Tag: China

Crimson soil: A forgotten struggle (Part 1)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author, San’aa Sultan

Between the folds of two nuclear states lies a valley of forsaken people whose struggle is yet to be told beyond its borders. Kashmir. A place where the crimson soil is still screaming to be heard.

Barbed wire in Kashmir
Hazratbal Srinagar Kashmir. Photo by Abdul Basit, used by permission.

Although the land is shared amongst India, Pakistan, and China, regions of peace and war are easy to identify. The Indian occupied Kashmir comprising the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, and Jammu, is home to the world’s highest concentration of troops. There are more Indian troops positioned here than NATO troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

At the hands of this brutal presence, the people of Kashmir have suffered oppression for many decades, spreading far beyond the separation of India. In the name of national security and what may be described as India’s self-prescribed “War of Terror,” the worlds’ largest democracy has continued to perpetrate unimaginable human rights abuses in Kashmir.

The names of Aasiya and Neelofar, two ill-fated young Kashmiri women who were gang raped and murdered are known across the valley. The families of eight year old Sameer Ahmed Rah who was beaten to death by Indian forces and 17 year-old Tufail Matoo who was killed after being hit by a tear gas canister have not yet tasted justice. Mass graves are still being uncovered, but the glimmer of hope in the homes of the disappeared lives on despite its painful embrace.

Torturous memories are left lingering in the mind of every Kashmiri and there is no household which has not been subject to abuse. As tensions rise along the Line of Control and the world anticipates a nuclear war, I wish to narrate to you the story of Kashmir.

A living tapestry of peace and reconciliation (Part 2)

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Alan O’Hare, a Seanchie (Celtic storyteller)

Rossville Street, Derry Peace mural
Mural in Derry, Northern Ireland. Image used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As you reflect upon the visions of peace and reconciliation presented in this blog, I invite you to co-create a living tapestry that celebrates the voices of peace activists and serves as a beacon for others.

Focus now on the center of this limitless tapestry, where visitors from across the ages are eavesdropping on the conversations of teachers of peace. In their midst is a floating multidimensional puzzle that pairs of participants work on together.

What a meditative gathering it becomes as Thich Nhat Hanh, Elise Boulding, and Bishop Tutu move gently and playfully among the guests, offering pieces of the puzzle that have fallen to the floor.

As a band of international roving musicians begin playing, Nelson Mandela joins hands with Aung San Suu Kyi and invites other guests to join their dance of celebration and reflection. In moments, a circle of once-alienated sisters and brothers are singing so joyfully that puzzle solvers stop and join in.

On the rooftop is the entrance to an endless museum of art, co-created by prisoners of war and oppression, celebrating the human dream and spirit. In this world of peace, reconciliation, and harmony, standing alone in a corner are remnants of violence inside a dumpster. They await conversion into mulch for growing new forms of learning, creating, and healing. These remnants include photos, drawings, and scrapings of:

  • Fenced-in, starving prisoners from an endless corridor of concentration camps
  • Bombed-out images from Rwanda, Hiroshima, Dresden, Vietnam, China, and more others than can ever be counted
  • Endless reams of plans and designs for weapons of destruction, cruelty and subjugation

From all of these terrifying remnants, we are reminded once again of the tragic, dehumanizing echoes of the past that can move us to learn new ways to be or not to be with one another.

Is this vision realistic, possible, or even desirable? The mission of the griots and other storytellers is to bear witness to the voices of the past and to move us to search among the endless possibilities for a more loving future.

We hope you will join us in pursuing a path to world peace and reconciliation. Please share your stories and dreams at engagingpeace.com.

Alan O’Hare, LifeStoryTheatre.org

Syria: Even fainter hope

Posted on by kathiemm

By guest author Mike Corgan

Map of Syria
Image in public domain

The tragic course of violence in Syria, falling mostly as it usually does on women and children, highlights the limitations of the United Nations as a means of peaceful conflict resolution in the world.

Even at its best, the UN can only do in situations like the Syrian civil war what the Security Council allows, and that body is set to stop action rather than take it.

The best analogy of the Security Council is that of a circuit breaker. It shuts down anything that is too big for the system to handle. The idea is that if any of the five permanent members (P5) really don’t want an action, then taking it would likely cause a more widespread and destructive situation.

Right now China and Russia are both balking at anything more than admonitions to Syria for what the Assad regime is doing to its own people. Neither country, each with its own restive and sometime violent Muslim minorities in Central Asia, wants any kind of precedent-setting UN response that promotes intervention in internal state conflict, however bloody and barbaric.

Russia has the additional motivation of not wishing to be seen as weak because it abandons a decades-long client state.

Who else could intervene? NATO is withdrawing forces from both Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as it can. Trying to set the house in order for another Middle Eastern state is not on any member’s agenda.

The ratio of Arab League rhetoric to action is nearly infinite.

Israel can only watch and hope. Geopolitically speaking, a fractious Syria on its border is a positive thing–but one sunk into chaos is not.

And even if some outside power did step in to stop the massacres, the aftermath of regime change now evident in other Arab states like Libya and Egypt is not at all encouraging.

It is the inevitably depressing commentary on humankind that perhaps only exhaustion of one or both of the combatants will end the killing. Inspired leadership by someone, anyone, could also be the answer but, alas, that is an even fainter hope.

Michael T. Corgan, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Department of International Relations, Boston University

No causes to kill for

Posted on by kathiemm
Gandhi in 1944
Gandhi in 1944 (Image in public domain)

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”     (Mahatma Gandhi, The story of my experiments with truth, 1927)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, often known as Mahatma (“Great Soul” in Sanskrit) was born October 2, 1869. In 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution to create an International Day of Non-Violence on October 2 to commemorate his birthday.

In anticipation of his birthday, we provide a list of some of the relatively recent non-violent movements and their goals:

  • Martin Luther King’s campaign in the 1960s to achieve his dream: “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal'”
  • Anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s and 1980s—for example, at the Montague Nuclear Plant site where the actions of one man, Sam Lovejoy, led to cancellation of plans for a nuclear power plant
  • The Chinese pro-democracy movement of 1987-1989, most memorable for the protests in Tiananmen Square
  • The end of apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s
  • The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2010 and 2011
  • The current demonstrations against economic and political control of the United States by Wall Street

To start a non-violent campaign of your own, you may find the steps offered in this document helpful.

Non-violence can achieve results.

Some wonderful examples can be found in the book A force more powerful: A century of non-violent conflict by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology