Though Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq by more than two to one, they don’t seem to be expressing that disapproval to anyone but pollsters. A plan to establish a monthly Iraq Moratorium Day may provide a way for them to do so.

Refitting an idea from the Vietnam era to the age of the Internet, organizers of the Iraq Moratorium Day are inviting ordinary Americans to demand an end to the war in targeted activities in their local communities and viral activities online. The goal is a “monthly expression of determination to end the war.”

The initiators, a handful of individuals from different corners of the antiwar movement, are asking people to make a simple pledge:

“I hereby make a commitment that on Friday, September 21, 2007, and the third Friday of every subsequent month I will break my daily routine and take some action, by myself or with others, to end the War in Iraq.”

US Labor Against the War and Progressive Democrats of America have already signed on to the Moratorium effort. Individual supporters include some of the usual suspects in the antiwar movement–Susan Sarandon, Howard Zinn, Anne Wright, Tom Hayden and Eve Ensler, as well as Edwidge Danticat, Danny Glover and Gold Star dad Fernando Suarez de Solar. But the movement is also tapping unusual suspects like Adam Neiman, CEO of the fair-trade fashion house No Sweat, actress Mercedes Ruehl and the antiwar Freeway Blogger.

“We felt that it was critical to move beyond the periodic national demonstrations in Washington, DC, New York and/or San Francisco, and instead develop and advance an approach that encourages increasingly massive local actions that suggests, more than anything else, no more business-as-usual,” said Bill Fletcher Jr., a Moratorium organizer who is former president of TransAfrica Forum. “The Iraq Moratorium will allow local actions integrally connected at a national level such that each effort is understood and felt to be part of a national movement without at the same time creating a new organization or coalition.”

Moratorium activities will range from wearing black armbands to not buying gas; from writing letters to politicians and the media to vigils, rallies and teach-ins; from special religious services to music, art and cultural events; from film showings and lectures to student-initiated alternative classes.

Organizers will work with netroots activists to post video of Moratorium activities on the site and on YouTube and similar sites. Poetry about the war will be solicited, and website visitors will be asked to help choose the best to be included in an anthology. Working groups have been formed to spread the word in the blogosphere.

Poised to participate is Joseph DeLappe, an art professor at the University of Nevada who has become a minor sensation on YouTube for Dead in Iraq, an online memorial and protest. For the past fourteen months he has periodically logged on to America’s Army, a Pentagon-funded online video game designed to lure new young recruits to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he refuses to play the game according to Pentagon rules.

Once online, DeLappe’s avatar immediately drops his weapon and waits to die by the hand of one of the more than 10 million “virtual warriors” who play regularly. After he is killed, DeLappe begins typing in the name, age, service branch and the date of death of soldiers who have died in Iraq. His goal is to record each of the more than 3,500 US military deaths to date. DeLappe views the Internet as a logical place for Moratorium protests to unfold.

“The Moratorium project is important in that it creates an opportunity to involve individuals in actions, however small, in bringing an end to this war,” DeLappe told The Nation. “I sense that people want to be involved yet are frustrated by traditional modes of protest that are more often than not ignored by the media and politicians. We must find creative ways to utilize the new modes of communication made possible through the Internet. The fact that so much of what is new and interesting on the net is, in fact, user-created (YouTube, flickr, etc.) provides a wellspring of unique opportunities for protest.”

The Vietnam Moratorium

On April 29, 1969, a group of antiwar student body presidents and campus newspaper editors–led by David Hawk, a divinity student on leave from Union Theological Seminary active in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, who had recently refused military induction–met with top Nixon Administration officials Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman in the White House Situation Room. On their way out, the student leaders told the press, “We have to resume our efforts to stop the war, because these people aren’t going to.”

Meanwhile, Boston businessman Jerome Grossman proposed a series of short, monthly general strikes to “enable a broad segment of the American people to participate in a legal and traditional protest action which will have a painful effect upon all with power and influence.”

Hawk and other activists quickly signed on to the idea of the escalating monthly actions, but to make them sound less confrontational they changed the label from a general strike to the Vietnam Moratorium. They opened an office in Washington and began tracking down hundreds of students leaders on summer vacation. Their plan was to roll out the first Moratorium on campuses October 15, then start recruiting in the surrounding communities for the second Moratorium a month later.

“Our strategy got blown out of the water, because it caught on like wildfire,” Hawk said. Veteran peace activist Sidney Peck said the Moratorium “allowed people to express their opposition to the war in a way that was comfortable. It could be wearing an armband, it could be honking your horn, it could be leaving your lights on. No matter what your politics were, if you were against the war, here was a chance to express it.”

The Moratorium won significant political support. Representative Morris Udall, who was running for Speaker of the House, told a Moratorium staffer who had asked for his endorsement, “I can do more if I’m Speaker, and I won’t be Speaker if I do this.” The next morning, Udall called the staffer back. “Look, I’ve thought about it overnight and haven’t slept very much. What I said to you last night is fundamentally wrong. I ought to do what I think is the right thing to do, not what is…politically expedient. Use my name.”

Millions of Americans in thousands of communities participated in the first Vietnam Moratorium Day. Everywhere it was different–candlelight processions, readings of the names of Americans killed in the war, church services, public meetings. White-coated doctors, dark-suited lawyers and young suburban mothers joined the protests. Life Magazine called it “a display without historical parallel, the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country.”

A second Moratorium a month later coincided with a planned November 15 rally in Washington. Crowds estimated by the newspapers at 250,000 and by independent observers as nearly a million, streamed into Washington. Attorney General John Mitchell told his wife, “Looking out the Justice Department it looked like the Russian revolution.”

By then, though, the leadership of the peace movement was splintering and the Moratorium movement was running out of steam. But in retrospect, some historians say it played a significant role in forestalling further escalation of the Vietnam War. Unbeknownst to those planning the Moratorium, Nixon was simultaneously planning Operation Duck Hook, which would include massive bombing of Hanoi, the mining of rivers and harbors, the bombing of dikes, a ground invasion of North Vietnam and perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons. According to Who Spoke Up?, a history of the anti-Vietnam War movement by Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, “The antiwar sentiment generated and aired in the fall of 1969 made it politically impossible for the President to proceed with his plan. As a result, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese and American lives were spared.”

Macro Protest, Micro Protest

Since the US invasion of Iraq, except for a small corps of antiwar activists, efforts to bring demonstrators to the streets have consistently faltered. The Moratorium idea developed in recognition of the fact that the antiwar movement needs to adapt to the forms of self-expression that people find most congenial today–even if they are very different from the mass mobilizations that drew people in the past.

