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WHAT'S NEW IN INES? |
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No. 4/2003 |
Dateline: March 6, 2003 |
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This is the weekly electronic information service of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility
Editor: Tobias Damjanov, e-mail:
WNII is archived at: http://inesglobal.org/archive.htm
INES homepages: http://inesglobal.org http://www.inesglobal.com/
INES International Office
INES Chair: Prof. Armin Tenner [Please note that the first "1" in q18 is the number one, while the last "l" is an "L"]
CONTENTS of WNII No. 4/2003
MEMBERSHIP AND PROJECTS' NEWS
"IPB News" March 2003 issue available
The March 2003 issue of "IPB News", the member magazine of the International Peace Bureau, is now available at: http://www.ipb.org/web/seccion.php?tipus=Publications-Newsletter
From the contents:
Russia: Socio-Ecological Union: "The SEU TIMES" issues 6&7 2003
The Sunflower, March 2003, No. 70
The March 2003 issue of The Sunflower covers the following:
THE US POLICY ON IRAQ
(SPECIAL SECTION)
Secret document details US plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members (Source: The Observer (British daily), 2 March 03)
The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq. Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.
The disclosures were made in a memorandum dated 31 January and written by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section at the National Security Agency - the US body which intercepts communications around the world - and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.
The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.
David Krieger: Five Ways to Stop War
The way things stand war is too easy. It is too easy to send someone else’s children to fight and die. It is too easy to dehumanize the enemy, making people believe, for example, that all children of Iraq wear the face of Saddam Hussein. It is too easy for leaders to commit egregious crimes under international law, including the crime of aggression, and not pay the price as did the Axis leaders at Nuremberg.
It’s time to change the rules so that those who wage war, particularly illegal war, will have appropriate consequences. It’s time to end the double standards, and to replace might makes right with the rule of law. It’s time to demand that our leaders find peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Here are five simple ways in which war could be stopped in its tracks.
1. Require the leaders who promote and support war to personally participate in the hostilities. This would provide a critical threshold of personal commitment to war by requiring some actual personal sacrifice of leaders.
2. Show the faces and tell the stories of the children of the “enemy” until we can feel the pain of their deaths as though they were the deaths of our own children. It is much more difficult to slaughter an enemy who one recognizes as being part of the human family.
3. Give full support to the establishment of an International Criminal Court so that national leaders can be tried for all egregious war crimes at the end of any hostilities. All leaders who commit egregious crimes must be held to account under international law as they were at Nuremberg, and they must be aware of this from the outset.
4. Impeach any elected leaders who promote or support illegal, preventive war, what was described at the Nuremberg Trials as an “aggressive” war. It is the responsibility of citizens in a democracy to exercise control over their leaders who threaten to commit crimes under international law, and impeachment provides an important tool to achieve this control.
5. Rise up as a people and demand that one’s government follow its Constitution, cut off funding for war and find a way to peace. US citizens must demand that Congress not give away or allow the president to usurp its sole authority under the Constitution to make the decision to go to war. Citizens should also demand that Congress exercise its power of the purse to prevent war, including not giving financial support to a president attempting to bribe other countries to participate in an illegal war.
Statement by U. S. Economists on Iraq
Sponsored by the US-based INES member organisation Economists Allied for Arms Reductions, over 100 U.S. economists, including seven Nobel laureates have released a statement on 4 March, with which they "oppose unilateral initiatives for war against Iraq, which we see as unnecessary and detrimental to the security and the economy of the United States and the entire world community." The statement has been distributed to Congress.
