Get out from under the nuclear umbrella!
October 8, 2008
| October 10, 2008 | ||
| 1:30 pm | to | 2:30 pm |
Japan and Australia have set up a nuclear disarmament commission, but each country is under the US nuclear umbrella, which adds credence to the view that nukes bring security. Japan’s national broadcaster will be in Melbourne on Friday and they want to film us protesting!!! Come along for the cause and the fame. We’ll have ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) t-shirts for you to wear and flyers to hand out.
***IF YOU CAN, PLEASE BRING A BLACK UMBRELLA!!! WE’LL HAVE RADIATION SYMBOLS TO STICKY-TAPE TO IT.***
Want more Info
http://icanw.org/files/Nuclear_Dangers_Solutions.pdf
http://icanw.org/files/Case_Against_Nuclear_Weapons.pdf
CPT - Colombia Reflection
October 7, 2008
Walking in Lila’s shoes
CPTnet
10 September 2008
By Carol Tyx
For the better part of a day, I am walking in Lila’s* shoes. Literally. Her “shoes” are knee-high black rubber boots, and I wear them as I walk through a valley in the Magdalena region of Colombia to investigate a murder. I’m not sure how far I would have gotten without Lila’s boots. I was told we would travel by truck and canoe. So when we arrive at the small village of Puerto Matilde and learn we will walk, I know I’m in trouble. Everyone is wearing the standard campo boots.
A slender woman points to the boots on her feet and gestures toward me. At first, I’m hesitant. But after a few exchanges, I understand: she’s staying behind and offering me her boots. I pull off my shoes and, feeling a bit like Cinderella, slip my foot into her boot. “Perfecto!” I exclaim.
The rains have turned the caramel-colored soil into soupy, treacherous muck sometimes over a foot deep, viscous enough to suck boots off. Fortunately, Lila’s boots fit snugly.
Finally, we reach the small house where Aicardo Antonio Ortiz once lived. The officials divide us into two groups—soldiers near the house and civilians within the corral—and the murder investigation begins. I stay with the civilians, keeping an eye on the government workers with their yellow tape measure moving around the house. The story is not as easily measured out. Only the most basic facts are unequivocal: on 8 July, soldiers from the Colombian National Army killed Aicardo Antonio Ortiz. Other pieces of the story contradict each other, the army telling one version, civilians another. But my teammates and I are not there to determine which is true. Rather, at the request of a local campesino association, we are accompanying civilians to make sure the authorities hear their perspectives.
When the investigation finishes, the civilians receive permission to view the site. How does one enter such a space? I try to look away first, to see the simple plank bed, the dishes hung from the wall, the television set on a small shelf: a whole life in this one room. But I can’t avoid looking down. A long splotch of red, a nebula splattered from the tiny kitchen to the bed, stains the floor, and in the center, a jagged hole remains where a bullet ripped through the floorboards. I walk carefully, trying to keep Lila’s boots from getting bloody, but walking in the house without walking through blood is impossible.
The sun fades. It’s been a long day. I think about the life Lila walks in: the armed soldiers she passes daily, the potential for spilt blood. As a woman from the United States, I know I cannot fully understand what it means to walk in Lila’s shoes, but I am grateful for the gift of this day. As I slip back into my shoes, I feel the heat from Lila’s feet, a heat that accompanies me all the way home.
*Name has been changed
Meryem Özsögüt
September 11, 2008
UPDATE:
Great news:Turkish woman trade union leader Meryem Özsögüt has been released from jail.
In a statement issued today by Public Services International, it was reported that Meryem’s union — SES — “thanked the international community for its support and solidarity via the LabourStart campaign as well as PSI affiliates”
and others.
(The full statement is on the PSI website - http://www.world-psi.org/ )
Over the last 10 weeks, 8,586 of you sent off your messages of protest in one
of the largest campaigns LabourStart has ever mounted. It has now been crowned
with success.
