Female Nobel Laureates call for an end to the Rohingya genocide

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Nobel Women Peace Laureates Call for an End to Rohingya Genocide

by Maurizio

07.03.2018 - Dhaka, Bangladesh - TRANSCEND Media Service

Nobel Women Peace Laureates Call for an End to Rohingya Genocide

Visiting women Nobel laureates Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Shirin Ebadi of Iran met with Prime Minister #SheikhHasina

As three Nobel peace laureates—Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland – conclude their visit to Bangladesh on the six-month anniversary of the current Rohingya crisis, the three women are calling for an immediate end to the “genocide” of the Rohingya people.

This week, the three women Laureates ­––in partnership with Bangladesh women’s organization Naripokkho­­––spent time listening to stories, meeting over 100 women refugees in the Cox’s Bazar area, and travelling to “no man’s land”, where thousands of Rohingya have been stranded between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

After hearing testimonies describing how security forces burned villages, tortured, killed and systematically raped women and girls—as well as reports from humanitarian organizations and UN officials—the Laureates concluded that the on-going attacks on the Rohingya of Rakhine State amount to crimes against humanity and genocide.

The Laureates are calling on Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar military to put an end to the killings and the persecution of the Rohingya people.

“She must stop turning a deaf ear to the persecution of the Rohingya or risk being complicit in the crimes,” said Tawakkol Karman. “Wake up or face prosecution.”

As women committed to peace, the Laureates are urging Aung San Suu Kyi to exercise her personal and moral responsibility stop the genocide. “If she fails to do so, her choice is clear: resign or be held accountable, along with the army commanders, for the crimes committed” added Karman.

The Laureates heard how Rohingya women have been twice victimized: for being Rohingyas and for being women. They described stories of horrific violence and systematic mass rape.

“My 18-year old daughter had her breasts cut off and she died,” a Rohingya woman in the Thyankhali camp told the Nobel peace laureates.

“My baby was only 1-year and 6-months old. The military tore her from my arms and slaughtered her in front of me,” said a Rohingya survivor of rape. She then passed around a photo she had of her child. She wanted everyone to see her little girl.

The laureates heard stories of children being thrown into fires and drowned in rivers. They heard stories of houses and complete villages being burned to the ground and children being shot while running to the forest to seek shelter and safety.

“The torture, rape and killing of any one member of our human family must be challenged, as in the case of the Rohingya genocide,” said Mairead Maguire. “Silence is complicity.”

The Nobel peace laureates were impressed by the strength and resilience of the women who had survived such horrific crimes. One woman at the Thyankhali camp told them, “Why should we feel shame? We were tortured. We don’t need to feel shame about that.”
Another woman at Camp Kutupalong said, “We are not afraid of anything. We want our stories to be told.”

The Laureates are calling for the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court.

“With over a million Rohingya displaced, countless dead or missing, and rape and sexual violence being used as a weapon of war, it is well past the time for the international community to act,” said Shirin Ebadi.

The Laureates met with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, government officials, human rights organizations and humanitarian agencies. They extended their thanks to Prime Minister Hasina and to both the Government and the people of Bangladesh for their exemplary acts of compassion for the Rohingya refugees.

The Laureates also expressed deep appreciation to the Bangladeshi government and to the various humanitarian agencies that have met the extra-ordinary challenge of setting up the Refugee and Relocation Camps for over one million Rohingya refugees.

As a result of their visit to Bangladesh, the Nobel Laureates are calling for:

• An immediate end to the genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine, and an order to the Myanmar military to immediately stop all acts of sexual violence.

• Justice for Rohingya victims: perpetrators of crimes must be brought to justice through the International Criminal Court (ICC).

• Bangladesh, as the only country in South Asia to have ratified the Rome Statute, should, along with other states parties, the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council, refer the case to the ICC.

• Alternatively, the ICC Prosecutor should open an independent investigation into crimes against humanity and genocide perpetrated in Rakhine State.

• A voluntary, safe and dignified return. There should be no forced repatriation. When Rohingya do return to Rakhine State, they should be offered security and be granted full citizenship.

• The government of Myanmar to take immediate action to address the systematic discrimination of the Rohingya in Rakhine State, and ensure the Rohingya's right to nationality, land ownership, freedom of movement and other fundamental rights.

• A comprehensive arms embargo on Myanmar to ensure that there are no sales of weapons or other military equipment.

• The international community to increase its support to Bangladesh’s humanitarian response.

• Bangladesh to ratify the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, as a major step to give protection to refugees and set an example in South Asia.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.

The original article can be found on our partner's website here

Maurizio | March 7, 2018 at 11:06 am | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/pqqtS-Ol

Peacemakers invade an American defence facility in Australia and stand trial

An American Spy Base Hidden in Australia’s Outback

The Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, photographed in 2014. Born at the height of the Cold War, the base near the town of Alice Springs was originally presented to the Australian public as a space research facility. Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

By JACKIE DENT

November 23, 2017

ALICE SPRINGS, Australia — Margaret Pestorius arrived at court last week in her wedding dress, a bright orange-and-cream creation painted with doves, peace signs and suns with faces.

