DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

An article from the Huffington Post by Eddie Ait, Deputy Secretary General of the Radical Left Party (PRG), Philippe Rio, Mayor of Grigny and President-AFCDRP Mayors for Peace France, and Jacqueline Belhomme, Mayor of Malakoff and vice-President of the International network (translated by CPNN)

The president of the United States, Barack Obama, is at Hiroshima today [May 27] for an historic visit: the first by a US leader almost 71 years after the order of President Truman launched the first two nuclear attacks in history on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (9 August).

For the International Mayors for Peace network, chaired by the mayors of these two martyr cities, and its French branch AFCDRP, such a visit is a positive sign which may mark a new stage in the international mobilization for achieving the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, as provided in the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Since its creation in 1982, Mayors for Peace has continued to invite world leaders to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years, more and more embassies have attended its commemorations. Last April, the arrival in Hiroshima of the Foreign Ministers of the G7, including three representatives of nuclear states -United States, France and United Kingdom- was already a step forward. As senior officials of States, all NPT signatories, they were willing to see with their own eyes the city that was a victim of this inhuman weapon, with indiscriminate effects.

US atomic bombs completely destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They turned the cities into immense mass graves. In Hiroshima, the chamber of commerce building, now the Dome of the atomic bomb, could hardly stand. It now shows the power of the blast. In 1945, over 200,000 people have died, victims of the explosion or radiation in the days and weeks that followed. After such horror, the survivors, the Hibakusha, have never ceased to carry a message of peace that no one should suffer as they have suffered. Their message has been relayed tirelessly by local representatives of more than 7,000 communities in 161 countries who are members of the Mayors for Peace network.

Primarily responsible for the safety of our citizens in case of conflict, we have a keen awareness of the magnitude of the nuclear threat to the world as a whole. We cannot take the risk of Hiroshima or Nagasaki being repeated, because today it would entail a suicidal escalation. For this reason, we must act on two levels: locally, by addressing the roots of conflict, drawing on the resources of the culture of peace as defined by UNESCO, and globally by working together with Hiroshima and Nagasaki to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

There are still about 16,000 nuclear weapons on the globe. These weapons threaten the very existence of the human being and his environment. This “total risk” undermines humanity, opening the way to all sorts of deadly excesses that only a culture of peace and reconciliation can solve.

All elected officials in France who are inspired by the symbolic gesture made by the American President in Hiroshima are encouraged to join our network, the French Association of Communities, Departments and REgions for Peace.

(Click here for the original version in French)

Can we abolish all nuclear weapons?

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

Transcript printed by the New York Times

Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.

Video of Obama speech from Bloomberg news

Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.

Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.

The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.

In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.

Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction. How the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill.

Nations arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.

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Can we abolish all nuclear weapons?

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Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.

Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.

And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

And yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.

For this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.

We see these stories in the hibakusha. The woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own.

My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell.

That is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here, 71 years ago.

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.

The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .

Roshni Kapur in The Diplomat

Democratic icon and National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Aung San Suu Kyi has reached out to some of the oldest ethnic rebel groups in Myanmar. Her goal is clear: she wants to push for a wide-ranging peace accord with all insurgent groups, including those that refused to participate with the previous government.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/ Claude TRUONG-NGOC

Friction between minority groups and the government have been ongoing for decades. Myanmar is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in Asia. While the majority of the population is the Burman (Bamar) ethnic group making up an estimated 68 percent of the population, the remaining 32 of the population comprises a number of different groups, including the Shan (9 percent), Kayin (7 percent), Rakhine (3.5 percent), Chinese (2.5 percent), Mon (2 percent), Kachin (1.5 percent), Indians (1.25 percent), and Kayah (0.75 percent).

The tensions and antagonism are attributed to this heterogeneous composition. Myanmar’s ethnic groups are divided in terms of religion, language, and ideology, as well as being separated geographically. The British rulers tried to unite the variant ethnic groups before officially pulling out in 1947. Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, was a respected military leader who worked to unite various groups across the country for a democratic reform.

However, the Communist Party of Burma led firefights against some ethnic groups to maintain territorial control and a monopoly of power. As a result, many ethnic groups picked up arms to safeguard their states from majority rule. These ethnic rebel groups are located in remote parts of the country that do not receive sufficient international attention and are often simply labeled as “rebel armies” without any understanding the nuances of the situation.

Almost all ethnic groups have their own armies, which they have been using to protect their people and push for fundamental rights within their territory. The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), one of the oldest rebel groups in the world, have demanded autonomy and ethnic rights for the Karen people since 1949. In 1961, the Kachin rebels formed the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the military wing of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).

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Is there progress towards democracy and respect for human rights in Myanmar?

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Many rebel groups have complained about the unrestrained force used by the state army. Around 3,700 villages have been destroyed in eastern Myanmar in the past 15 years.

Each tribe wants to protect its individual languages, customs, roots, and natural resources. Some ethnic groups have historical ties to China. The Kokang, who are ethnic Han, speak Mandarin and their militia leader, Phone Kyar Shin, lived in China for years. The United Wa State Army, which controls one of the largest holdout territories in Myanmar, reportedly has Chinese backing too. They use the Chinese currency and have named Mandarin an official language.

The previous government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Thein Sein, pushed for a ceasefire with some holdout militias in October 2015, but only eight of the 15 militant groups turned up to sign the proposal. The armed wings of the Kachin, Wa, and Shan refused to cooperate until all ethnic rebel groups agreed to be a part of the government’s initiative.

However, the NLD’s accession into power marks signs of optimism for the country. People are hopeful that a permanent peace accord is possible, since many ethnic groups have welcomed the newly elected government and are willing to join renewed peace talks. Suu Kyi’s vision of a peaceful reconciliation is similar to her late father’s. She wants to bring all ethnic groups together for a nonviolent means of reconciliation that will pave way for a democratic society. The Kachin and Karen rebels may trust Suu Kyi and the NLD’s vision of a peaceful reconciliation more the military junta and its political arm, National Unity Party (NUP).

“We are eager to start peace talks,” La Nan, a spokesman of the Kachin Independent Army, was quoted as saying in an online article by Thailand’s Nation Multimedia.

Other insurgent groups such as the United Wa State Army and the Shan State Army (SSA) have also welcomed the NLD’s triumphant victory and sent positive signals. Suu Kyi may take additional steps to reassure ethnic minorities that their vested interests will be represented in the NLD-led government for an inclusive and participative democracy.