Five hundred climate activists gathered in a park field in Bonn, Germany on Saturday to stage a dramatic aerial image and send a message to the UN climate meeting that was taking place downtown.

Unfortunately, you need to be up on environmental news and/or willing to do some sleuthing to decode the message. 350 and Tck Tck Tck are both climate activist groups. The former takes its name from what is considered the safe upper limit of CO2 in the atmosphere, as measured in parts per million. The latter from the sound of a clock.

So basically, they’re telling the UN “We can save the planet if we agree to reduce CO2 emissions below 350 parts per million, but time is ticking.”

I hope the suits figured that out.

• About 30,000 left-wing activists, students, politicians and Catholic priests and nuns in the Philippines are expected to protest President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s attempt to extend term limits.

• Continental Airlines pilots are protesting the company’s annual shareholder meetings to remind executives that the sacrafices made by pilots in their last contract agreement were a loan.

• 150 protestors marched outside an East Texas courthouse on Monday to demand that the Department of Justice look at a case involving two white men accused of dragging a black man to death that was dropped by local authorities on lack of evidence.

• A rally for Iran’s leading presidential challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi surrounded and overmatched a simultaneous rally for current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bringing Tehran to a standstill on Monday.

• Somali journalists went on strike today to protest the recent assassination of a colleague, while also demanding protection from the international community.

• Three members of the environmental activist group Rising Tide attempted to shut down Australia’s second-largest aluminum smelter on Tuesday because it derives its energy from coal.

• About 35 Ontario farmers have been protesting a landfill that messes with their water table by blockading the road that leads to it with their tractors.

• Weekly protests are being held in a small Irish village to oppose the construction of an oil pipeline by Shell.

On Saturday, a hundred Italian activists who oppose the construction of a new U.S. military base at Vicenza’s Dal Molin airport broke into the site, unfurled banners denouncing the plan and planted an 8-meter-high flag as “a symbol of dignity and independence from military slavery and imposition.”

The action was taken in preparation for a much larger demonstration on July 4, when organizers hope thousands will take over the site and plant flags of resistance. Apart from the significance of July 4th in the United States, that date was chosen because “a few days later the G8 begins in L’Aquila, and the new U.S. President will arrive in Italy for the first time.”

Since the military base was approved by the Vicenza’s City Council in October 2006, there has been fierce resistance by the local population. Following the decision, thousands beat pots, pans and drums for seven hours in the city square to register their disapproval. Then, on January 16, 2007, activists nonviolently occupied the local railway station and set up Presidio Permanente – an encampment on the edge of the construction site that has been in operation 24/7 ever since.

The No Dal Molin movement is part of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (or No Bases Network) that grew out of the 2004 World Social Forum in India. In 2007, the coalition held their first international conference in Quito, Ecuador that brought together 300 activists from 40 countries.

In her introduction to the new book, “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” Catherine Lutz writes: “Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in 909 [U.S.] military facilities in 46 countries and territories.”

At the G20 protests in London a couple months ago, the police got in trouble for using agent provocateurs to incite the crowd to violence. While such stories are unfortunately not uncommon at large political rallies, I have never heard of the authorities or a corporation staging an entire protest. That, however, is exactly what the popular video game maker Electronic Arts, did last week in an effort to promote one of their new releases. According to the Associated Press:

The game publisher hired a group of nearly 20 people to stand outside the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on Wednesday and appear to protest the upcoming EA game “Dante’s Inferno.” EA spokeswoman Holly Rockwood says the stunt was arranged by a viral marketing agency hired by EA.

The group claimed to be protesting the third-person action game — loosely based on Dante Aligheri’s poem “Divine Comedy” — because they said the game glorified eternal damnation.

The fake religious protesters passed out pamphlets and held up picket signs with messages such as “Hell is not a Video Game” and “Trade in Your PlayStation for a PrayStation.”

Apparently, the fake demonstrators that were hired were unemployed. Pretty sad.

I would be delighted to see this stunt, which may very well have been successful from a business perspective, backfire on EA somehow. Perhaps an actual boycott of the company is in order, just so that the execs can get a taste of the real power of nonviolent action. But I don’t think gamers are generally activists, so I won’t hold my breath.

[Editor's note: I just received another dispatch from Kathy, who is part of a delegation visiting cities and villages in Pakistan through this Saturday. -ES]

In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:

“The planes always come…like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.”

The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20^th, 2009.  A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.

