in an Israeli prison and then expelled from Israel at the end of 2008, Father Miguel wanted to organize a press conference in NYC to give me an opportunity to explain what had happened and defend my position. I declined his initiative, perhaps unadvisedly, as I didn’t want to place Miguel in the line of fire sure to follow.

At the end of 2008 Israel launched a massive attack against Gaza, known as Cast Lead, and Father Miguel sought to have the General Assembly condemn the attack and call for an immediate ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal. It was a difficult moment for Father Miguel, feeling certain that this was the legally and morally the right thing to do. Yet as events proceeded and diplomatic positions were disclosed, Miguel was forced to recognize that the logic of geopolitics worked differently, in fact so starkly differently that even the diplomat representing the Palestinian Authority at the UN intervened to support a milder reaction than what Miguel deemed appropriate. Unlike his Nicaraguan experience, here the backers of feasibility prevailed, but in a manner that Father Miguel could never reconcile himself to accept.

I met many diplomats at UN Headquarters here in NY who said that no one had ever occupied a high position at the UN with Father Miguel’s manifest quality as someone so passionately dedicated to righteous principle. Pondering this, it occurred to me that one possible exception was Dag Hammarskjöld, an early outstanding UN Secretary General, who died in a plane crash, apparently assassinated in 1961 for his principled, yet geopolitically inconvenient, dedication to peace and justice. From his private writings we know that Hammarskjöld’s UN efforts also sprung from wellsprings of spirituality. . . .

Miguel took full advantage of his term as president of the General Assembly to provide venues within the Organization that offered humane alternatives to neoliberal economic globalization. He sponsored and organized meetings at the UN designed to overcome current patterns of economic and ecological injustice, making use of the presence in New York City of such non-mainstream economists as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz, and the prominent Canadian activist author, Maude Barlow. Here again Father Miguel demonstrated his grounded spirituality by once more combining the visionary with the practical.

I had the opportunity to work with Father Miguel on several proposals to raise the profile and role of the General Assembly as the most representative and democratic organ of the UN. This initiative was rather strategic and partly meant to counter the US-led campaign to concentrate UN authority in Security Council so that Third World aspirations and demands could be effectively thwarted, and the primacy of geopolitics reestablished after the assault mounted in the 1970s by the then ascendant Nonaligned Movement.

What I have tried to describe is this deep bond in the life and work of Father Miguel between the spirituality of his character and motivations and the practicality of his involvement in what the German philosopher, Habermas, calls ‘the lifeworld.’ I find it indicative of Father Miguel’s deep spiritual identity that he suffered a punitive response to his life’s work from the institution he loved and dedicated his life to serving, being suspended in 1985 by Pope John Paul II from the priesthood because of his involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution. Miguel was reinstated 29 years later by Pope Francis, who many view as a kindred spirit to Miguel.

There is an object lesson here for all of us: in a political crisis the moral imperative of service to people and ideals deserves precedence over blind obedience to even a cherished and hallowed institution. This would undoubtedly almost always pose a difficult and painful choice, but it was one that defined Father Miguel d’Escoto at the core of his being, which he expressed over and over by doing the right thing in a spirit of love and humility, but also in a manner that left no one doubting his firmness, his affinities and commitments, as well as his unwavering and abiding convictions.

As I suggested at the outset, the daring and creativity that Father Miguel brought to the law and to his work at the UN sprung from spiritual roots that were deeply grounded in both religious tradition and in an unshakable solidarity with those among us who are poor, vulnerable, oppressed, and victimized. For Miguel spirituality did not primarily equate with peace, but rather with justice and an accompanying uncompromising and lifelong struggle on behalf of what was right and righteous in every social context, whether personal or global.

There is no assurance that this way of believing and acting will control every development in the world or even control the ultimate destiny of the human species. Humanity retains the freedom to fail, which could mean extinction in the foreseeable future.The happy ending of the Nicaragua case needs to be balanced against the prolonged and tragic ordeal of the Palestinian people for which there is still no end in sight. Beyond wins and losses, what I think should be clear is that unless many more of us become attentive to the horizons of spirituality and necessity the outlook for the human future is presently bleak. Father Miguel d’Escoto’s disavowal of the domain of the feasible is assuredly not the only way to serve humanity, but it is a most inspiring way, and points us all in a direction that is underrepresented in the operations of governments and other public institutions, not to mention during the speculative frenzies on Wall Street and the backrooms of hedge fund offices.

In my language, Father Miguel d’Escoto was one of the great citizen pilgrims of our time. His life was a continuous journey toward what St. Paul called ‘a better city, a heavenly city’ to manage and shape the totality of life on Planet Earth.

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION, Latin America, United Nations,

World’s Largest Tropical Reforestation to Plant 73 Million Trees in Brazilian Amazon

. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT . .

An article from Ecowatch

The largest tropical reforestation effort in history aims to restore 73 million trees in the Brazilian Amazon by 2023. The multimillion dollar, six-year project, led by Conservation International, spans 30,000 hectares of land—the equivalent of the size of 30,000 soccer fields, or nearly 70,000 acres. The effort will help Brazil move towards its Paris agreement target of reforesting 12 million hectares of land by 2030.

“This is a breathtakingly audacious project,” Dr. M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation International, said in a statement. “Together with an alliance of partners, we are undertaking the largest tropical forest restoration project in the world, driving down the cost of restoration in the process. The fate of the Amazon depends on getting this right—as do the region’s 25 million residents, its countless species and the climate of our planet.”

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest, home to indigenous communities and an immense variety and richness of biodiversity. The latest survey detailed 381 new species discovered in 2014-2015 alone.

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Question for this article:

Despite the vested interests of companies and governments, Can we make progress toward sustainable development?

When you cultivate plants, do you cultivate peace?

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But this precious land has been threatened by decades of commercial exploitation of natural resources, minerals and agribusiness, as Conservation International editorial director Bruno Vander Velde writes, “leading to about 20 percent of original forest cover to be replaced by pastures and agricultural crops, without securing the well-being of the local population.”

“The reforestation project fills an urgent need to develop the region’s economy without destroying its forests and ensuring the well-being of its people,” he notes.

Fast Company reports that instead of planting saplings—which is labor- and resource-intensive—the reforestation effort will involve the “muvuca” strategy, a Portuguese word that means many people in a small place. The strategy involves the spreading of seeds from more than 200 native forest species over every square meter of deforested land and allowing natural selection to weed out the weaker plants. As Fast Company notes, a 2014 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization and Bioversity International found that the muvuca technique allowed more than 90 percent of native tree species planted to germinate. Not only that, they especially resilient and suited to survive drought conditions for up to six months.

According to Rodrigo Medeiros, vice president of Conservation International’s Brazil office, priority areas for the restoration effort include southern Amazonas, Rondônia, Acre, Pará and the Xingu watershed. Restoration activities will include the enrichment of existing secondary forest areas, sowing of selected native species, and, when necessary, direct planting of native species, Medeiros said.

The Brazilian Ministry of Environment, the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund, and Rock in Rio’s environmental arm “Amazonia Live” are also partners in this effort.

Latin America, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

South Korea: Busan Film Festival and creation of world culture

EDUCATION FOR PEACE .

An article by Park Sang-seek published by the Korea Herald (reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher)

I attended as an invited guest the opening ceremony of the 22nd Busan International Film Festival on Oct. 12. I immensely enjoyed the whole ceremony and the reception. It reminded me of the 10th Singapore International Film Festival in April 1997 I attended when I served as Korean ambassador to Singapore.


Photo from the 2016 Busan festival.

After the event in Singapore I wrote an article on the SIFF in the Strait Times in which I emphasized that nations can cope with deepening racial, ethnic and cultural conflicts through cultural exchange and cooperation despite, and because of, rapid economic and social globalization.

BIFF has made me reconfirm my belief. It is ironic that economic and social globalization has actually resuscitated racial, ethnic and cultural conflicts. The reason is that the more people contact each other, the less they understand each other.

When different races develop different cultures, they become divided into different ethnic groups. Different ethnic groups form their own states (nation-states). There are also multiethnic states, but they are in general more conflict-ridden than homogeneous nation-states.