If people go to Amazon instead of the bookstore, Netflix instead of the movie theater and MySpace to meet new friends, perhaps the media and the antiwar movement shouldn’t just be counting how many people show up at demonstrations in Washington, DC, to measure the scope of social protest.

Micro-resistance may well be the mobilization of the future, with people exploring new kinds of protest wherever they can, whether at the computer or on the local street corner. If so, the question for organizers is how to connect and amplify the thousands of antiwar micro-activities that go unnoticed every day.

The Iraq Moratorium could link and amplify the micro-protests as varied as Joseph DeLappe’s online activism and the small but eloquent voice of Cameron Penny.

Penny, a 12-year-old poet from Michigan, likewise exemplifies the principle: “Cast down your protest where you may.” A poem he wrote stunned the audience at a Poets Against the War reading in New York City:

If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies
And when the soldiers look into the window
They don’t see their enemies
They see themselves as children
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep
When they wake up, the land is well again.

Can a moratorium work today? The Iraq War, fought with a volunteer army, so far hasn’t sparked the level of college protests students felt then, with the draft breathing down their necks. But opposition to presidential war policy is far more widespread now than in 1969, when Americans supported President Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam war two to one.

To some, Penny’s poem represents merely the innocent dreams of a child; DeLappe’s actions may seem little more than a gesture of high-tech despair. But if the Moratorium can link a child poet’s dream of peace, an artist’s interference and a Pentagon war game, it might also open a virtual window on a very real battlefield.

Susie Tompkins Buell, Naila Bolus
Sunday, May 13, 2007
SFGate

A suicide bomber detonates himself in a crowded marketplace in Iraq, killing dozens. Tensions over North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs continue to build, despite protest from the world’s nations. In Darfur, the body count has exceeded 200,000 as the genocide rages on.

Everywhere we turn today, we are bombarded with images and reports of warfare and violence. Parents face the challenge of helping our children process these “current events” without leading them to become cynical or hopeless or excessively fearful. Moms are particularly sensitive to this dilemma, given our special role as nurturers and keepers of the peace at home and in our society.

For moms, nothing is more important than making the world safe for our children. In fact, Mother’s Day was originally founded in America as a holiday to unite women against war. In proposing a “Mother’s Day for Peace” more than a century ago, the American abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Julia Ward Howe hoped that this powerful, maternal desire for security could even shape world events.

Howe, whose other claim to fame was penning the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” had witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Civil War and the scourge of violence and disease that claimed the lives of soldiers on and off the battlefield. She also worked with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers and later traveled to Europe where she encountered similar devastation from the Franco-Prussian War. In response, she called on mothers to work for peace and for the establishment of a special day in their honor.

More than a century later, our nation is again at war. Today, more than ever, it’s time we put the peace back in Mother’s Day.

But what is the best way to do this? Suffice it to say, most of us can’t take it upon ourselves to pack our bags for Sri Lanka or Sudan or any other number of conflict-torn regions badly in need of peace building. Nor can we step in and help broker peace negotiations among warring nations. But there are many, meaningful things any family can do on Mother’s Day, or any other day for that matter, to promote the ethics of peace that Howe envisioned:

Make room for peacemakers. Even though the news overwhelmingly focuses on conflict, it’s only part of the story. If we are to kindle any sense of hope in our children and grandchildren, we must take it upon ourselves to teach them about the people who are working to make the world safer and more secure for everyone. Why not use Mother’s Day to talk about what inspiring and courageous moms are doing around the globe? Moms such as Wangari Matthai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Green Belt Movement motivated thousands of ordinary citizens in Kenya to, in her own words, “overcome fear and a sense of helplessness and to defend democratic rights.” Or Lisa Schirch, director of the nonprofit 3D Security Initiative, who uses development projects such as building schools and water wells to disarm conflicts from Lebanon to Ghana. You can find more stories about moms working for peace at www.rediscovermothersday.org.

Break down barriers. Most wars and violent conflict can be traced to clashing ideologies that have all but drowned out our common humanity. Introduce your children to different cultures; encourage them to question their assumptions; and break down perceptual barriers that could contribute to hate and misunderstanding.

Be a role model. There are many ways to model your values. Practice healthy ways to resolve everyday conflicts, like asking questions rather than rushing to judgment, and mending fences whenever possible. Make family donations to groups that work for peace. Explain to your child on election day why you’re voting and what you’re voting for.

Consume ethically. Talk to your children about shopping decisions you make to support products from countries with good human rights and workers’ rights records. And work with your family to use energy more wisely, because reducing our dependence on oil makes us all more secure.

War enters our homes on a daily basis through the TV, over the Internet and in conversation at the dinner table. As parents and grandparents, we owe it to our kids to make sure peace gets an equal hearing. Mother’s Day is the perfect chance to begin that conversation, to hold a space in our homes and in our society for something better.

How do we talk to our children about war? The answer is simple: Talk to them about peace.

Susie Tompkins Buell is a San Francisco businesswoman, activist, mother and grandmother, and a sponsor of www.rediscovermothersday.org. Naila Bolus is executive director of Ploughshares Fund and the mother of three young daughters.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2007/05/13/EDGONP1IL71.DTL

This article appeared on page E – 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

In a past column I have written about a narrow window of opportunity, a period of perhaps as few as ten years within which humanity must make dramatic reductions in worldwide CO2 emissions or run the risk of unleashing dangerous cascades of “runaway” warming. In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon itself and outgrow the human power to slow it, leading to shifts in temperature, sea level, ocean currents, rainfall patterns, and ecology with the potential to disrupt coastal cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.Minimizing this risk calls for massive improvements in energy efficiency, decreases in consumption, and a rapid shift to clean energy. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that all of this is possible if we were to get serious about public investment and incentives for a life-serving energy system, but ten years is a short window for going about such large scale change, especially in a nation that has not yet gathered itself to rise to the challenge.

A few hours and a little research will provide all of the information you need to come to your own conclusion about the above assessment. But then what? If you find yourself agreeing that we have ten years to address a problem of human survival and that addressing it will require very deep changes in much that we take for granted, how do you find the response that is right for you, whoever you are? What’s a fifth grade teacher to do? Or a grandmother? An artist? A carpenter? A student?

