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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Friday, July 31, 2009
Activists Aim Toward Nuclear-Free World
By Polly Summar
Journal Staff Writer
They may not have everyone on their side, but peace activists who would like to eradicate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth say they now have a very powerful ally.
“We support (President Barack) Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world,” said the Rev. John Dear of Santa Fe this week, a Jesuit priest whose Web site said he has been arrested over 75 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience for peace. Dear served as pastor of several parishes in northeastern New Mexico from 2002 to 2004.
To get the word out and to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pax Christi New Mexico — a regional arm of the national Catholic peace organization — has put together two days of events in Santa Fe and Los Alamos. A highlight is the appearance of two Nobel Peace Prize winners to speak in both towns today and Saturday.
The two are Jody Williams — who won the 1997 prize for her work to ban land mines around the world — and Mairead Corrigan Maguire — who won the 1976 prize after organizing the largest peace demonstrations in the history of Northern Ireland after her relatives were killed on the streets of Belfast.
“They are paying their own way, and they're paving the way” to make a difference,” said Dear. “They're saying, 'We're coming here on our own to support local grass roots activism in our campaign to disarm Los Alamos.'”
The two will speak at 7 p.m. today at a free event for the public at the Santa Fe Convention Center, and at 4 p.m. Saturday at Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, following a procession and prayer vigil that's part of Pax Christi's Annual “Sackcloth and Ashes” Peace Vigil.
“We're taking up the story from the book of Jonah where the people of Ninevah sat in sackcloth and ashes to repent of their violence,” said Dear, explaining that those who attend the event will walk through the streets of Los Alamos and also sit for a half hour in silent prayer.
Dear said the peace supporters don't go to Los Alamos to point fingers. “We're going to say, 'We're all taking responsibility for the horrible predicament we're in, for these immoral weapons,'” Dear said. “We are publicly saying, 'We are sorry we have developed this nuclear arsenal and we want to get rid of them.'”
In an interview Thursday in Santa Fe, Williams said banning nuclear weapons is no more impossible than banning land mines. “In 1992, I went down to the United Nations in New York because that's where all the diplomats were,” Williams said. “We had 52 cents in the budget.”
Williams had started her campaign in 1991 when the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and a humanitarian group in Germany asked her if she thought she could create a political campaign to ban land mines.
“Every single person I met with from the different embassies ... said, 'Lovely idea — it's never going to happen,'” recalled Williams. “Five years later, we had a treaty banning land mines.”
Williams said the same thing happened with banning cluster bombs, which was a more difficult task. “Those weapons were considered tactical and useful,” she said, but added that the campaign against cluster bombs was successful, too — launched in November 2003, with a treaty completed in May 2008.
“We're not trying to say that cluster bombs and land mines are like nuclear weapons,” Williams said. “But they do share a quality of being indiscriminate, meaning they can't tell the difference between a soldier and a civilian.”
Now teaching at the University of Houston, Williams holds the endowed chair in global justice. She was in Santa Fe two years ago to speak at the World Peace Conference.
Williams is hopeful about the two-day event and the prospects of banning nuclear weapons internationally. “Just worrying about something isn't going to change the world,” she said. “But people can succeed if they take action and work together.... As citizens, we don't just have rights, we have responsibilities.”
She cited the results of her initial land mine campaign. “We grew from two organizations and me to 1,300 organizations in 90 countries,” said Williams. She explained that, while many of those organizations — like Human Rights Watch and UNICEF — work on a large variety of issues, the campaign managed to get people in each of those organizations to focus on the goal of banning land mines, too.
With the nuclear weapons situation, Williams said Obama's interest in ridding the world of them is crucial. “We really are at a critical moment of incredible possibility,” she said. “If this moment is lost, it's going to be extremely difficult to recreate it....”
“Change happens not because you want it to happen, but because you make it happen.”
Witness for Peace
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