Cultural exchanges in general are more likely to promote peace among states than any other exchanges, because economic exchanges rather strengthen nationalism, while social exchange can increase immigration and migration, which in turn create racial, ethnic and cultural conflicts within a state. We are eyewitnesses to such conflicts in multiracial, multiethnic and multireligious states in both the West and non-West.

Why can cultural exchanges promote mutual understanding and empathy better among different racial, ethnic and religious peoples?

My answer is that culture is more likely to activate empathy in the human heart than any other human activity. Empathy is the main source of peace. Some scholars believe that reason is the strongest source, but empathy is more prevalent and stronger than reason in the average human.

How would an average person react to foreign cultures? She may dislike or like them. But art performances transform them into emotional panaceas and invoke empathy in audiences. Among all art forms, film is the best to build empathy because it is an integrated art form (an amalgamation of novel, poetry, music, dancing, drama, sculpture and painting) and can affect every sensual organ of the human.

Whenever I see movies, my racial, national, ethnic, educational, family and ideological backgrounds suddenly disappear and I become a primordial human being and begin to empathize with any other kind of human being.

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Question for this article:

Film festivals that promote a culture of peace, Do you know of others?

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When I watched the Iranian movie “Gabbeh,” I thought I was living with a tribe in Iran and experienced the love of mankind. I had the same experience as I had at SIFF when I saw the “Glass Garden” (a profound anatomy of human nature) showcased at BIFF. When I watched a physically handicapped girl, my psyche became instantly connected to hers, my mind melded into hers and I shared my life with her.

Film is one of the most effective and inexpensive means of promoting empathy among all humans and consequently to create a culture of peace. According to the preamble of the UNESCO constitution, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”

UNESCO believes a culture of peace can be built through education, interstate cultural exchanges and the preservation of national cultural heritage and diversity. But it has been proven that member states have been using UNESCO for the preservation of their own cultures, not for the creation of a universal culture. I personally observed this during my tenure as South Korean ambassador to UNESCO in the early 1990s.

Since UNESCO which was created to promote world culture has been unable to fulfill its objective, some other international organizations and activities have to undertake this role. BIFF and other similar organizations worldwide are most well-suited for it. I have become more convinced of this after I attended the activities of BIFF this year. BIFF may make small contributions to the creation of world culture, but its small step will lead to a giant step for humankind toward the ultimate goal.

However, it will be practically impossible to build the foundation of world culture without going through an intermediate stage: a regional stage to provide a bridge to a world culture.

Therefore, each region should establish its own regional organization for cultural cooperation. I had this in mind when I proposed a Pacific Cultural and Information Organization at a conference hosted by the Korean Commission for UNESCO in the mid-1980s. Nation-states create a regional culture in their respective regions first and work toward the creation of a global culture next. It is encouraging to note that regional film festivals are also held in all regions.

The freedom of filmmaking is one of the most important human rights. It is not surprising that dictatorships take filmmaking under state control.

BIFF can contribute to the creation of peace and global culture while promoting human exchanges better than any other cultural organization, activity or diplomacy.

After I attended the festival, I thought the programs of BIFF could be improved.

One important shortcoming of the festival is that some programs are not well internationalized. For a lack of funds, the organizer uses many university students as volunteer workers and guides, interpreters or desk workers. But they are not quite familiar with Western culture and protocol. International conferences and events are held according to Western protocol and rules of conduct and therefore BIFF should also be held according to them.

I also believe BIFF should be completely depoliticized. Otherwise, the very purpose of BIFF, the creation of a culture of peace, will never be realized.

[Publisher’s note: The author, Park Sang-seek, is a former rector at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies at Kyung Hee University and the author of “Globalized Korea and Localized Globe.”]

East Asia, EDUCATION FOR PEACE, Uncategorized

Nobel Laureate leads historic march across India to keep children safe

. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article from Education International

When Kailash Satyarthi commits there is no way of stopping him, which was evident as millions followed his call to end the sexual abuse and trafficking of children in what was the country’s biggest march.

Over the course of the past month Indians voiced their opposition to the abuse of children with their feet as they marched across the country in droves with estimates exceeding 10 million participants.


Launched by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, the Bharat Yatra, A March to End Sexual Abuse and Trafficking of Children, covered more than 11,000 km across 22 States and Union Territories from 11 September to 16 October.   

