Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Apartheid

  • Archbishop Desmond Tutu

    David KriegerOne of the strong focuses of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is Peace Leadership. Since the creation of the Foundation, we have encouraged leadership for peace and tried to shine a light on it. For 28 years, we have given an annual award for Distinguished Peace Leadership to some of the greatest Peace Leaders of our time. In giving these awards, our purpose has been not only to honor outstanding peace leaders, but to inspire others, particularly young people, to greater commitment in building a more peaceful and decent world. 


    In 1990, we had the great pleasure of honoring Archbishop Tutu. Actually, the honor we bestowed upon him paled in comparison to the honor he bestowed upon us by accepting. His acceptance speech upon receiving our award was entitled “God’s Dream,” and was published in the Foundation’s anthology, Waging Peace II. 


    In his acceptance speech, Archbishop Tutu pointed out, “A minute fraction of what nations spend on their budgets of death would be enough to ensure that children everywhere had adequate housing, a clean supply of water, adequate health facilities, and proper education. People would live with a sense of fulfillment and not labor under stressful anxiety that is caused by the uncertainties of what the future holds. Many, especially young people, ask whether life is worth living when it is lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.” 


    Though more than 20 years have passed since he uttered those words and since the Cold War ended, we and our children continue to live under that mushroom cloud and we continue to spend vast amounts globally on our militaries rather than on our common good. We fight unnecessary wars and develop new instruments of long-distance killing rather than building a world we can be proud to pass on to our children.


    Archbishop Tutu is one of the great men of our time. He played a leading role in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa. He then led the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, bringing a new process for healing to his country and to the world. The world badly needs such social innovation to keep pace with the technological innovations that have put civilization and humankind in danger of annihilation.


    For over 20 years, the Archbishop has served on the Advisory Council of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, where he has offered his advice and support. In 2002, Archbishop Tutu wrote the foreword for an anthology connected with the Foundation’s twentieth anniversary, Hope in a Dark Time. In his foreword, he wrote:


    “I have had many blessings in my life. One of the greatest of these has been to witness the power of forgiveness. In the aftermath of the apartheid regime in South Africa, we chose the path of forgiveness and reconciliation. As the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I learned first-hand the transformative nature of forgiveness. It is a power that can cleanse the human heart and free us from hatred and bloodlust. I am convinced there is no future without forgiveness, and in forgiveness there is hope we can put an end to wars and violence.”


    Archbishop Tutu is the Archbishop emeritus of Capetown. Among his many honors, he is a Nobel Peace Laureate. He is a humble and decent man, a man who makes us proud of our common humanity and inspires us to be better and to build a better world. 

  • Mairead Maguire’s 10-Year Deportation from Israel

    Press Release – 8th October, 2010

    Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire was deported from Israel at 4 a.m., on Tuesday 5th October, 2010 and arrived back in Belfast later that afternoon. Maguire had arrived in Israel on Tuesday 27th September, to attend a Nobel Women’s Initiative visit, and support those working in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories – particularly women groups – for human rights and justice.

    On arrival she was detained in Ben Gurion Detention Centre, Tel Aviv. The Israeli security tried to forcefully deport Maguire the following day but she peacefully resisted sitting quietly on the tarmac beside the plane refusing to be forcefully deported. The KLM pilot refused to allow her to be forcefully taken on by Israeli guards, so she was taken back into detention, where she remained for seven days in solitary confinement under harsh conditions causing her to be hospitalized at the end of a week. During the seven days she had three court appearances to appeal her conviction of 10-year deportation from Israel.   

    At the Supreme Court appeal, Maguire spoke to the three judges saying that she loved the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and was saddened by their suffering. However, she insisted that peace will not come to Israel until the Israeli government end Apartheid. She also made in the Supreme Court an appeal, through the media, for the Israeli government to end apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

    On arriving home Maguire said:

    “I am sorry to be deported for 10 years from Israel and have asked my attorney, Adalah, to challenge this order on my behalf, as I very much wish to return to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to support all those working for change.   I do not feel I have been treated justly by the Israeli Court.  In June 2010, I and my colleagues on the “Rachel Corrie” boat were illegally hijacked in international waters by the Israeli navy, whilst trying to break the siege of Gaza and bring humanitarian aid to people suffering under illegal collective punishment by Israel.  I am not a criminal and ask, “How can I be deported from Israel when I had been taken at gunpoint and forced to come to Israel against my will in June, 2010?” I wish the three Supreme Court judges had been braver and upheld their proposal to the Israeli state prosecution that I be allowed to stay for a few days and join the NWI. However, they showed how little independence the Israeli judiciary have, and obeyed the Israeli security authorities that were determined to uphold my 10-year deportation from Israel, a form of silencing those who are critical of Israeli policies.

    “Sadly also, the Israeli media were very selective and negative regarding me, carrying misrepresentations such as reporting that I was in a plane and shouting and creating a scene, clearly Israeli propaganda against me. In truth I went to Israel in good faith, with nothing but love for Israelis and Palestinians, and wishing a good future for both peoples to live in justice and peace.   Being a voice critical of the Israeli government policies does not make me an enemy of Israel or her people, but an upholder of an ethic of human rights and nonviolence, and a believer that peace is possible between both peoples when justice reigns. It is my sincere hope that I can return to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to meet my friends soon again.”

  • Apartheid in the Holy Land

    In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

    What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

    On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

    I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said:”Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews.”

    My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

    Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.

    The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

    Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or — I hope — to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

    We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?

    My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: “I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro- freedom. I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression.”

    But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?

    People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful — very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

    Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

    We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God’s dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.

     

    Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.