{"id":57238,"date":"2015-05-04T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-05-04T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=57238"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:24:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:24:42","slug":"a-century-of-women-working-for-peace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/a-century-of-women-working-for-peace\/","title":{"rendered":"A Century of Women Working for Peace"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Amy<\/a>

Amy Goodman<\/p><\/div>\n

THE HAGUE, Netherlands\u2014One hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, in these very violent times, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, saying \u201cNo\u201d to wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Syria, not to mention the wars in our streets at home. They were marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of WILPF, the Women\u2019s International League for Peace and Freedom. Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist who co-founded the group a century ago, said the purpose of the original gathering in 1915 was to empower women \u201cto protest against war and to suggest steps which may lead to warfare being an impossibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the women here were four Nobel Peace Prize winners. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the prize in 2003 for advocating for human rights for Iranian women, children and political prisoners. She was the first Muslim woman, and the first Iranian, to receive a Nobel. Nevertheless, she has lived in exile since 2009, and has only seen her husband once since then. \u201cHad books been thrown at people, at the Taliban, instead of bombs, and had schools been built in Afghanistan,\u201d Ebadi said in her keynote address to the WILPF conference this week, \u201c3,000 schools could have been built in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9\/11\u2014at this time, we wouldn\u2019t have had ISIS. Let\u2019s not forget that the roots of the ISIS rest in the Taliban.\u201d She was joined by her sister laureates Leymah Gbowee, who helped achieve a negotiated peace during the civil wars in Liberia; Mairead Maguire, who won the peace prize in 1976 at the age of 32 for advancing an end to the conflict in her native Northern Ireland; and Jody Williams, a Vermonter who led the global campaign to ban land mines, and who now is organizing to ban \u201ckiller robots,\u201d weapons that kill automatically, without the active participation of a human controller.<\/p>\n

These four world-renowned Nobel laureates were joined by nearly a thousand deeply committed peace activists from around the globe. Madeleine Rees, the secretary-general of WILPF, recalled the history of the first gathering in 1915, and how it was organized: \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have happened, but for the suffrage movement,\u201d she told me, \u201cbecause you don\u2019t just start a mass movement. You actually have to have an organizational structure to make that happen. That had started with the suffragette movement. … Every single one of those women who went to The Hague … were demanding the right to vote. They saw, quite rightly, that the absence of women in making decisions in government meant a greater likelihood of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kozue Akibayashi is WILPF\u2019s new president. After World War II, the U.S. required that Japan\u2019s Constitution explicitly forbid it from pursuing war to settle disputes with foreign states. \u201cThe majority of people in Japan support the peace constitution,\u201d Akibayashi explained. President Barack Obama, however, like George W. Bush before him, is pressuring Japan to eliminate the pacifistic Article Nine from the Japanese Constitution. He hosted Japan\u2019s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in Washington this week, celebrating Abe as he works to restore Japan\u2019s military to its former offensive capacity. Akibayashi and thousands of others also are protesting the planned expansion of the U.S. military presence on Okinawa.<\/p>\n

Africa activist Hakima Abbas was also in The Hague. I interviewed her hours after mass graves were reported in Nigeria, containing victims of the militant group Boko Haram. The story of Boko Haram, she told me, \u201cis an intersection with violent Islamist fundamentalisms, with global capitalism and with militarization … fundamentalisms, though, don\u2019t start and end with Islamic fundamentalisms in Africa. We\u2019ve seen Christian fundamentalisms in Uganda, and the persecution of LGBTQI people.\u201d She then made a connection to the street protests in Baltimore this week: \u201cIn your own country,\u201d she told me, \u201cthe white supremacist and Christian right fundamentalisms are exacerbated by the gun culture and the promotion of an armed police force, which is killing black women, men, trans people and children. … So fundamentalisms is really something that we have to address globally.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Shirin Ebadi if she had advice for the people of the world. She replied with a simple yet powerful prescription for peace, laying out the work for WILPF as it enters its second century: \u201cTreat the people of Afghanistan the same as you treat your own people. Look at Iraqi children the same as you look at your own children. Then you will see that the solution is there.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.<\/em><\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of <\/em>Democracy Now!, a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of <\/em>The Silenced Majority, a New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

(c) 2015 Amy Goodman. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}