The previous day, some travelers had come to Khaisor, and the villagers had served them a meal.  “This is our custom,” my friend relates.  “It is our traditional way.”  But these travelers were members of the Taliban, and their visit was noted by U.S. forces.  It is possible they were identified through pictures taken by unmanned U.S. drones.  Although the visitors had left right after their meal, the U.S. responded to this act of hospitality by bombing the homes of the hosts early the following morning.

I asked my friend how families cope, when a bomb suddenly blasts their home in the middle of the night.  Do they have any kind of first aid available to help the wounded?  “You see this,” he said, pointing to the long shawl that I happened to be wearing, a customary part of every village woman’s dress, “they try to use this [as a bandage] because it is all they have.”  I imagined the shawl rapidly soaking up the blood of a dying Pakistani man, woman, or child.

On the morning of the 20^th, the other villagers had rushed to the section where the missile had hit, hoisting  injured survivors onto their shoulders and carrying them across rough, hilly terrain to the nearest road (about five kilometers away from the village) where, lacking vehicles of their own and with no hope of receiving an ambulance visit, they waited for a car to stop, their only means of reaching a hospital.

The first car they saw did stop, but its driver refused to take any of the wounded for fear that his action would be noted by an unmanned U.S. drone, and that he himself would face the reward for his hospitality which the village had received.

The villagers walked along the road until another car stopped and did agree to take some of the wounded to a nearby center run by the International Commission of the Red Cross.

For three days following the attack, people collected in the village, coming in from all over the region for the funerals.  My visitor told me that whether people know the villagers or not, they will come to pray.  “On the cell phone you get the word,” he said, “Look, this bloody thing again happened. People share the sorrow, but the anger increases.  Everyone says we should get rid of the Americans.”

Read the rest of this article »

During his highly publicized speech in Cairo last week, President Obama urged Palestinians to use nonviolence in their struggle for independence.

Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Obama’s nod to nonviolence “one of the most important points that he made.” But many others have had trouble sidestepping the hypocrisy of such words coming from the man in charge of the world’s greatest military power. As Starhawk, a panelist for the Washington Post‘s On Faith blog, pointed out:

For the powerful to demand that the less powerful renounce violence, without making the same demands on themselves or on their allies, is simply to say: “I reserve the weapons of death for myself and my friends.”

The obvious friend is of course Israel, which receives about $3 billion a year from Washington. Right behind them, interestingly enough, is the dictatorship in Egypt, which received $7.8 billion from the U.S. over the past five years. Making matters worse, the Obama administration is requesting a 60 percent cut in funding for pro-democracy groups and initiatives in the country. So even the location of Obama’s speech adds to the hypocrisy of his call for nonviolence, especially considering he made no direct reference to the dictatorship.

While the president may not have a leg to stand on when it comes to espousing nonviolence, he could have at least acknowledged efforts made by Muslims and Arabs to reach a peaceful reconciliation. For one, on the day of his speech in Cairo, CodePink delivered a letter to Obama from Hamas that called for a meeting “on the basis of mutual respect and without preconditions.”

Without mention of this most people are left to assume that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, know nothing but violence. As McClatchy Newspapers‘ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dion Nissenbaum noted, there is “a question long raised in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Where is the Palestinian Mahatma Gandhi?” Nissenbaum then went on to describe the most recent exploration of that question–a rather comprehensive and insightful article in the Weekly Standard–and quote several leading theorists.

Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement that organizes largely non-violent protests of Israeli actions in the West Bank, argues that there are “many Palestinian Gandhis” who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, including Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who was killed when he was hit in the chest by a tear gas cannister fired by an Israeli soldier.

Salil Tripathi of Forbes also touched on this idea, saying that Obama should have mentioned the nonviolent Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who is known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for raising a nonviolent army of over 100,000 members in the Northwest Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A sharper endorsement of non-violence, citing the many standard-bearers, including those from the region, could have planted the seed of an idea. And, maybe, the paradigm would have shifted.

There is still a chance that it may. But it is unlikely to be inspired by an American president.

