SUMMER 1999

Profit-driven social plans are rarely friendly to women. Of the economics disguised as social planning in the modern world (globalization, the prison industrial complex), beyond a doubt, the single greatest threat to women and everyone else is the military industrial complex which still drives so much of the world economy. Where there are excess weapons, armed conflict is almost inevitable.

Since the 1870s, women have gathered into organizations to oppose the economic and so-called patriotic impulses that marched men into war. Poet and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, perhaps best known as the composer of the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, created Mother’s Day as a protest against the US Civil War. (Short biography available at who2.com/juliawardhowe.html)
Howe wrote, in part,

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!

Anticipating the First World War, suffragists reached out to one another across the Atlantic Ocean, in an effort to find peaceful solutions. According to the history at www.wilpf.org

"On April 28, 1915, more than 1,000 women from warring and neutral nations met in an International Congress that suffragists organized in The Hague, Netherlands World War I to work out a plan to end WWI and lay the basis for a permanent peace. Out of this meeting the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was born.”

WILPF went on to win two Nobel Peace Prizes and became one of the 42 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that served as consultants to the U.N. founding conference in San Francisco in April of 1945—a role that continues to this day.

WILPF has never forgotten its origins in the suffragist movement. It emphasizes that racial, gender and social justice are essential elements to peace. Therefore, the organization maps out longterm strategies on all those fronts. At the same time, WILPF responds to current events as well, including the War on Drugs, against US sanctions and bombing of Iraq, sanctions against Cuba, involvement with Colombia, and the School of the Americas.

With the military action in Kosovo, WILPF condemned ethnic cleansing but stressed that bombing is no solution:

“The interests of U.S. arms manufacturers are intimately tied to the expansion of NATO as the policeman of the European continent and beyond. Therefore, the world’s citizens are treated to advertisements for U.S. stealth bombers and other weapons displayed minute by minute on the international billboard supplied by CNN. We deplore the use of space satellites to direct bombs to their targets that is accelerating the militarization of space.”

A close ally of WILPF is the Canadian Voice of Women, with a full agenda described in a bare-bones website at www.interlog.com/~vow/ . VOW began with a spontaneous mass meeting in the early 1960s, to protest against nuclear weapons, and has maintained Canadian women’s presence in the global peace movement ever since.

WILPF offers a list of links to other resources, which you can find at www.wilpf.org/programs/statements/kosovostatement.htm .

Two very good websites are the Center for Defense Information at cdi.org and The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research at http://www.transnational.org/ .
Founded and operated mainly by former military personnel (including some generals and admirals) CDI’s missions statement includes:
“CDI seeks realistic and cost effective military spending without excess expenditures for weapons and policies that increase the danger of war.” With their knowledge of military logic, CDI published a paper in June 1998, arguing that NATO must not intervene in Kosovo by itself – that only the UN could authorise such an intervention.

The Nordic Transnational Foundation is run by the wife-and-husband team of Christina Spännar and Jan Øberg. The website features a colourful, abstract logo with this explanation:
“TFF is an independent, small and innovative force for peace. We see conflict-resolution as science, art and politics in one. Thus, you’ll find science, art and politics on these pages.”
Jan Øberg was one of the few commentators who immediately rejected the Rambouillet Accord as hollow.

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting at www.iwpr.net offers informed commentary from dissident reporters within Serbia and Kosovo. In a conflict fought as much through propaganda as with missiles, where NATO’s news releases often seem contradictory, and Serb news releases paint an entirely different picture from NATO, it can be useful to have a third set of opinions.

One message that comes across clearly in IWPR reports is the environmental effects of NATO’s bombing. When oil refineries and storage areas explode into flames, does that increase global warming? Intuition would say yes, but nobody seems to be tracking the effects. When chemical and fertilizer factories burn, where do the toxins go? IWPR worries. NATO ignores the question.

Most of all, evidence is mounting that US Tomahawk missiles and armour-piercing bullets are tipped with Depleted Uranium. DU is an extremely hard and durable metal, but despite the “depleted” name, it is still radioactive, with a half life of 4.4 billion years. When DU explodes, it bursts into radioactive dust and fragments. Since the Gulf War, the sharply increased incidence of cancers and birth defects in Iraq has been blamed on DU that weapons scattered there during the war. The Persian Gulf War Veterans website has a couple of pages of information about DU, starting at www.idir.net/~krogers/duupdate.html .

Former US Attorney-General Ramsay Clark issued a report titled, “Metal of Dishonor”, and an international appeal to ban the use of DU in weapons. Both of these articles are archived at www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm .

While you’re there, click on “Home” and visit the International Action Center at www.iacenter.org
The IAC continues to report on Iraq as well as Kosovo, and connects those military actions with US domestic policies such as the incarceration of Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. The website is ideological, heavy on polemics and skimpy with gender analysis; yet it offers very useful material, notably Ramsay Clark’s speeches and reports. There’s also an anti-DU statement from Women Strike for Peace, an anti-nuclear organization founded in 1961 to press for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Alas, the Electronic Witches who broke new ground by facilitating communications among women on both sides of the conflict during the Serbian-Croatian conflict, do not seem to have updated any of their websites since 1996. Another important women’s peace group, Women In Black, has fallen silent in Belgrade, although other chapters still participate in demonstrations around Europe (especially) and report through email. Mindful of Serbian atrocities in the past–especially mass rapes–they reject all forms of violence in Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Peace Magazine featured the Toronto WIB on its May-June cover, posted at its website, www.peacemagazine.org/
Peace Mag articles often address women’s issues with regard to peace and war. The March/April issue carried a report on the Women In Conflict Zones project.

Canada’s own unique Project Ploughshares has a website at www.ploughshares.ca/.

The name is of course taken from the Biblical parable about beating spears into pruning hooks, and swords into plows. Ploughshares offers a “20 Minutes Peace Workout” every month, for quick and focused action, as well as the monthly Monitor, and various working papers and briefs. Its premises include: “Excessive global military spending continues to rob the world of resources desperately needed to build the social and economic conditions necessary for stable peace.” Ploughshares Canada has also assembled a valuable selection of links to peace groups.

A completely different organization with a similar name is also worth a visit. The Ploughshares Fund at www.ploughshares.org/ provides small and large grants to peace organizations worldwide. The list of groups that have received grants in recent years includes Women Strike for Peace and an eye-opening array of other organizations.

In September 1999, the United Nations kicks off its biggest anti-weapon push yet: The International Year for the Culture of Peace (2000), which in turn begins The International Decade of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World. Since the Decade celebrates children, the One Day Foundation website for youth, at www.oneday.org/ offers suggestions ranging from lesson plans to an entire play about peace.

In addition, the UN hopes to collect 100 million signatures on a pledge to promote peace, equitable and sustainable development, and social justice. This pledge is online in six languages, at manifesto2000.unesco.org/.

Perhaps the most ambitious website is at www.worldpeace2000.org/. It aims to co-ordinate all the participating groups–more than one thousand so far, in 130 countries–keeping all informed of one another’s plans. This last site offers freebies ranging from printout stickers for youngsters, to banners for webweavers, as well as fund raisers such as candles, flags, bumper stickers and picture books.

The armaments industry is enormous and still has the potential to destroy the world accidentally, even though the Cold War is supposed to be over. Yet public opinion can indeed force governments to negotiate disarmament: the ground-breaking treaty banning anti-personnel land mines is only the most recent example. With the aid of the Internet, the United Nations might yet harness public revulsion to wars and weapon, and make the new millennium the beginning of a weapons-free, nuclear-free economy.