Full text and signatures are available at: http://www.ecaar.org
Topical web references (in alphabetical order)
Emergency petition to the U.N. Security Council: 550,000 supporters in 2 days (Source: MoveOn.org, posted by the IPB on 6 March 03)
The response to our emergency petition to the U.N. Security Council has been nothing short of extraordinary. Less than two days after the petition was launched, over 550,000 people have signed, from over 200 countries. The petition should be delivered to the U.N. Security Council on 10 March. It can be found at: http://www.moveon.org/emergency/
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Abolition 2000 homepage: http://www.abolition2000.org Grassroots News: http://www.napf.org/abolition2000/news/
New website for articles' archive
The US-based Proposition One Committee has set up a separate website of news articles, carefully collected, sorted, and linked by date, for several years back: http://nucnews.net This includes lists of articles in the following news categories:
Please send inquiries to: < >
"Trust & Verify" No. 106/January-February 2003
The latest issue of "Trust & Verify", published by the London-based "Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC)", carries the following:
NOTE: INES member Dr. Owen Greene, who served as chair of VERTIC's Board for the past five years, has stepped down. The new chair, elected at the Board's AGM on 27 January, is Susan Willett.
EU Parliament resolution against DU weapons (Source: mailing by INES member Alice Slater, posted on 19 February 03)
Widely unreported by the mass media, the Parliament of the European Union, on 13 February, adopted a resolution which requests the EU member states, "to immediately implement a moratorium on the further use of cluster ammunition and depleted uranium ammunition (and other uranium warheads), pending the conclusions of a comprehensive study of the requirements of international humanitarian law."
Furthermore, the resolution calls on the EU Council, "to support independent and thorough investigations into the possible harmful effects of the use of depleted uranium ammunition (and other types of uranium warheads) in battlefield operations such as in the Balkans, Afghanistan and other regions; stresses that such investigations should concern the effects on the soldiers in affected areas as well as the effects on civilians and their land."
The citations above are only two out of thirteen points of the resolution, with which the EU Parliament describes further steps to be taken with regard to depleted uranium ammunition, as well as anti-personnel landmines.
The full text of the resolution available from the WNII Editor as an rtf-formatted email attachment.
"Biosecurity and Bioterrorism" (Source: FAS Secrecy News, Volume 2003, Issue No. 19, March 4, 2003)
Co-edited by Tara O'Toole and Thomas V. Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (USA), "Biosecurity and Bioterrorism" is a new peer-reviewed quarterly journal that is intended "to foster a deepening understanding of the threat posed by biological weapons and to broaden the spectrum of people who are knowledgeable in these realms."
Further information, including a promising selection of articles from the first issue, may be found here: http://www.liebertpub.com/BSP/default1.asp
CONFERENCES, MEETINGS, SEMINARS
UNU/INCORE International Summer School
Three courses, run simultaneously, make up the Summer School 2003:
The UNU/INCORE International Summer School is an intensive week of discussion, reflection, learning and networking facilitated by leading academics and practitioners. The courses aim to reflect the state of the art in the current arena of conflict resolution, offering those involved in conflict management the opportunity to come together - to broaden their knowledge and to avail of the most up-to-date learning and experiences.
The School provides a unique forum for policy makers, practitioners and researchers to meet, thus creating a multi-disciplinary dialogue. The International Summer School is designed for the experienced individual. Political Scientists; journalists; policy advisors; community workers; professors; youth workers; local government officers; post-graduate students; and military personnel are just some of the participants of previous summer schools.
Further details can be found at: http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/news/events/ss/index.html
2nd Global Conference on War and Virtual War: The Challenges to Communities
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference marks the continuation of a project launched in 2002 to provide a challenging forum for the examination and evaluation of the nature, purpose and experience of war, and its impacts on all aspects of communities across the world. Viewing war as a multi-layered phenomenon, the conference series seeks to explore the historical, legal, social, religious, economic, and political contexts of conflicts, and assess the place of art, journalism, literature, music, the media and the internet in representation and interpretation of the experience of warfare.
Further details and information about the War and Virtual War project: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/war.htm
Specific information about the conference: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wvw2cfp.htm
International Peace Bureau Triennial Conference
For more details, contact the IPB Secretariat: < >
No new or changed email or web addresses in this issue. All INES e-mail addresses and homepages are available upon request from:
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