This should inspire all of us to sign up to the remaining campaigns — particularly those protesting repression directed against trade unionists in South Korea and Iran. The full list of current campaigns is here:
http://www.labourstart.org/actnowen.shtml
And remember — LabourStart receives no corporate or government funding. To conduct our campaigns we rely on your generosity. Please contribute today:
http://www.labourstart.org/donate.shtml
Urgent help needed - Meryem Özsögüt
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
The Turkish government has jailed a woman trade unionist, Meryem Özsögüt, and has kept her in detention for nearly six months. LabourStart - the international work justice website has called on supporters and people of good will to give Meryem our much needed help. Meryem is a leader of the public sector union SES, and Public Services International (PSI) has launched a big online campaign demanding her release.
For more details and to add your signature, please click here now
This campaign will not take off, and we will not secure Meryem’s release, unless we can mobilize thousands of concerned people from around the world. Please do what you can to help this campaign go to lots of people that you know - forward it to other email lists, feel free to post information on church-related websites, use Facebook and blogs to spread the word …
Posted in Just Stuff
JustAct reloaded - Just End Persecution (online petition)
September 4, 2008
The JustAct team reckoned it was about time that the JustAct site got a bit of a makeover.
A new section has just been completed - JustEndPersecution (covering international human rights abuses against Christians).
This month we are asking you to take action with our new petition function in JustEndPersecution. Just go to the petition!
Free Pastor Berlin
Control Arms - Action & Game
August 25, 2008
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Peacemaking - a way to get involved
August 17, 2008
| September 5, 2008 | ||
| 6:00 pm |
About Talisman Sabre 09
In June 2007, 30,000 Australian and US troops descended on Shoalwater Bay on the central Queensland coast for a series of live-fire exercises including bombings and invasion tactics. They’re planning to do it all again in July 2009. At the same time, a new coal port has been proposed for an area inside the the Shoalwater Bay Training Area.
This is an invitation for you to be involved in planning to stop the Talisman Sabre military exercises in July 2009.
The Melbourne Peace Convergence Collective met recently to talk about what needs to be done between now and July 09 in order to make these exercises less likely to happen. We established two groups:
1. Movement building: This group decided to focus their attention and energy on getting as many people involved in protesting the military exercises as possible. This will primarily be done through education, public meetings, research and organisation. It would also involve liasing and networking with other peace groups to build a national movement to stop the Talisman Sabre exercises which fuel further wars of aggression, align us with US foreign policy, and are destructive to Australia’s ecology and national interest.
2. Strategic Direct Action: The direct action group decided to focus on training and equipping as many people as possible to be as disruptive as possible for as long as possible should all other attempts to stop the exercises fail. This will require both those who are willing risk arrest for nonviolent direct action, and significant support crew (people who can do media, legals, driving, logistics, etc). Ideally we would like this to be a nationally co-ordinated effort with people from every state.
We would therefore like YOU to join us on:
Friday September 5th at 6pm (bring some food to share) at 116 Little Bourke Street (Urban Seed), where both groups will meet to make further plans.
These are likely to be monthly meetings so if you can’t make this one, plan to be at the next one. Please forward this invitation on to anyone you think might be interested.
Even if you’re not planning to go to Shoalwater Bay in July 09, you’re welcome to be part of the planning and organisation process. We will need people in Melbourne involved as well.
For more information on the Talisman Sabre military exercises, go to http://www.peaceconvergence.com.
For questions etc email Kristy at kmhen7@gmail.com or Simon at smoyle@gmail.com, or just come along and find out more on the night.
ACF - Campaign to stop proposed uranium sales to Russia
August 14, 2008
Why would Australia sell uranium to Russia - a country that fails to comply with their nuclear disarmament obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty and has the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons?