“It’s the colors of Easter, so I always think of it as being a resurrection dress,” said Ms. Pestorius, a 53-year-old antiwar activist and devout Catholic, who on Friday was convicted of trespassing at a top-secret military base operated by the United States and hidden in the Australian outback.

From the base, known as the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, the United States controls satellites that gather information used to pinpoint airstrikes around the world and target nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks, according to experts and leaked National Security Agency documents.

As a result, the facility, dotted with satellite dishes and isolated in the desert, has become a magnet for Australian antiwar protesters. Over the past two weeks, Ms. Pestorius and five other Christian demonstrators were convicted in two separate trials of breaching the site’s security perimeter last year. They could face seven years in prison.

Margaret Pestorius, a 53-year-old Catholic peace activist, was arrested last year for trespassing at Pine Gap. The base’s role in U.S. military operations has made it a magnet for antiwar protesters. David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

“In terms of actions like this, it’s pretty basic: We are called to love our enemies,” said Jim Dowling, 62, a member of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement who was one of the protesters. “Do good to those who persecute you. To turn the other cheek. Put up our swords. All the teachings of Jesus on nonviolence.”

The trials — and the Australian government’s uncompromising prosecution of the protesters — has put a spotlight on a facility that the United States would prefer remain in the shadows.

Born at the height of the Cold War, Pine Gap was presented to the Australian public in 1966 as a space research facility. But behind the scenes, the station was run by the C.I.A. to collect information from American spy satellites about the Soviet Union’s missile program.

Since then, American spies, engineers, cryptologists and linguists have flocked to Alice Springs, the small town closest to the base, to work at the facility. At least 599 Americans lived there in 2016, according to the latest census. Though their presence in town is low-key, there are some telltale signs: a baseball diamond at a local sports complex, Oreo cookies and Dr Pepper in the supermarket, and beef brisket on sale at a butcher shop.

“Americans, from the time they came here, have never been isolated from the rest of the community,” said Damien Ryan, the mayor of Alice Springs, who could remember a time when Americans in left-hand-drive cars were frequently seen on the town’s roads. “They’ve been part of the community the whole time.”

A satellite image of Pine Gap from October. Inside the white spheres, called radomes, are antenna systems that send and receive information from dozens of satellites.

TerraServer / DigitalGlobe

The base is reached by a dead-end road, marked with a sign warning away visitors. Without clearance, the only way to see Pine Gap is by air, or by climbing the craggy ridges of the MacDonnell Ranges that surround the site.

Photos taken from the air show a sprawling campus punctuated by white geodesic domes that look like giant golf balls. Inside these spheres, called radomes, are antenna systems that send and receive information from satellites in constant orbit above the earth.

The staff at Pine Gap was predominantly American until the 1980s, when the two governments, responding in part to public pressure here, made it about half Australian. Today, more than 800 people from both countries are believed to work at the base. But the United States is firmly in control.

“Pine Gap has changed and developed enormously,” said Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and honorary Melbourne University professor who has investigated and criticized the base for years.

In documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the American intelligence contractor turned whistle-blower, Pine Gap is described as playing “a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations.”

Defendants with supporters this month in Alice Springs, where their trials were held. 

The proceedings have put a spotlight on a facility that the United States 

would prefer remained in the shadows. 

David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

What that actually means, Professor Tanter said, is that the station is involved in real-time contributions to the United States’ global military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap, he added, also “contributes data for C.I.A. drone operations in countries in which the United States is not at war — Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so forth. It is also critically important in whatever the United States is going to do on the Korean Peninsula.”

Professor Tanter has gleaned information about the secret site from unexpected public records, including the LinkedIn profiles of Pine Gap contractors and satellite photos that reveal new construction at the site.

Professor Tanter, who is president of the Australian board of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, said he wanted the government to “make a very clearheaded assessment” of whether it is in Australia’s best interest to contribute data for drone assassinations and targeting nuclear weapons.

Other experts, however, said that hosting a base like Pine Gap helps maintain the country’s alliance with the United States, and that other partners of the Americans carry considerably larger burdens.

The defendant Jim Dowling, 62, of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement, appeared in court barefoot. “In terms of actions like this, it’s pretty basic: We are called to love our enemies,” he said of the protest at Pine Gap last year. 

David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

Australians are “not doing a lot of things that our allies are doing,” including permanently hosting American nuclear weapons and soldiers, said Stephan Frühling, a professor at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center of the Australian National University.

Last year, in the early hours of a cold, dark September morning, Ms. Pestorius, Mr. Dowling and three other “peace pilgrims,” as they call themselves, breached Pine Gap’s security perimeter.