(article continued in right column)

(click here for the Spanish version of this article or here for the French version.)

Question related to this article:

Rights of the child, How can they be promoted and protected?

(article continued from left column)

“What our children are facing is not an ordinary crime. This is a moral epidemic haunting our country as well as the rest of the world. We cannot accept it. We have to break our silence as a nation. We have to raise our voice and unite as a nation,” said Satyarthi.

Delhi was the final leg of the journey where Satyarthi spoke before thousands of students across the city as they pledged to support the campaign. Joining him for the end of the march was Education International General Secretary Fred van Leeuwen, a long-time friend and supporter. Together, Satyarthi, van Leeuwen and Sylvia Borren created the Global Campaign for Education (GCE).

Keeping children safe in India is an immense challenge. The campaign let it be known that every day 40 children are raped while another 48 are sexually abused and hundreds of thousands have been trafficked for nefarious reasons.

The campaign is focused on urging the government to take greater steps to ensure that children’s safety is a top priority. Together, people from all walks of life, from business and policy, teachers and women’s groups to faith leaders, children and parents have taken part.

(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for this article.)

HUMAN RIGHTS, South Asia

English bulletin November 1, 2017

CAN WE ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS ?

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), one of the civil society coalitions that supported the development of the United Nations Treaty to ban nuclear weapons. To quote the Nobel Committee, “Nuclear weapons pose a constant threat to humanity and all life on earth. Through binding international agreements, the international community has previously adopted prohibitions against land mines, cluster munitions and biological and chemical weapons. Nuclear weapons are even more destructive, but have not yet been made the object of a similar international legal prohibition.”

For several months now, we have been following progress towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. The July bulletin of CPNN followed the ongoing development of negotiations at the United Nations for the Treaty. The August bulletin headlined that the Treaty was adopted by a majority of the UN General Assermbly – 122 countries.

More recently, during the general debate of the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly from 19 to 25 September in New York, many presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers from all regions of the world spoke in favour of the Treaty. And on September 26, Ministers and representatives of 46 Member States, delegations, the United Nations system and civil society took the floor during a day-long General Assembly high-level meeting to commemorate the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

However, as we have recognized, while the Treaty is an “important victory for our shared humanity“, its effectiveness is limited, because the UN delegations from all of the countries with nuclear weapons, as well as most of their allies, boycotted the Treaty conference and many of them announced their opposition.

The Treaty will not take effect until it has been formally ratified by 50 Member States of the UN. Although it has been signed by many countries, it has only been ratified by three at last count: Guayana, Thailand and the Holy See. Activists agree that a priority in the coming months is to get at least 50 countries to ratify the treaty.

Where activists do not fully agree is the question of a High-Level Conference on Nuclear Disarmament (UNHLC) proposed to be held by the United Nations in 2018:

Abolition 2000 has established a working group on the UNHLC;

Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND) organized an event at the Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly in St Petersburg to promote the ban treaty, nuclear-risk reduction measures and the 2018 UNHLC; PNND has just produced a Parliamentary Action Plan for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World;

The Abolition 2000 Youth Network and PNND are organising an international youth conference on the UNHLC to take place in Prague, Czech Republic on Nov 28-29, 2017;

UNFOLD ZERO maintains a webpage dedicated to the 2018 UN High-Level Conference that includes all relevant documents, reports and actions;

UNFOLD ZERO and PNND will produce a civil society action guide for the 2018 UNHLC;

Arguing in favor of the UNHLC, one leading activist, Alyn Ware, has told CPNN that it follows the model of other UN High Level conferences such as the Sustainable Development Conference (2015) which adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. the Climate Change Conference (2016) which adopted the Paris Agreement. the Oceans Conference (2017) which adopted the 14-point action plan ‘Our Oceans, Our Future’, and the Refugees conference (2016) which adopted the New York Declaration. He emphasized that one key aspect which ensured their success was strong cooperative action by civil society.