Get informed on this issue and participate in this on-line campaign by sending an e Card to the Ministerfor Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith to reject a proposed treaty for sale of Australian uranium to Putin’s Russia, add your own views and ask the Minister to response to you – or Phone the Minister’s offices in Canberra Tel: (02) 6277 7500 and in Perth Tel: (08) 9272 3411.
Go to: http://www.acfonline.org.au/articles/news.asp?news_id=1880
ACF believes this flawed treaty will unacceptably weaken Australia’s policy and practice on nuclear safeguards, compromise our efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons and make Australia complicit in serious failures of the Russian state – where the rule of law, democratic values and human rights are not being observed. Read ACF’s Policy Brief on the Russian nuclear treaty.
The treaty was proposed and signed by then prime minister John Howard and Russian President Vladimir Putin at APEC in Sydney in 2007 and has been sent to a federal Parliamentary Inquiry by the new Labor federal government. This Inquiry may report back from mid-September and then Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith will decide Australia’s position.
Australia should not sell uranium to nuclear weapon states – like Russia – that fail to comply with their nuclear disarmament obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Russia maintains the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons and is developing new weapons delivery systems.
This nuclear treaty would jeopardise the aims of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament to rid the world of nuclear weapons and would make the world less safe and more insecure.
Nuclear security risks far outweigh any claims for a nuclear expansion – see the ACF Policy Brief Reject the dangerous nuclear industry.
ACF is working with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW). For Australia to properly act on our international responsibilities and to take up a leadership role for the abolition of all nuclear weapons must involve the phase out of nuclear power and of Australia’s uranium mining and exports for the realisation of a nuclear free world.
In 2006 ACF and MAPW prepared a major report An Illusion of Protection: the unavoidable limitations of safeguards on nuclear materials and the export of uranium to China on the limitations of safeguards for the proposed export of Australian uranium. This critique applies equally to the proposed nuclear treaty for uranium sales to Russia which is based on the same set of inadequate Australian and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
“The contemporary nuclear threat is a key medical and public health issue with Australia priming the pump through irresponsible uranium exports,” said Associate Professor Tilman Ruff, President of MAPW.
David Noonan
Nuclear Free Campaigner
Australian Conservation Foundation
Level 1, 157 Franklin St, ADELAIDE SA 5000, Australia
Ph 08 8211 6838
d.noonan@acfonline.org.au
www.acfonline.org.au
The Olympics…
August 10, 2008
Bejing Olympics - One World One Dream...
HIROSHIMA DAY RALLY FOR PEACE AND A NUCLEAR FREE FUTURE
August 5, 2008
| August 9, 2008 | ||
| 1:00 pm |
Saturday August 9 th
1pm
State Library
NO URANIUM MINING
NO WAR, NUCLEAR WEAPONS
NO NUCLEAR WASTE DUMPS
More info about whats going on here http://www.nukefreeaus.org/
avvaz action - darfur
July 21, 2008
Dear friends,
On Monday, the International Criminal Court indicted Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir for genocide. He is charged with killing hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan and its Darfur region, and corralling the surviving women and girls into terrifying camps where they are being quietly and systematically raped until their peoples are destroyed.
In response, Al Bashir’s regime is threatening more terror against Darfurians and the UN, and appealing to powerful international friends who buy oil from and sell weapons to Sudan to give him protection. Al Bashir knows that he will be caught only if other governments, especially Arab and African governments, agree to help the International Criminal Court (for example by arresting him when he travels abroad).
Targeting Al Bashir is our best hope to end the terror of Darfur’s rape camps, and take a major step forward for international justice. Many of Sudan’s neighbours are Muslim countries where rape is a scandalous crime – and Al Bashir’s henchmen have killed and raped thousands of Muslim women. To raise awareness of this, Avaaz is launching a large regional ad campaign, urging leaders to help the ICC. Our ads will run in just a few days, and a full page ad in an Egyptian newspaper is just 3000Euros($5000), so we need just 50,000 Euros ($75,000) to get our message across. Click below to help:
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