As the activists scrambled up a rocky hill to get closer to the base, and with the police moving in, Ms. Pestorius picked up her viola. Another protester strummed his guitar. As they played a lament for those killed in war, Mr. Dowling held up a large, laminated photograph showing a bloodied young woman with her foot missing.

A sixth activist, Paul Christie, 44, carried out his own protest at Pine Gap days later; he was tried separately and convicted last week, charged, like the others, with entering a prohibited area. During the activists’ back-to-back trials this month, a modest band of supporters gathered at the courthouse. Many were members of the country’s antiwar movement, parts of which are religion-infused.

A Quaker knitted flower brooches. A Buddhist brewed coffee from the back of his van. A collection of colourful banners tied to fences read “Close Pine Gap” and “End the U.S. Alliance and Pine Gap Terror Base.”

The base is reached by a dead-end road, marked with a sign warning visitors away. David Maurice Smith for The New York Times

Mr. Dowling, who said he had been arrested between 50 and 100 times, was found guilty once before of trespassing at Pine Gap, in 2005. The conviction was later overturned.

One of his co-defendants this time was his 20-year-old son Franz, the guitar player at the protest last year. The younger Mr. Dowling and two other defendants — Andrew Paine, 31, and Timothy Webb, 23 — live together in a Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Brisbane, where they regularly take in homeless people.

All five were found guilty of entering a prohibited area, and Mr. Paine was convicted of an additional charge of possessing a photographic device.

During their trial, the five — who acted as their own attorneys — tried to argue that they had acted in the defense of others, but Justice John Reeves did not allow it.

Pine Gap has “to bear a big responsibility for all the murder and mayhem that has taken place in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Jim Dowling, who appeared in court barefoot.

Mr. Dowling seemed unperturbed by how few activists had traveled to remote Alice Springs to support him and the other defendants.

“There’s not a huge number engaged in nonviolent resistance in the name of their faith, but numbers don’t matter, do they?” he said. “Just follow your conscience, you know?”

     Source from the New York Times: 

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/world/australia/pine-gap-spy-base-protests.html?referer=https%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FmikWG6gdG9%3Famp%3D1

         

Building a world of peace.

Golden Words by Peace Ambassador of present era Mr @ManHeeLeePeace ..@hwpl_nl @hwpl6chicago @HWPL_ZA pic.twitter.com/vgMriiXxNe

— Syed.K.I. Zabiuddin (@rafay06) March 14, 2016

Quaker Bonnets & The Historic Peace Testimony versus Modern Military Warfare

Not a lot is known, up close and personal, in Australia about the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia.  The main cause of this is that there aren't many of them/us. About 3000 people identified as Quakers at the last census.  This came as a bit of surprise - because the most knowledgable Friends (as Quakers prefer to be called), as well as the records of Friends, could only account for somewhat over 1,000.  For those who know about Quakers, there is usually one stand-out factor - they are pacifists and active campaigners for peace.  Please go here to learn more of The Quaker Peace Testimony.  Quakers also keenly maintain their history with women in many places taking to needle and thread in preservation of the Quaker story.  The Editor of Beside The Creek can testify personally to the needlework and design skills of Tessa.  The event to which Helen refers is the Shoalwater Bay Peace Convergence 2015 which coincides with and is a protest against Exercise Talisman Saber 2015.

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Helen Bayes

Shared publicly  -  10:23

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours with my dear Friend Tessa Spratt mending our Quaker bonnets in preparation for the quakergrannies4peace witness at Shoalwater Bay, next month. Tessa's bonnet has a note inside the brim that it was made in 1860 and it is all hand-stitched. Mine is machine chainstitched and probably dates around 1880s. You can be sure they will be worn with joy at actions in Rockhampton and Shoalwater Bay.

2015-06-23

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Creative Ministries Network and Antony McMullen, its new Director

Re-posted from Crosslight

Working creatively

BY DEB.BENNETT ⋅ SEPTEMBER 1, 2013 ⋅ POST A COMMENT

To say Antony McMullen, newly appointed director of Creative Ministries Network (CMN), is passionate about justice in the workplace would be something of an understatement. As a social justice officer with the synod’s Justice and International Mission (JIM) unit, his work often covered areas such as workplace reform for those in some of society’s most undervalued occupations, such as cleaners.

“Work takes up such a large part of our lives and sometimes things can go terribly wrong,” Mr McMullen said.

“It’s not always a matter of pointing the finger; that’s what excites me about the restorative justice approach of CMN. We can see when relationships break down that focussing on people’s faults and solely dealing with things through formal systems may not always be the best way forward; although sometimes it is unavoidable.”

Mr McMullen said he will draw heavily on lessons learnt during his five years with the JIM unit, particularly when he was tasked with examining the criminal justice system.

Please go here to read more

You can follow Antony on Twitter at @antonymcmullen