On the other hand, Alyn regrets that some disarmament organisations are calling the UNHLC a ‘distraction’. This includes ICAN that won the Nobel Prize. We may assume that they are skeptical about UN High Level Conferences in the same way that leading environmental activists were skeptical about the outcome of the Climate Change Conference that adopted the Paris Agreement in 2016. At that time, CPNN reported that James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, called the Paris talks ‘a fraud’ and Naomi Klein, another leading environmenal activist said that “We are going backwards, COP21 is the opposite of progress.”

To make the Treaty effective, and to make a High-Level Conference effective, it will not be enough to have the words of the non-nuclear Member States. We must have actions as well as words. It is up to cities, parliaments and non-governmental organizations to put sufficient pressure on the states with nuclear weapons to bring them to the point of disarmament. The Treaty and High-Level Conference can be effective tools to be used in this process.

      

DISARMAMENT AND SECURITY



The Nobel Peace Prize for 2017

TOLERANCE AND SOLIDARITY
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Spain: Melilla Unesco Center will host the presentation ‘Islam: Culture of peace and non-violence’

DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION



Madrid will again host the World Forum for Peace in 2018

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT



Costa Rica A Role Model for Sustainable Tourism to the World

WOMEN’S EQUALITY


Mexico: Expanding the Women’s Network against Gender Violence

HUMAN RIGHTS


Indonesia’s Supreme Court Upholds Water Rights

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION


Ecuador: ‘Dedicated Lives’ at the Casa Carrión

EDUCATION FOR PEACE


Challenge in Colombia: Peace displacing violence as inspiration for the arts
Uncategorized

Colombia: Envigado inaugurates mediation center for the community

… EDUCATION FOR PEACE …

An article from 360 Radio (translated by CPNN)

The Personería Municipal [municipal ombudsman] of Envigado, headed by Virginia López Flórez, inaugurated the new mediation center for the community, with which they will seek to provide greater solutions when resolving conflicts between citizens.

“The Center contributes to a culture of peace and tolerance, so that people settle their disputes in a peaceful and respectful way, returning to dialogue and dignified treatment with the help of an impartial third-person mediator. We seek to serve people from strata 1 and 2 who do not have the resources to pay a mediator in a private center,” according to a municipal representative.

The Mayor of Envigado, Raúl Cardona, who supported the initiative, was also present at the inauguration. “Now, the Envigadeños have another place to reconcile which is totally free. Obviously this will greatly improve relations and coexistence and make it easier to solve problems,” the Mayor told 360 Radio.

“We are the second municipality in the Aburrá Valley that has such a center and one of 8 at a national level. This helps ensure that small conflicts do not go to the judicial system and delay it. Whether we like the peace process or not, the country has to start to change and prevent conflicts from escalating into violence,” said Jorge Correa, president of the Envigado Council.

(click here for the original Spanish version)

Question for this article:
EDUCATION FOR PEACE, Latin America

Remembering the US soldiers who refused orders to murder Native Americans at Sand Creek

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An article by Billy J. Stratton in The Convesation

Every Thanksgiving weekend for the past 17 years, Arapaho and Cheyenne youth lead a 180-mile relay from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to Denver.

The annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run opens at the site of the Sand Creek Massacre near Eads, Colorado, with a sunrise ceremony honoring some 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne people who lost their lives in the infamous massacre. This brutal assault was carried out by Colonel John Chivington on Nov. 29, 1864.


Members and supporters of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Native American tribes, 2014.

While the Sand Creek massacre has been the subject of numerous books< , much less attention has been given to a href="http://www.jhwriter.com/?page_id=4">two heroes of this horrific event: U.S. soldiers Captain Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer.

These were men who rejected the violence and genocide inherent in the “conquest of the West.” They did so by personally refusing to take part in the murder of peaceful people, while ordering the men under their command to stand down. Their example breaks the conventional frontier narrative that has come to define the clash between Colonial settlers and Native peoples as one of civilization versus savagery.

This is a theme I’ve previously addressed as a scholar in the fields of American Indian studies and Colonial history, both in my book on the Indian captivity narrative genre, “Buried in Shades of Night,” and more recently in writings on Sand Creek.

The letters of Soule and Cramer

Soule’s noble act of compassion at Sand Creek is humbly conveyed in a letter to his mother included in the Denver Public Library Western History Collections: “I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children… It was a horrable scene and I would not let my Company fire.”

