The Korean Trend: Peace Organizations & Peace Movements

Canada

Agnes Macphail, a Canadian pacifist, was the first woman to be elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Macphail objected to the Royal Military College of Canada in 1931 on pacific grounds.[55] Macphail was also the first Canadian woman delegate to the League of Nations, where she worked with the World Disarmament Committee. Although a pacifist, she voted for Canada to enter World War II.

The Canadian Peace Congress (1949–1990) was a leading organizer in the peace movement for many years, particularly when it was under the leadership of James Gareth Endicott who was its president until 1971.

Currently, Canada has a diverse peace movement, with coalitions and networks in many cities, towns and regions. The largest cross-country umbrella coalition is the Canadian Peace Alliance, whose 140 member groups include large city-based coalitions, small grassroots groups, national and local unions, faith, environmental, and student groups, with a combined membership of over 4 million Canadians. The Canadian Peace Alliance has been a leading voice, along with its member groups opposing the "War on Terror". In particular, the CPA opposes Canada's participation in the war in Afghanistan and Canadian complicity in what it views as misguided and destructive U.S. foreign policy.

Canada has also been home to a growing movement of Palestinian solidarity, marked by an increasing number of grassroots Jewish groups opposed to Israel's policies, in many cases likening them to Apartheid, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.

Germany

During the Cold War (1947–89), the West German peace movement concentrated on the abolition of nuclear technology, particularly weapons, from West Germany and Europe. Most activists stridently attacked both the United States and Soviet Union. Conservative critics repeatedly warned it was infiltrated by agents from the East German secret police, the Stasi.[56]

After 1989, the cause of peace was espoused by Green parties across Europe. It sometimes exercised significant influence over policy, e.g., as during 2002 when the German Greens influenced German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to oppose involvement in Iraq. The Greens controlled of the German Foreign Ministry under Joschka Fischer (a Green and the single most popular politician in Germany at the time). Fischer sought to limit German involvement in the War on Terrorism; he joined with French President Jacques Chirac whose opposition in the UN Security Council was decisive in limiting support for the U.S. plan to invade Iraq.

Israel
Main article: Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Arab–Israeli conflict have existed since the creation of Zionism, and especially since the 1948 formation of the state of Israel, and the 1967 occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands. The mainstream peace movement in Israel is Peace Now (Shalom Akhshav), whose supporters tend to vote for the Labour Party or Meretz.

Peace Now was founded in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem, when many people felt that the chance for peace might be missed. PM Begin acknowledged that the Peace Now rally in Tel Aviv at the eve of his departure for the Camp David Summit with Presidents Sadat and Carter—drawing a crowd of 100,000, the largest peace rally in Israel until then—had a part in his decision to withdraw from Sinai and dismantle Israeli settlements there. Peace Now supported Begin for a time, and hailed him as a peace-maker, but turned against him when withdrawal from Sinai was accompanied by an accelerated campaign of land confiscation and settlement building in the West Bank.

A map showing settlements in theWest Bank, produced by Peace Now.

Peace Now advocates a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. Originally this was worded vaguely, with no definition of who "the Palestinians" are and who represents them. Peace Now was quite tardy in joining the dialogue with the PLO, started by such groups as the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the Hadashcommunist party. Only in 1988 did Peace Now accept that the PLO is the body regarded by the Palestinians themselves as their representative.

During the first Intifada, Peace Now held numerous protests and rallies to protest the army's cruelty and call for a negotiated withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. At the time Peace Now strongly targeted then for Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his infamous order to "break the bones of Palestinian trouble-makers". However, after Rabin became Prime Minister, signed the Oslo Agreement and shook Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn, Peace Now strongly supported him and mobilized public support for him against the settlers' increasingly vicious attacks. Peace Now had a central role in the November 4, 1995 rally after which Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extreme-right militant.

Since then the annual Rabin memorial rallies, held every year at the beginning of November, have become the main event of the Israeli Peace Movement, always certain to draw a crowd in the tens or hundreds of thousands. While officially organized by the Rabin Family Foundation, Peace Now presence in these annual rallies is always conspicuous.