The answer to this question doesn’t strike most people instantly or with total clarity. Grave threat though it is, climate change isn’t at all like a burning building or a raging flood. It’s not the sort of crisis that automatically pulls our best selves forward. All our highest capacities are there to draw upon – our creativity, our intellect, our perseverance, our selflessness and courage – but most of us seem to need to hold the reality of global warming in our awareness for some time before ours hearts and souls cipher out a response.

But here is a dangerous irony. While we may need to sit with the reality of climate change for a while before we can see what it is that we are able to offer in response, most minds don’t react to our global crisis with calm and deliberate introspection.

Some minds know for certain that calls for immediate and dramatic action are flat out wrong and typical alarmist environmentalism.

Some minds leap with fear for beloved people and places and can’t see or think very well beyond that fear.

Some minds quickly find distraction, in daily obligations or solvable problems.

And some minds decide that’s its too late anyway because people will never change and one person can’t make a difference.

Climate change presents us with all sorts of challenges, but the very first one, the one that must be met before any of the others can even be engaged, is the challenge of opening ourselves to the reality of climate change’s existence, scale, and immediacy.

There’s no one right way to open oneself to something this big, of course. We each have to find our own way, on our own terms. But we can experiment, and we can share our discoveries with one another.

In that spirit I offer a few ideas:

Talking with others helps. Climate change is everyone’s problem so there’s no point in trying to face it alone.

Believing in your own sense of reality helps too. As you begin to learn about climate change, the fact that the newspaper headline says 150 New Coal Plants on The Drawing Board, rather than Congress Declares State of Emergency, makes it easy to doubt yourself and your perspective. Don’t do this. Instead seek out others who have examined the data, talk it over with them, and consider the possibility that you’re the sane one and it is the society that is lost in illusion.

Envisioning what you really want pulls your mind forward, and helps you see the other side of climate change, the push towards what you long for anyway. There is a lot to look forward to in a post-fossil fuel world. I’m more than ready for a super-efficient train system and a flowering of my local economy. I’m ready for less junk-mail and no more planned obsolescence of everything from toasters to telephones. I’m ready for more quality and less quantity and more time with my family. I’m ready for the last day of the last war over oil.

Whatever you see when you envision your world once it’s moved beyond fossil fuels, treasure that vision, allow it to reveal itself to you more and more clearly. One reward for realizing how much you dislike the current drift towards disaster is discovering just how much you want something else. Whatever this something else is, you can learn to describe it with passion and vividness, and in doing so, you can chip away at the unconscious belief in our culture that we are already living in the best possible way, and that any accommodation to climate change would therefore be sacrifice.

This is not a matter of imagination only, of course. Once you really take in the reality of a ten-year window to address climate change, without question, you will begin to try new things. Who knows what: biking to work, running for Congress, organizing your community, planting your first vegetable garden.

Whatever it is, in choosing it, you will be opening yourself to the messages of an astonishingly beautiful planet and trying to figure out how to live according to its elegant and non-negotiable terms.

And the human spirit can bear a lot of fear and worry and grief when it is held up by a purpose as large and life-affirming as that one.

Elizabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute’s Our Climate Ourselves program and is a writer, teacher, and systems analyst who lives with her family as part of an intentional community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. For more of her writing visit www.ourclimateourselves.org

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart’s exploitation of weak U.S. labor laws interferes with workers’ rights to organize and violates the human rights of its employees, according to a report by a leading human rights group.

In a 210-page report released Monday, Human Rights Watch said Wal-Mart uses an arsenal of sophisticated tactics — some of which it says are illegal — aimed at thwarting union organization and creating a climate of fear for its 1.3 million U.S. workers.

The Human Rights Watch study was based on interviews with 41 current and former Wal-Mart workers and managers, as well as labor lawyers and union organizers, between 2004 and early 2007. The organization also said it analyzed cases against Wal-Mart charging the company with violating U.S. labor and employment laws.

While Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is not alone in engaging in illegal anti-union tactics, the retailer “stands out for the extreme sophistication and aggressiveness of its anti-union strategies,” said Carol Pier, senior researcher on labor rights and trade for Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

Pier noted that while Human Rights Watch had been following reports on Wal-Mart’s anti-union efforts, what was missing from the debate was a “human rights analysis” and a roadmap to its systematic approach. With Wal-Mart being the largest private employer in the States, Pier noted that “the company’s treatment of its workers has significant impact in the U.S. and beyond.” She emphasized that the report was not funded by labor unions and the group is not an anti-Wal-Mart organization.

But Wal-Mart was quick to dismiss the study’s allegations as untrue and unsubstantiated.

“Wal-Mart provides an environment of open communications and gives our associates every opportunity to express their ideas, comments and concerns,” said David Tovar, a spokesman at Wal-Mart, in a statement. “It is because of our efforts to foster such an environment that our associates have repeatedly rejected unionization attempts.”

He continued, “…Wal-Mart respects our associates’ right to a free and fair unionization vote through a private, government-supervised process and we remain committed to compliance with U.S. laws regarding workers’ rights to unionize.”

Tovar added that less than 5 percent of all retail workers in the States are part of a union, so the current trend is not unique to Wal-Mart.

In a statement, Justin Hakes, legal information director at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a nonprofit group, called the study “the latest tactic in the aggressive efforts by union officials to force union affiliation on Wal-Mart’s workforce.”

Human Rights Watch is using the report to call on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA — which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in March and is now under consideration in the Senate — increases penalties for labor law violations. The legislation also would restore what the group calls a “democratic” union selection process by requiring employers to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign cards showing their support. Currently, employers can force union elections and then intimidate workers with their aggressive anti-union message during the campaign period, Human Rights Watch said.

Unions have been trying to organize Wal-Mart for years, but after failing in several attempts to represent workers at individual Wal-Mart stores, union-backed groups like WakeUpWal-Mart.com have emerged to embrace a broader strategy that goes beyond its employees and aims to get the retailer to improve its wages, health care benefits, environmental record and to be a better neighbor.

According to Human Rights Watch, Wal-Mart uses training sessions, videos and other means to indoctrinate its employees on the negatives of joining a union, tactics that the group says starts on the day employees start their job. The company also gives explicit instructions to managers on how to prevent union formation, according to the report. The report said that Wal-Mart generally responds within a few days to workers organizing by dispatching from headquarters members of its Labor Relations Team.

According to Pier, Wal-Mart engages in illegal tactics such as restricting the dissemination of pro-union views and firing workers for their union activity, in extreme cases. According to former workers and managers at one store, Wal-Mart ordered the repositioning of surveillance cameras to monitor union supporters, the report said.