Refusing to participate, Soule and the men of Company D of the First Colorado, along with Cramer of Company K, bore witness to the incomprehensible. Chivington’s attack soon descended into a frenzy of killing and mutilation, with soldiers taking scalps and other grisly trophies from the bodies of the dead. Soule was a devoted abolitionist and one dedicated to the rights of all people.

He stayed true to his convictions in the face of insults and even a threat of hanging from Chivington the night before at Fort Lyon.

In the following weeks, Soule and Cramer wrote letters to Major Edward “Ned” Wyncoop, the previous commander at Fort Lyon who had dealt fairly with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Both harshly condemned the massacre and the soldiers who carried it out. Soule’s letter details a meeting among officers on the eve of the attack in which he fervently condemned Chivington’s plans asserting “that any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.”

Describing the attack to Wynkoop, Soule wrote, “I refused to fire and swore that none but a coward would.” His letter goes on to describe the soldiers as “a perfect mob.”

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Question for this article:

“Put down the gun and take up the pen”, What are some other examples?

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This account is verified by Cramer’s letter. Detailing his own objections to Chivington, whom he describes as coming “like a thief in the dark,” Cramer had stated that he “thought it murder to jump them friendly Indians.” To this charge, Chivington had replied, “Damn any man or men who are in sympathy with them.”

In Soule’s account, he writes, “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”

While few Americans – especially those living outside of Colorado – may know their names, Soule and Cramer are honored and revered by the descendants of the people they tried to save. According to David F. Halaas, former Colorado state historian and current historical consultant to the Northern Cheyenne, without their courage in disobeying Chivington’s orders and keeping their men from the massacre, “the descendants probably wouldn’t be around today,” and there would be no one to tell the stories.

The horrific descriptions of Soule and Cramer prompted several official inquiries into the atrocity. Both men also testified before an Army commission in Colorado as witnesses. While the officers and soldiers responsible escaped punishment, their testimony brought widespread condemnation upon Chivington, who defended the massacre for the rest of his life.

These investigations also ended the political career of the Colorado territorial governor, John Evans, who had issued two proclamations calling for violence against Native people of the plains, and for organizing the 3rd Colorado Cavalry Regiment in which Chivington was placed in command.

Sites of reverence and healing

The Cheyenne and Arapaho will return to Denver this year to honor their ancestors and remember Soule’s and Cramer’s conscience and humanity. This will be done through an offering of prayers and blessings, along with the performance of honor songs.

On the third and final day of the healing run, they will gather for a sunrise ceremony at Soule’s flower-adorned grave at Denver’s Riverside Cemetery. The participants will then continue on to 15th and Lawrence Street in downtown Denver. There, a plaque is mounted on the side of an office building at the place where Soule was murdered on April 23, 1865. His death, for which no one was ever brought to justice, occurred only two months after he testified against Chivington before the Army commission.

Over the last few decades, Soule’s grave and place of death have been transformed into sacred sites of remembrance within a violent and traumatic frontier past.

The catastrophe of the Sand Creek Massacre is recognized by historians as among the most infamous events in the annals of the American West. Even now, it is the only massacre of Native people recognized as such by the U.S. government, with the land itself preserved as a national historic site for learning and reflection.

In Cheyenne and Arapaho stories, this event remains an ever-present trauma and persists as part of their cultural memory. In addition, it encapsulates the stark moment of betrayal against their ancestors and the theft of their lands.

The story of Soule’s and Cramer’s actions and their courage to say “no” to the killing of peaceful people at Sand Creek is an important chapter of U.S. history. I maintain that it is people like Soule and Cramer who truly deserve to be remembered through monuments and memorials, and can be a source for a different kind of historical understanding: one based not on abstract notions of justice and right, but upon the courage and integrity it takes to breathe life into those virtues.

On the 152nd anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, as we honor the memory of those who died at Sand Creek, may we also be inspired by the heroic actions of these two American soldiers.

(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for this article)

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY, North America

Challenge in Colombia: Peace displacing violence as inspiration for the arts

EDUCATION FOR PEACE .