Nowadays, Peace Now is especially known for its struggle against the expansion of settlement outposts on the West Bank.

Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, is a radical movement to the left of Peace Now. In its present name and structure, Gush Shalom grew out of the Jewish-Arab Committee Against Deportations, which protested the deportation without trial of 415 Palestinian Islamic activists to Lebanon in December 1992, and erected a protest tent in front of the prime minister's office in Jerusalem for two months—until the government consented to let the deportees return. Members then decided to continue as a general peace movement with a program strongly opposing the occupation and advocating the creation of an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel in its pre-1967 borders ("The Green Line") and with an undivided Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states.

While existing under the name Gush Shalom only since 1992, this movement is in fact the lineal descendant of various groups, movements and action committees that espoused much the same program since 1967, and that occupied the same space on the political scene. In particular, Gush Shalom is the descendant of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace(ICIPP), which was founded in 1975. The ICIPP founders included: a group of dissidents from the Israeli establishment, among them were Major-General Mattityahu Peled, who was member of the IDF General Staff during the 1967 Six Day War and after being dishcarged from the army in 1969 turned increasingly in the direction of peace; Dr. Ya'akov Arnon, a well-known economist who headed the Zionist Federation in the Netherlands before coming to Israel in 1948, and was for many years director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Finance and afterwards chaired the Board of Directors of the Israeli Electricity Company; and Aryeh Eliav, who was secretary-general of the Labour Party until he broke with the then PM Golda Meir over the issue of whether or not a Palestinian People existed and had national rights.

These three and some two hundred more people became radicalised and came to the conclusion that arrogance was a threat to Israel's future and that dialogue with the Palestinians must be opened.[citation needed] They came together with a group of younger, grassroots peace activists who had been active against the occupation since 1967. The bridge between the two groups was Uri Avnery, a well known muckraking journalist who had been member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between 1965 and 1973, at the head of his own radical one-man party.

The main achievement of the ICIPP was the opening of dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the aim of making Israelis understand the need of talking and reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians, and conversely making Palestinians aware of the need to talk to and eventually reach a deal with Israel.

At present, Gush Shalom activists are mainly involved in daily struggle at Palestinian West Bank villages that have their land confiscated by the Separation barrier, erected to stop suicide bombers. Gush activists are to be found, together with those of other Israeli movements like Ta'ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall, joining the Palestinian villagers of Bil'in in the weekly non-violent protest marches held to protest confiscation of more than half of the village lands.

Although Gush Shalom earned itself respect among peace-seeking Israelis as well as in the United States and Europe, it is regarded by mainstream Israelis as a purely pro-Palestinian movement.[citation needed]

United Kingdom

From 1934 the Peace Pledge Union gained many adherents to its pledge, "I renounce war and will never support or sanction another." Its support diminished considerably with the outbreak of war in 1939, but it remained the focus of pacifism in the post-war years.

Post–World War II peace-movement efforts in the United Kingdom were initially focused on the dissolution of the British Empire and the rejection of imperialism by the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The anti-nuclear movement sought to "opt out" of the Cold War and rejected such ideas as "Britain's Little Independent Nuclear Deterrent" in part on the grounds that it (BLIND) was in contradiction even with MAD.

The VSC (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) led by Tariq Ali mounted several very large and violent demonstrations against the Vietnam war in 67/68 but the first anti Vietnam demonstration was at the American Embassy in London and took place in 1965.[57]

StWC Placard

The peace movement was later associated with the Peace camp movement as Labourmoved "more to the centre" under Prime Minister Tony Blair. By early 2003, the peace and anti-war movement, mostly grouped together under the banner of theStop the War Coalition, was powerful enough to cause several of Blair's cabinet to resign, and hundreds of Labour Party MPs to vote against their government. Blair's motion to support militarily the U.S. plan to invade Iraq continued only due to support from the UK Conservative Party. Protests against the invasion of Iraq were particularly vocal in Britain. Polls suggested that without UN Security Councilapproval, the UK public was very much opposed to involvement, and over two million people protested in Hyde Park (the previous largest demonstration in the UK having had around 600,000).