This Wednesday the invasion had grown to some 3,000 families, a total of 12,000 people, camping in shelters made of bamboo and black plastic sheeting.

The MTST and other organisations demanding housing, like the National Union for Popular Housing (UNMP) and the Downtown (Sao Paulo) Homeless People’s Movement, stepped up their mass protests this month, holding street marches and rallies in front of government buildings and occupying abandoned old buildings.

The MTST’s activities have expanded the traditional “Red April”, when social movements take action to commemorate International Day of Peasant Struggle on Apr. 17 and the national Indigenous People’s Day on Apr. 19.

This year these actions extended over several weeks, and in the case of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) are still continuing.

“Red April” gets its name from the red flags that are the hallmark of MST demonstrators and carried prominently in their marches.

“The biggest social movement in Brazil today is the Landless Movement (MST)” which is campaigning to accelerate the agrarian reform. It joins forces with other movements with common aims, such as protesting social injustice, Breno Bringel, a political scientist and visiting researcher at Campinas University, told IPS.

Apart from the landless MST and the homeless MTST, who are “revitalising urban protest,” organisations of indigenous peoples, garbage pickers, and people affected by dams are also active, he noted. There are also organisations fighting for education or health; youth culture groups, such as hip hop; and the Afro-Brazilian movement, Bringel said.

Social movements emerged as political actors in Brazil during the 1970s, when they “organised opposition to the military regime,” developing new forms of grassroots organisation. In the 1980s they acquired new dimensions, going on to claim social rights like the rights of women, the environment, and sexual and ethnic minorities, he said.

But in the 1990s, with the advance of free-market policies, “the influence of organised social movements declined. They lost ground to non-governmental organisations, as public criticism of the system ebbed away,” Bringel said.

“The demonstrations this April are seeking to break the state-market-service sector tripod, while rejecting policies based on welfare or charity,” and they signal a return to the fundamental demand for social transformation, said Bringel, who holds a doctorate in the theory of social movements.

The growing strength of social movements, which played an important role in the Brazilian elections “by cementing the forces of the left,” contrasts with the crisis in trade unionism which has been exacerbated by the rise in unemployment, the growth of the informal labour market, and the “flexibilisation and increased precariousness of labour relations,” he said.

The fundamental contradiction between capital and labour has been displaced outside the factory, with “workers being excluded or rejected by the formal employment structures,” said the academic.

“If they do not adapt, trade unions with a vertical structure will only plunge deeper into crisis, because of their disconnection from the new realities,” he predicted.

The high level of social unrest this April is also a response to political circumstances in Brazil, as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who began his second four-year term on Jan. 1, has belatedly only just completed the appointment of his ministerial cabinet, historian Dulce Pandolfi, head of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), told IPS.

The trend is for social movements to take more of a leadership role, in Brazil as well as in other countries, because of their “broader and more horizontal action,” which makes them capable of responding to more tenuous demands, such as those of the informal economy and of segments of the population lacking many effective rights, like people living in “favelas” (shantytowns), Pandolfi said.

Whereas trade unions are very much tied to negotiating salary issues for those who have jobs, the social movements have “novel” ways of organising in networks that are horizontal and flexible, equipping them for confronting “more complex relations between social classes,” she said.

That is the sort of outcome achieved by, for example, an initiative from Rio de Janeiro for the “right to the city,” which mobilises homeless people, favela dwellers and other sectors, such as people concerned about public security, or about recreational and cultural areas, to participate, she said.

The MST, which has multiplied the number of its occupations of land considered unproductive, and has even invaded land belonging to the army, has recently abandoned its previous willingness to negotiate with the Lula administration. For years, it considered Lula an ally, but impatience with the slow pace of agrarian reform has led to an apparently confrontational attitude now.

“The dozens of demonstrations this April do not indicate a growth of the grassroots movements, but rather greater indignation among activists” in response to the slow implementation of the ongoing agrarian reform, Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the national coordinators of the MST, told IPS.

“The MST’s struggles provide a kind of education for the masses, by showing disorganised and apolitical sectors that struggle is the only way to improve people’s lives,” Stédile said.

Indeed, the acronym of the MTST and its way of operating, by occupying buildings but then pulling out if the courts order them to do so, are very similar to those of its rural counterpart. (FIN/2007)

From April 29 to May 6 in Iraq not only the rumble of bombs will
be heard. A network of associations of the Iraqi civil society, belonging to
different political and religious affiliations, will carry on peace
initiatives on the whole national territory within the Iraqi Week of
Nonviolence.

This event will take place while the Iraqi government meets in
Sharm el-Sheikh (May 3-4) representative of the neighbouring countries, plus
the G5 and G8, in the ministerial meeting that aims to restore security in
Iraq. But is a top-down peace process feasible in a country traumatized by
violence and insulted by military occupation like today’s Iraq? The Iraqi
civil society asserts to have the duty and the capability to bring its own
contribution. Given the high danger faced by those who organize public
events in these times, this is a courageous venture that the international
community must know about, an act of civil resistance to terror and
militarism.

Tens of associations and more than a hundred activists have
agreed to hold initiatives in schools, theatres, public spaces of the main
cities in Iraq. Events are scheduled in Kut, Baghdad, Basra, Diwaniya,
Dohuq, Erbil, Faw, Kirkuk, Maysan, Mosul, Salaheddin, Sulaimaniya, Tikrit.
The organization is coordinated by the network LAONF (nonviolence, in
Arabic), created in 2006 by associations that participated in training
programmes on Active Nonviolence: a philosophy and a means of peoples’
liberation that envisages full respect for life, and rejection of any form
of oppression, exploitation and violence.

Many of the initiatives are managed with children and students,
that are now preparing paintings and banners to be fixed at the entrance of
their schools and universities to ask for an end to violence against
civilians. At Al-Mustansiriyya University in Baghdad – where in January 2007
the explosion of two car bombs killed 60 and wounded 110 among professors,
students and personnel – olive and palm trees will be planted to commemorate
the victims of violence. In front of school buildings people will bury
remnants of bullets and splinters, because the sons of Iraq should not grow
between symbols of violence. Instead, they must learn to bury its bitter
fruits and build another society with other means. In a village close to
Mosul people of different ethnic groups and sects will play together a
football game; in Kut teenagers of secondary schools will free white doves
and make white balloons fly; everywhere posters and calendars will be
distributed to be hanged at the walls of people’s houses and remind them
that violence is not the solution but the cause of their suffering.