• Some 80,000 teachers continue their strike in Chile because they have not been paid their promised bonuses, and more than 50 are arrested for trying to surround the presidential palace

• Italian activists with the No Dal Molin movement broke into the construction site for a massive new US military base in Vicenza, and planted flags and banners of opposition

• On Monday, some 200 people protested at a Berlin airport against a mass deportation of Vietnamese asylum-seekers from Germany and Poland

• Company officials at Ssangyong Motor Corp., South Korea’s smallest carmaker, say they may reconsider mass layoffs, as thousands of unionized workers continue to occupy their plant in the city of Pyeongtaek

• South Africa’s labour federation COSATU, an ally of the ruling ANC, on Thursday backed a call by metal workers for strikes to demand deeper interest rate cuts to help lift growth and save jobs

• Five prisoners in Cuba are on hunger strike to demand better medical treatment, religious attention, the right to call family members and transfers to prisons in their home provinces

• A leading Bollywood union said on Friday it would boycott filming in Australia until the government takes action against people behind a series of violent assaults on Indian students there

• Two dozen hunger strikers at University of California Santa Cruz end their hunger strike as two of their demands are met and negotiations begin with the administration

• Two activists with Cascadia Summer have climbed trees to stop the clear-cutting of 400 acres of forest in Oregon

A surprising end came to the lawsuit implicating Royal Dutch Shell in the murders of environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and six other civilians by the former Nigerian military regime: Shell agreed to a $15.5 million settlement.

I say surprising not just because Shell gave in, but more so because it seems like Shell got off too easy. By agreeing to the settlement they avoided having to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Not that Shell could ever come off looking like the good guys, but passing on their day in court allowed Shell Executive Director Malcolm Brinded to spin a positive PR statement in which he said, “This gesture also acknowledges that, even though Shell had no part in the violence that took place, the plaintiffs and others have suffered.”

Furthermore, as Chris Kahn of the Associated Press noted:

“Altogether, the settlement will have a negligible affect on Shell’s shareholders, amounting to less than one-hundredth of a percent of Shell’s annual revenue. It’s comparable to the annual cost of renting one of the supertankers that Shell uses to deliver Nigerian oil to other countries.”

Even so, the plaintiffs, which include Wiwa’s son and other relatives of the deceased, are calling it a victory. And I won’t begrudge them that. They helped pave the way for other transnational companies owned or operated in the US to be held responsible for human rights abuses committed abroad.

About half of the money will go toward setting up a trust fund that according to the AP “will invest in social programs in the country, including educational endowments, agricultural development, support for small enterprise and adult literacy programs.” The rest will compensate the families and pay off years of legal fees.

The families and the lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights have been through a lot since they initiated the lawsuit in 1996. So the victory, as they see it, is well deserved–as is the lawsuit’s landmark status. But I can’t help but wonder what would have come from a trial, since Shell seemed eager enough to avoid it.

• Janitors, community supporters and faith leaders are in the midst of their sixth day of fasting to protest the layoffs of 75 janitors who worked at Cisco Systems.

• Environmental activists from the Thames Valley Climate Action group protested a UK engineering firm that’s submitted a bid to build the nation’s first coal fired power plant in 30 years.

• More than 30 people gathered to protest the demolition of Tiger Stadium, the historic Detroit ballpark built in 1912 and vacant since 1999. Preservationists would like a portion of it saved as a city landmark.

• South African miners, totaling more than 300,000, are preparing for a nationwide strike in an effort to increase wages.

• Students and environmentalists staged rallies all across Indonesia to mark Environment Day and raise public awareness to the country’s major environment issues.

• Firefighters in Colorado held a rally against Governor Bill Ritter’s veto of a bill that would have allowed them to unionize without local government approval.

• Doctors in South Africa are threatening to strike during the 2010 World Cup over low wages. Many earn less than bus drivers in Johannesburg.

Friday, reports the Providence Journal, hundreds turned out at St. Michael’s church in Providence, Rhode Island to celebrate the life of David Cartagena. I can begin to imagine the scene—when I lived in Providence, I knew the church as an incredibly vibrant, diverse, and powerful place of peace in a deeply troubled neighborhood. It’s hard to think of any spot more worthy of the man being celebrated.

In his own words:

Cartagena, who worked as a streetworker at the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, had once been a gang member, in and out of jail for years. He finally turned his life around and became a respected force for peace and justice in the community. Says the Institute’s website:

In recent years, he was recognized by law enforcement and community organizations as a skilled mediator and valuable partner.  A gifted public speaker and storyteller, he was sought after as a speaker in nonviolence trainings.  He testified before Congress on gang intervention strategies and has worked with professionals in Connecticut, Guatemala, Massachusetts, Detroit, Michigan and Portland, Oregon on ways to curb youth violence.

In the early morning of May 31st, Cartagena was killed in a car accident on I-95 in Providence.