The primary function of the National Peace Congress was to provide opportunities for consultation and joint activities between its affiliated members, to help create an informed public opinion on the issues of the day and to convey to the government of the day the views of the substantial section of British life represented by its affiliated membership. The NPC folded in 2000 to be replaced in 2001 by Network for Peace, which was set up to continue the networking role of NPC.

United States
See also: Opposition to war against Iran

During the tail end of the Cold War, U.S. peace activists largely concentrated on slowing the superpower arms race in the belief that this would reduce the possibility of nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. As the Reagan administrationaccelerated military spending and adopted a tough, challenging stance to the Russians, peace groups such as the Nuclear Freeze and Beyond War sought to educate the public on the what they believed was the inherent riskiness and ruinous cost of this policy. Outreach to individual citizens in the Soviet Union and mass meetings, using then-new satellite link technology, were part of peacemaking activities in the 1980s. In 1981, Thomas started the longest uninterrupted peace vigil in U.S. history.[58] He was later joined at Lafayette Square by anti-nuclear activists Concepcion Picciotto and Ellen Thomas.[59]

In response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, President George H. W. Bush began preparations for a mideast war. Peace activists were starting to find their groove just before the Gulf War was launched in February 1991, with well-attended rallies, especially on the west coast. However, the ground war was over in less than a week. A lopsided Allied victory and a media-incited wave of patriotic sentiment washed over the protest movement before it could develop traction.

During the 1990s, peacemakers' priorities included seeking a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian impasse, belated efforts at humanitarian assistance to war-torn regions such as Bosnia and Rwanda, and Iraq; American peace activists brought medicine into Iraq in defiance of U.S. law, in some cases enduring heavy fines and imprisonment in retaliation. Some of the principal groups involved were Voices in the Wilderness and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Protesters against the Iraq War in New York.

Before, during, and after the War in Iraq began, a concerted protest effort began in the United States. On February 15, 2003 a series of protests across the globe took place with events in approximately 800 cities. In March 2003, just before the U.S. and British Military led invasion of Iraq, a protest mobilization called "The World Says No to War" led to as many as 500,000 protestors in cities across the U.S. However, many protest organizations have persisted as the United States has maintained a military and corporate presence in Iraq.

U.S. activist groups including United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink (Women Say No To War), Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), Not In Our Name, A.N.S.W.E.R., Veterans for Peace, and The World Can't Wait continued to protest against the Iraq War. Methods of protest include rallies and marches, impeachment petitions, the staging of a war-crimes tribunal in New York (to investigate crimes and alleged abuses of power of the Bush administration), bringing Iraqi women to tour the U.S. and tell their side of the story, street theater and independent filmmaking, high-profile appearances by anti-war activists such as Scott Ritter, Janis Karpinski, and Dahr Jamail, resisting military recruiting on college campuses, withholding tax monies, mass letter-writing to legislators and newspapers, blogging, music, and guerrilla theater. Independent media producers continue to broadcast, podcast and Web-host programs about the movement against the Iraq War.

Starting in 2005, opposition to military action against Iran started in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, including the creation of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. By August 2007, fears of an imminent United States and/or Israeli attack on Iran had increased to the level that several Nobel Prize winners, Shirin Ebadi(Nobel Peace Prize 2003), Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Betty Williams (joint Nobel Peace Prize 1976), Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize for Literature 2005) and Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize 1997), along with several anti-war groups, including The Israeli Committee for a Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological and Chemical Weapons, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,CASMII, Code Pink and many others, warned about what they believed was the imminent risk of a "war of an unprecedented scale, this time against Iran", especially expressing concern that an attack on Iran using nuclear weapons had "not been ruled out". They called for "the dispute about Iran's nuclear program, to be resolved through peaceful means" and a call for Israel, "as the only Middle Eastern state suspected of possession of nuclear weapons", to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[60]

Source : Wikipedia

Every country hates war and wishes to have peace but it has been failed due to unreasonable material to make peace.

Peace will come when everybody has a good mind to give sacrifice one another.

The Korean Trend

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Peace Organizations & Peace Movements

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