Economy
Going bananas to restrict weapons … as Aung San Suu Kyi accepts Nobel peace prize …
Kirsty Maddeb from Amnesty City Group
We had a successful action at Salamanca Market today (17/6/’12) at the Amnesty International stall.
We were ‘going bananas’, dressed as bananas, to illustrate that there are more international trade restrictions on bananas than on weapons.
We were urging people to sign our petition and/or banana cards to call for an Arms trade treaty that effectively prevents arms from fuelling serious human rights abuses or war crimes and calling on the Australian Government to demonstrate increased leadership in the Asia-Pacific region and amongst all UN member states to support such a treaty.
This is part of a worldwide campaign Amnesty has been involved in for the past decade for a treaty that requires countries to carry out rigorous risk assessments on all arms transfers where it is likely they will be used to commit or facilitate serious human rights abuses.
This launch and action is part of the 100 days of action by Amnesty around the world, with the Petition.
A final push will be given to the 193 member countries of the UN just before they meet demanding they negotiate a treaty that has strong human rights protection.
1 person is killed every minute by armed conflict/violence
12 billion bullets are produced each year – almost enough to shoot everyone on the planet-twice
10s of thousands of child soldiers are operating in armed conflict in 19 countries.
• The Guardian,
Peter Beaumont in Oslo
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 16 June 2012 14.49 BST
Aung San Suu Kyi accepts Nobel peace prize
In an event hailed as the “most remarkable in the entire history of the Nobel prizes”, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner, delivered her acceptance speech for her peace prize in Oslo’s vast City Hall more than two decades after it was awarded.
Given the prize in 1991 – but by then under house arrest by Burma’s military junta – it was left to her two sons, Alexander and Kim, to travel to Norway to receive the peace prize that year. Able to travel freely after 21 years, Aung San Suu Kyi stood in front of a packed hall, in which Norwegian dignitaries rubbed shoulders with Buddhist monks in saffron robes and Burmese guests in traditional costumes, to deliver her long-delayed acceptance speech in a moment of high emotion.
Commended in the original citation for her “non-violent struggle” as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades”, the 66-year-old activist, elected to the country’s national assembly during its fragile political transition, recalled with typical self-effacement the moment at which she heard she had been awarded the peace prize.
“I heard the news on the radio one evening. I’ve tried very hard to remember what my immediate reaction to the announcement of the award had been. I think it was something like: ‘Oh … so they’ve decided to give it to me’.”
Aung San Suu Kyi arrived in Norway from Switzerland, her first stop on a two-week tour of Europe. The journey is her first in Europe since 1988, when she left her husband and two young sons in England to visit her ill mother in Burma and became the focal point for the nascent democracy movement.
She made a wide-ranging, deeply personal lecture, which touched on her feelings of isolation under house arrest, the Buddhist concept of suffering, human rights and her hopes and fears for her country’s future, and the importance of the peace prize itself.
“It did not seem quite real because in a sense I did not feel myself to be quite real at that time,” she said. “Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world.
“There was the house which was my world, there was the world of others who also were not free but were together in prison as a community, and there was the world of the free; each was a different planet pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe.
“What the Nobel peace prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings outside the isolated area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me. This did not happen instantly, of course, but as the days and months went by, and news of reactions to the award came over the airwaves, I began to understand the significance of the Nobel prize. It had made me real once again.
“What was more important, the prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten. When the Nobel committee awarded the peace prize to me, they were recognising that the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognising the oneness of humanity … The Nobel peace prize opened up a door in my heart.”
Talking about the motivation in a period during which she was separated from her family and her British husband …