Besides ceremonies, there will be seminars and conferences to
present to civil society and local authorities principles and methodologies
of nonviolent action for social and political change. The activists of LAONF
will not limit themselves to speaking in universities, indeed they will
participate in the events organized by trade unions on the 1st of May,
Workers Day. They will animate public debates on the strategy of nonviolent
action with the Syndicate Union of Workers in the Baghdad National Theatre,
with the unions that fight against privatization of Iraqi oil at the Oil
Union Centre of Basra, with fishermen’s unions in the Fao peninsula, the
first zone that opposed a fierce resistance to Anglo-American occupation in
2003.

Lastly, the associations involved in this event have chosen a
symbolic campaign that unites them all. At a time when the opinion of
anybody who takes a stand is distorted to be accused of sectarianism, the
network LAONF asks that all people commit themselves not to transfer the
thirst for vengeance and violence to Iraqi children. In every city they will
collect signatures and they will finally present a petition to the Iraqi
Parliament asking for a ban on imports of toys that push children to
violence. After a thirteen-years long embargo, Iraq needs medicine and
books, technology for development of its civilian economy, not toys that
induce children and teenagers to assign a positive connotation to violence.
It is necessary to protect the youngsters from the culture of death and
destruction that has already been imported in Iraq by foreign troops and
combatants.

According to the organizers, the Iraqi Week of Nonviolence
pursues three significant objectives. Firstly the Iraqi civil society proves
to its own people and to the international community that it is still able
to organize national unitary events unbounded by political and religious
powers. It is an important testimony of their willingness and capacity to
refuse the logic of civil war and carry on common initiatives defying the
overpower of armed groups and armies. Secondly, they aim to initiate a
process of conscientization of civil society on the possibility of
renouncing hatred and vengeance, in order to pursue the common objective of
peaceful coexistence. The constructive message is directed especially to
young generations that risk to forget how strong was till recently the
sentiment of unity of the Iraqi people. Fighting for self-determination and
for peoples’ rights is fair and dutiful, but there are other means than
weapons to promote a just society, nonviolent means that are coherent with
the ends assigned to them. They allow us to shape since the beginning,
during the fight, the model of society that we aim to promote, where women
and men, youngsters and elders, have the same dignity. Finally, during this
week the activists will encourage individuals and associations to join
LAONF, to increase the number of those who accept this commitment.

The Iraqi Week of Nonviolence takes place for the second year,
and hopes to begin a fixed appointment for cultural and political promotion
of nonviolent action, of making peace by peaceful means. Nonviolent means of
fight have been used in recent history by Iraqi trade unions and social
movements, but often without explicit and conscious adhesion to a reference
model. The network LAONF aims to articulate in the Iraqi culture the
universal values and methodologies of action that assigned political and
spiritual victories to the movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
feminism, and many others. The training process of LAONF activists is
supported by the Catalan association NOVA – Centre for Social Innovation,
and by the Italian Un ponte per…, that have been organizing for two years
training programmes on the culture of nonviolence, by explicit request and
invitation of the Iraqi associations.

Information on the initiatives already undertaken are available on the
website HYPERLINK “http://www.launf.net/”www.launf.net managed by NOVA-CIS
and on the website HYPERLINK “http://www.laonf.org/”www.laonf.org managed by
members of the network LAONF from Baghdad.

Ed Hedemann has not paid any federal income tax since 1970 and has no intention of starting this April. The avuncular peace activist says he owes the government $70,000–a sum worth several cluster bombs at $14,000 each and dozens of $9 hand grenades. Instead, he donated the money to Global Exchange, American Friends Service Committee and other humanitarian efforts.

The 62-year-old mild-mannered pacifist says he sleeps better knowing his tax dollars are redirected to peaceful causes. “I run a risk of getting in trouble for not paying my taxes, but not as big a risk as the people of Iraq will suffer if I do pay,” said Hedemann, a freelance photographer and writer in Brooklyn.

Conscientious war objectors from the Vietnam era like Hedemann represent the cerebral wing of the anti-war movement–protesters who take their campaigns from the streets into the solitude of their homes and the privacy of their bank accounts. Tax resisters say their ranks are increasing as discontent over the war in Iraq grows. The U.S. Treasury Department doesn’t track the reasons why people refuse to pay their taxes, so whether the number of war tax resisters is swelling or stagnant is difficult to determine.

Hedemann, the author of “War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support From the Military,” helped found the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) in 1982 to provide information and support to people considering war tax resistance.

The committee estimates that 51 percent of 2008 federal taxes will go toward the military; the U.S. Office of Management and Budget puts the number closer to 21 percent.

The committee urges people to protest the war by refusing to pay anywhere from a dollar to their entire federal income tax bill. “If enough people participated you could really cripple the government,” said Hedemann, who estimates that at least 2 percent of taxpayers would need to become resisters. Bruce Friedland, an IRS spokesman, declined to comment on how many tax-withholding citizens it would take to put a crimp in military actions.

These determined pacifists believe their cause is catching the eye of war-weary Americans. Hedemann points to the rising number of hits on the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee’s Web site (nwtrcc.org) since President Bush spoke about a troop escalation in Iraq.

Anti-war sentiment is not a legitimate reason to not pay taxes, the IRS says. “No law, including the Internal Revenue Code, permits a taxpayer to avoid or evade tax obligations on the grounds that the taxpayer does not agree with the government’s use of the taxes collected,” said IRS spokesman Eric Smith.

But that doesn’t mean the tax man is quick to haul protesters off to jail. Conscientious tax resisters usually receive form letters from the IRS demanding payment for back taxes, penalties and interest.

Hedemann says he’s been receiving such letters for years, but has had an IRS representative knock on his door only five times in his life. “Once, I tried telling him about the federal pie chart and where his money was going, but he didn’t seem interested,” Hedemann said.

There are no constitutional, federal or tax laws that protect conscientious objectors, according to Peter Goldberger, a criminal defense lawyer near Philadelphia who has represented a dozen war tax resisters. But the resisters rarely receive any jail time because “the IRS doesn’t have the resources to enforce the law and their priorities are going after those with a lot of money,” Goldberger said. “These people are not wealthy or greedy.”

He added that the IRS is wary of pressing charges because “the publicity these cases generate usually makes conscientious tax resisters sympathetic” and “they’re not tax cheats.”

These pacifists are inspired by writer Henry David Thoreau, who refused to finance slavery and the Mexican-American War in 1847 by withholding his poll tax.