An article By Camila Pinzón Mendoza for Huffington Post (translated by CPNN and reprinted according to the principles of “fair use”)

Colombian artists, filmmakers, musicians, playwrights and writers have a new challenge: to create peace instead of violence. At least if the agreements between the government and the guerrillas are complied with and respected. This is an interval of time without precedient for the Colombians for which they are not only witnesses but also creators. Two centuries of violence have defined their ways of feeling, thinking, living and inspired some of their best works of art, but today is a new time, the time of post-agreement .


Scene from the official trailer at El Fin de la Guerra

Living in a country without war brings to Colombians new ways of thinking, of narrating and of living. It’s a paradigm shift since the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC, on November 24, 2016, a transit scenario. This will be explored and reflected in the Neiva Cinexcusa Film Festival between the 23rd and 27th of October. It is the most important cinematographic and cultural meeting of the department of Huila and southern Colombia, a multidisciplinary event that involves literature, music, journalism and social sciences.

“We came from an overdose of film about drug trafficking and characters built in molds and clichés,” says Luis Eduardo Manrique Rivas, director of Cinexcusa. “Maybe,” he adds, “this is the time to tell stories with more real and current characters in more intimate environments that generate identification.” In this direction, the film Pariente, which will premiere at the Festival, will represent Colombia at the Oscars of 2018. The film talks about the enemies of peace. It tells the story of Willington’s love for Mariana while the rumor of a thief in the streets and a series of violent deaths bring back the memories of fear through “rural characters who are complex, contradictory and in dispute about the lack of love and of course, violence.”

“The territory of literature exists between history and myth,” reflects Daniel Ferreira (Colombia, 1981), a guest writer at the Festival. For the writer, “the torn opening of reality allows the past to become central, ordering the past and its contradictions with another sense in a distanced way that provides clairvoyance for the future”. Ferreira is the author of the novel, Viaje al interior de un gota de sangre (Alfaguara, 2017), recently published, in which he reconstructs a massacre through the voices of the victims and for whom “there are no collective, only individual truths”.

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(Click here for the original Spanish version of this article.)

Question for this article:

Film festivals that promote a culture of peace, Do you know of others?

What is happening in Colombia, Is peace possible?

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For twelve years now, Cinexcusa has addressed through the arts, the social and political problems of Colombia and the world, such as mistreatment of women, Nazism and the armed conflict of the country. Through Cinexcusa have passed authors like the Colombian Alfredo Molano, who has dedicated his life to narrate the history of violence in Colombia in books such as “Los años del tropel: relatos de la violencia,” “Trochas y fusiles,” and his most recent, “A lomo de mula.” Last year, the Argentinean Andrés Neuman, was invited and he brought the individual and collective experiences that he explores in”Una vez Argentina”. Two years ago the guest was the Argentine chronicler Josefina Licitra, who has narrated the memory of the devastated of the tragedy of Epecué in his book, “El agua mala, un episodio similar al ocurrido en Armero”. Other participating authors have included Manuel Rivas, Lucrecia Martel and Leila Guerriero.

During these five days there will be more than 30 activities, with 28 guests and 22 films, including feature films and short films, in 12 public settings in Neiva. Neiva, a city in the south of the country on the banks of the Magdalena River, has been an unavoidable place of passage, a strategic enclave for the support of the armies: a place of war. Now it is celebrated as an encounter of art, culture, peace.

The central theme of the projections of this 12th edition is the post-agreement. Thirteen films on this theme make up the bulk of the program, which also includes participation by the directors themselves or experts who open the debate, such as the director of Pariente, Iván Gaona, the well-known actor Álvaro Rodríguez and the film critic Augusto Bernal. With the purpose of providing a panorama of the national filmography, there is also the section of “Colombian Cinema”, a space to talk with the creators about their creation processes and experiences during the shooting. There is also a sample of short films, which has become a national contest, to disseminate and stimulate audiovisual projects, and a sample of films that are screened in several schools in the city, called “Cinema on the board”, which seeks to bring the cinema to the classrooms.

You are invited to look at some of the films that will be screened at Cinexcusa, a light on the contexts of war and post-conflict. Click here and scroll down for film trailers.

EDUCATION FOR PEACE, Latin America