In the past 60 years, there were only 45 IRS court actions against war tax resisters, Goldberger said. Most resisters have been hauled into court either for not cooperating with the government by refusing to hand over records or, during the height of Vietnam War protests in the early 1970s, because they fraudulently altered their W-4 forms. Only one war tax resister–James Otsuka in 1949–was ever charged with not paying taxes, according to the War Resistance League.

Hedemann was prosecuted eight years ago for refusing to divulge financial information to IRS investigators. Goldberger, who is Hedemann’s lawyer, successfully argued that complying with the government would violate his client’s Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. The anti-war activist is so dedicated to his cause that he lives on the brink of poverty; he doesn’t own a home, car or bank account for fear the IRS will seize his assets.

“I don’t want to finance this country’s war-making machine,” Hedemann said.

Many war tax resisters object to military spending on religious grounds. Robin Harper, a Quaker and war tax resister, says he sends the IRS a letter each year that states: “The First Amendment of our Constitution guarantees me the right to practice my religion freely, and I choose not to kill or pay others to take human life.”

Karl Meyer, a self-employed carpenter in Nashville, Tenn., said, “If I send $1,000 to DC, I doubt 10 cents would go to direct services.” But, he said, “If I send it to the Catholic Worker community, the whole $1,000 will go to the hungry and poor. The logic is crushing and overwhelming.”

One reason why the war tax resistance movement is mainly restricted to the Vietnam-era generation is because younger people don’t yet earn enough money to pay taxes.

But some college-age peaceniks are skeptical that withholding taxes would actually stop bombs from falling. “I think any form of resistance is good, but clearly withholding taxes is not historically the way wars have ended,” said Jared Rodriguez, 25, a student at the City University of New York and a member of Military Families Speak Out, an organization opposed to the Iraq war.

Conscientious tax resisters point out that tax resistance goes back to the American Revolution, but they agree it hasn’t been a popular form of pacifism recently. “Even at the height of the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War, tax objection wasn’t the main form of resistance,” said Dennis Dalton, a Barnard College politics professor who gives the federal portion of his tax bill to nonprofits. “But if tax resistance could be achieved on a large scale, it would be the most effective form of resisting a government that is waging an unjust war.”

ASIA’S great spiritual leaders tend to build shrines round themselves. There they sit, disciples at their feet, handing down instructions for achieving the perfect life. When Preah Maha Ghosananda, in later years, became associated with Buddhist temples in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, his admirers would expect to find him there. He seldom was. He would be far away, walking.

Where he walked was often remote, but it was neither safe nor quiet. He would tread, a little bird-like man with hands folded and head bowed, along narrow paths that threaded through the jungle-forests of central Cambodia. Care was necessary, for the ground had been sown with landmines up to the edge of the trails. Humidity would mist his glasses and slick his bald head with sweat. His orange monk’s robes, hitched up to show stout boots and socks, would tangle in the bushes. Behind him, chanting to the beat of a drum, would stream 200-300 laymen, monks and nuns, walking across Cambodia for peace.

Though Ghosananda led these Dhammayietra, or “Pilgrimages of Truth” in the early 1990s, well after the signing of peace accords to end a civil war between the remnants of the murderous Khmers Rouges and the new, Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government, he often found war still raging. Shells screamed over the walkers, and firefights broke out round them. Some were killed. The more timid ran home, but Ghosananda had chosen his routes deliberately to pass through areas of conflict. Sometimes the walkers found themselves caught up in long lines of refugees, footsore like them, trudging alongside ox-carts and bicycles piled high with mattresses and pans and live chickens. “We must find the courage to leave our temples”, Ghosananda insisted, “and enter the suffering-filled temples of human experience.”

Many of the villagers they met had not seen a Buddhist monk for years. In the old Cambodia, before the Khmers Rouges in April 1975 had proclaimed a new Utopian era, “forest-monks” had been a part of rural life, wandering through with staves and bowls, exchanging a handful of rice for a blessing. Now, though the Khmers Rouges had outlawed nostalgia, had razed the monasteries and thrown the mutilated Buddha-statues into the rivers, old habits stirred. As they caught Ghosanada’s chant, “Hate can never be appeased by hate; hate can only be appeased by love”, soldiers laid down their arms and knelt by the side of the road. Villagers brought water to be blessed, and plunged glowing incense sticks into it to signal the end of war.

Ghosananda himself had missed the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years. His family, ordinary peasant folk from the Mekong delta, had been wiped out; monks like him, “social parasites” as they were now branded, were defrocked, forced to labour in the fields, or murdered. Out of 60,000 only 3,000 were left alive, and those had fled. But Ghosananda had gone to Thailand to learn meditation in 1965, staying for years in a hermitage in the forest where only the buzz of insects disturbed him. Not until 1978, when he went to minister to Cambodian refugees in the camps on the Thai border, did he learn that Buddhism had been destroyed in Cambodia, although almost all the people had adhered to it. He decided then that his duty was to restore his country’s sacred foundation.

Step by step

He did not believe this could be done through grand temples or enclosed institutions. Certainly he could have gone that way. Like many others he had been a dek wat, a “temple kid”, washing the monks’ dishes and carrying their alms-bowls. Unlike others, he became a monk and remained one, getting all his education in temples and eventually gaining a doctorate in Pali, the scriptural language of Theravada Buddhism. He was a polymath and an intellectual. Yet he could not stay out of the world. Rather than devoting himself to monastic scholarship, he built hut-temples in the refugee camps and handed out dog-eared photocopies of the Buddha’s Metta Sutta, or Words of Love:

With a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating love over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths…

On his walks his message remained the same. It needed no complication. The work, he knew, would be slow: “step by step”, as he liked to say. It would continue as long as Cambodians felt divided from each other and brutalised by their past.

After 1980 he was made much of. He represented the Cambodian government-in-exile at the United Nations, and was influential in the peace talks; in 1988, he was made Supreme Patriarch of Cambodia. Several times he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize. He founded more than 50 temples across the world. Some he spoke at; but his first priority lay elsewhere. It was to appear, birdlike, out of the Cambodian forest, to surprise a man digging or a woman washing; to remind them that the power of love was stronger than the forces of history; and then to move on.

For the pure-hearted one
Having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

The Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs, in conjunction with more than 30 women’s rights groups, launched the campaign against the sexual violence that has often been linked to HIV/AIDS among women in this postwar country.

Sierra Leone’s first network for women living with HIV/AIDS, ‘The Voice of Women’, aims to be up and running later this month. Network organisers envision it not only as an advocacy platform but as a safe haven from the stigma that HIV-positive people often suffer.

“In society we find ourselves stigmatised. People tend to outcast people, especially positive women,” said one of the network’s 12 founders, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

She contracted the virus from her husband in 2000, and has already lost one of her daughters to an AIDS-related illness. “Nobody wants to come around you, fearing that they could contract HIV/AIDS,” she said.

Government initiatives with a special focus on rural areas will include information campaigns on radio, targeting both men and women in interactive lectures and seminars for women.

Rape was commonly used as a tool of war during more than a decade of conflict in Sierra Leone, where women and girls were often used as sex slaves.

Since the end of the war, rape has increased, especially of children, according to the Sierra Leone Police Family Support Unit (FSU), which is responsible for investigating abuses of women’s and children’s rights.

According to the FSU, 65 percent of rape cases reported to the police in 2006 involved teenage girls under the age of 18, while a report by the United States State Department in the same year found that rape was underreported, and indictments rare.
A reluctance to pursue justice for women, combined with limited economic opportunities, created a culture of impunity for perpetrating violence against women in Sierra Leone, the State Department said.

UNAIDS has estimated HIV prevalence in Sierra Leone at 1.5 percent, with the government indicating that approximately 50,000 people are infected.

Campaigners in more than 50 cities across Europe have taken part in a month-long action protesting against the nuclear capacity of NATO member states. Concerned citizens have been filing official complaints with relevant authorities on the grounds that NATO’s nuclear capacity is contrary to international humanitarian law, as the weapons’ indiscriminate nature is certain to cause unnecessary suffering.
The series of complaints, organised by Greenpeace and the Belgium peace organisation Vredesactie, culminated in the notification of a citizens’ summons to NATO secretary-general De Hoop-Scheffer, to coincide with the Riga Summit being held to discuss the future of the Alliance. The summons calls on NATO to change its nuclear policy and start the dismantling of the nuclear weapons still deployed by European NATO members. NATO’s condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear test as “an extremely serious threat to peace and security in the world” is held by campaigners to be hypocritical when European countries continue to hold their own nuclear weapons, and also house some of the US’s nuclear capacity. “NATO should put its own nuclear house in order and eliminate its own extremely serious threat to peace and security,” said Bombspotting campaigner Fabien Rondal. Wendel Trio of Greenpeace added “This is an opportunity for European leaders to meet their own obligation to disarm the world of nuclear weapons and to do what the majority of people in Europe want by removing US nuclear weapons from European soil.”
Synchronised action
The campaign very successfully managed to coordinate and synchronise activity between a myriad of European peace campaigners, represented by a variety of different groups, and based in over 50 European cities. In police stations across Spain, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Portugal, countless official complaints were made. Many groups also carried out street demonstrations.
In Belgium, hundreds of citizens collectively sent a bailiff with a citizen’s summons to prime minister Verhofstadt. In earlier complaint actions in Belgium, in 2002 and 2004, more than a thousand complaints were filed.
Amongst the many British actions, Norwich witnessed more than 30 people, representing a range of local groups, demonstrating in front of the police station and holding colourful banners while the letter of complaint was officially filed.
NATO, currently leading some 32,000 troops from 37 countries in Afghanistan, is at a transitional point in its history. Holding NATO to account by existing humanitarian laws becomes a vital exercise as NATO works to redefine its post-cold war role. Campaigners argue that it is of vital importance that, in future, NATO is free of nuclear weapons.

CONTACT: The Rainforest Action Network
415 398 4404 | 415 398 2732 fax | answers@ran.org

Investors Warned About Weyerhaeuser’s Environmental and Human Rights Problems

Rainforest Action Network Begins Investor Education Campaign in Advance of Lumber Giant’s April Shareholder Meeting

San Francisco – This week, hundreds of responsible investors in Canada and the United States began receiving letters from Rainforest Action Network detailing the extent of Weyerhaeuser Corporation’s (NYSE:WY) environmental and human rights violations.

The letters request that responsible investors “engage with Weyerhaeuser over the rights and interests of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in northwestern Ontario, and their refusal to adopt the Forest Stewardship Council’s certification standards.” The letters endorse a shareholder resolution filed by Capital Strategies Consulting, Inc., requesting “a feasibility assessment to suspend wood procurement from Grassy Narrows’ territory until the free, prior, and informed consent of the community has been established.” The resolution contends that Weyerhaeuser’s ongoing procurement of wood from Grassy Narrows’ territory is an unnecessary violation of internationally recognized human rights and established industry best practices. Independent research shows that the Ontario Province could respect Grassy Narrows’ call for a moratorium on non-consensual logging without sacrificing jobs by re-directing unused hardwood supplies from other less controversial regional forests to Weyerhaeuser’s Timberstand mill in Kenora, Ontario.

At issue is Weyerhaeuser’s procurement from clear-cut logging done without consent on Grassy Narrows traditional territory. Weyerhaeuser is the sole purchaser of hardwood from Grassy Narrows territory each year, making it the largest purchaser of wood from the contested area. Canadian logging company Abitibi Consolidated currently holds logging rights to Grassy Narrows territory granted by the Ontario government. Grassy Narrows contests these licenses as a violation of their Indigenous rights under Treaty 3. Treaty 3 stipulates that Indigenous people have the right to use their land for traditional practices such as hunting, trapping, and fishing- all of which are threatened in Grassy Narrows because of the continued clear-cut logging.

Amnesty International Canada has also sent letters to investors, outlining their concerns about the company’s human rights practices with regard to the Grassy Narrows First Nation, citing that: “Amnesty International believes that all companies share a responsibility to promote and protect human rights within their operations. As a North American business leader, Weyerhaeuser has an obligation to respect the human rights of First Nations communities in those areas where it conducts business. The company should not proceed unless appropriate consultations have indicated that the community has given its free, prior informed consent. Failure to do so exposes investors to potential risk. Amnesty Canada urges Weyerhaeuser to vote in favour of this resolution at the upcoming AGM and to recommend this action to its shareholders.”

“Calvert is deeply concerned by the ongoing dispute between Grassy Narrows, the government of Ontario, and forest products companies including Weyerhaeuser,” said Stu Dalheim, manager of advocacy and policy for the mutual fund company. “Through our dialogue with the company we are calling upon Weyerhaeuser to stop sourcing wood from Grassy Narrow’s traditional territory until the community provides its free prior informed consent.”

“Most people recognize that clear-cut logging on Indigenous land is bad for human rights and the environment, but the business case against these destructive practices is just as clear.” said Brant Olson, Old Growth campaign director at Rainforest Action Network. “Steve Rogel has a duty to inform investors about the risks associated with relying on clear-cut logging in Grassy Narrows and a responsibility to pursue less ecologically and socially damaging alternatives.”

For more information, visit www.RAN.org , www.Amnesty.ca /campaigns/sharepower, or www.FreeGrassy.org .

February 23, 2007 edition – The Christian Science Monitor
The common enemy is violence and terrorism, not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews.
By Kenneth Ballen

WASHINGTON

Those who think that Muslim countries and pro-terrorist attitudes go hand-in-hand might be shocked by new polling research: Americans are more approving of terrorist attacks against civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria.

The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland’s prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24 percent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”

Contrast those numbers with 2006 polling results from the world’s most-populous Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Terror Free Tomorrow, the organization I lead, found that 74 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that terrorist attacks are “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure was 86 percent; in Bangladesh, 81 percent.

Do these findings mean that Americans are closet terrorist sympathizers?

Hardly. Yet, far too often, Americans and other Westerners seem willing to draw that conclusion about Muslims. Public opinion surveys in the United States and Europe show that nearly half of Westerners associate Islam with violence and Muslims with terrorists. Given the many radicals who commit violence in the name of Islam around the world, that’s an understandable polling result.

But these stereotypes, affirmed by simplistic media coverage and many radicals themselves, are not supported by the facts – and they are detrimental to the war on terror. When the West wrongly attributes radical views to all of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, it perpetuates a myth that has the very real effect of marginalizing critical allies in the war on terror.

Indeed, the far-too-frequent stereotyping of Muslims serves only to reinforce the radical appeal of the small minority of Muslims who peddle hatred of the West and others as authentic religious practice.

Terror Free Tomorrow’s 20-plus surveys of Muslim countries in the past two years reveal another surprise: Even among the minority who indicated support for terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden, most overwhelmingly approved of specific American actions in their own countries. For example, 71 percent of bin Laden supporters in Indonesia and 79 percent in Pakistan said they thought more favorably of the United States as a result of American humanitarian assistance in their countries – not exactly the profile of hard-core terrorist sympathizers. For most people, their professed support of terrorism/bin Laden can be more accurately characterized as a kind of “protest vote” against current US foreign policies, not as a deeply held religious conviction or even an inherently anti- American or anti-Western view.

In truth, the common enemy is violence and terrorism, not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews. Whether recruits to violent causes join gangs in Los Angeles or terrorist cells in Lahore, the enemy is the violence they exalt.

Our surveys show that not only do Muslims reject terrorism as much if not more than Americans, but even those who are sympathetic to radical ideology can be won over by positive American actions that promote goodwill and offer real hope.

America’s goal, in partnership with Muslim public opinion, should be to defeat terrorists by isolating them from their own societies. The most effective policies to achieve that goal are the ones that build on our common humanity. And we can start by recognizing that Muslims throughout the world want peace as much as Americans do.

Kenneth Ballen is founder and president of Terror Free Tomorrow, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to finding effective policies that win popular support away from global terrorists.

Reporters Without Borders today called for the immediate release of 25 women journalists and feminist activists held in Tehran’s Evin prison, who, on the eve of International Women’s Day, began a hunger strike to protest against their continued detention.

Thirty-three women were arrested on 4 March while demonstrating outside the Revolutionary Islamic Tribunal in Tehran in protest against criminal charges brought against five activists who organised a women’s demonstration in June 2006.

“We call for the immediate and unconditional release of the journalists and activists in custody in Evin prison,” the worldwide press freedom organisation said. “These women have not broken any law. They simply exercised their right to demonstrate peacefully.” “After censoring websites which relay and defend the demands of women’s rights organisations, the Iranian authorities have now deprived their main contributors of their freedom.” It added.

Scores of journalists and feminist activists gathered outside the Tehran Revolutionary Islamic Tribunal on 4 March in solidarity with five women on trial for “damaging public order and security”, “publicity against the Islamic Republic” and “taking part in an unauthorised demonstration”.

The five were: journalists Nushin Ahmadi Khorasani, Parvin Ardalan and Fariba Davudi Mohajer and activists Shahla Entessari and Susan Tahmassebi. They had been charged on 12 June 2006 for organising a peaceful demonstration in support of reform of laws which discriminate against women in Iran.

They were re-arrested when they left court alongside the demonstrators who had come to support them. A total of 33 women were arrested, 22 of them journalists. They were put into isolation cells in Evin prison. Three of them who are sick, Parvin Ardalan (journalist), Fatemeh Govarayee (journalist) and Mahnaz Mohammadi (activist) have been refused access to their treatment.

Parastoo Dokoohaki (journalist and blogger), Saghar Laghayee (journalist and contributor to website meydaan.com), Saghie Laghayee (online journalist on meydaan.com), Niloufar Golkar (online journalist on we4change.com), Farideh Entessari (activist), Sara Loghmani (activist), Nahid Entessari (activist) and Parastoo Sarmadi (journalist) were all today released on bail while the others began a hunger strike to protest against their continued detention.

Websites we4change, zenestan, kanonzanan and meydaan, which employ many of the journalists arrested on 4 March, have been censored in Iran after launching online campaigns backing a change in women’s status.

List of journalists currently held in Evin:
Asieh Amini, journalist and blogger (http://varesh.blogfa.com/)
Jila Bani Yaghoub, journalist, Sarmayeh and http://www.irwomen.com/
Mahbubeb Abbasgholizadeh, journalist
Mahbubeh Hosseinzadeh, journalist and blogger (http://kharzar.blogfa.com/)
Zara Amjadian, online journalist (http://www.we4change.com)
Mariam Hossein Khah, online journalist (we4change)
Jelveh Javaheri, online journalist (we4change)
Zeinab Peyghambarzadeh, journalist and blogger
Maryam Mirza, journalist and blogger
Nahid Keshavarz, online journalist (we4change and zenestan)
Nasrin Afzali, journalist and blogger
Elnaz Ansari, online journalist (we4change and zenestan)
Fatemeh Govarayee, journalist
Minoo Mortezayee, journaliste
Nushin Ahmadi Khorasani, journalist
Parvin Ardalan, journalist
Nahid Jafari, online journalist (we4change)
Shadi Sadr, journalist and lawyer