Sunday, April 24, 2011

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ACA: Four Decades of Accomplishment

Click here to see highlights - 1971-2010.
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Radiation from Nuclear Weapons Production and Public Health

A Readiness to Harm: The Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Complexes

Arjun Makhijani   [Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih eds., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 and 2000),]
On September 29, 1957, at 4:20 p.m., an enormous explosion in a tank containing highly radioactive waste occurred in the Mayak nuclear weapons plant in the southern Ural mountains of the Soviet Union. The fallout plume spread strontium-90 and other dangerous radionuclides over about 15,000 square kilometers, which remain contaminated to this day.
Food stores were closed, and more than 1,000 tons of food dumped. Farming was stopped for more than two decades on about 150,000 acres. More than 10,000 people were relocated, and their empty homes were torn down and buried as radioactive waste. Yet, none of the residents were told why. The Soviet government covered up the accident, only acknowledging the devastation in June 1989 as the Cold War was ending.[1]
Surprisingly, the West assisted the Soviet government in its cover-up. In 1976, Soviet dissident biologist Zhores Medvedev published an article in the New Scientist, a British science magazine, about the accident. Instead of denouncing the callous cover-up of the Soviets, however, the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John Hill, and other British experts dismissed the story as “rubbish” and “scientific fiction.”[2]
The CIA also helped the cover-up. According to a 1959 CIA document, the agency knew that an accident had occurred that resulted in food stores being closed. The resulting food shortages created lines that were “reminiscent of the worst shortages during World War II.” They also knew that high officials had been “wearing small radiation counters” while the public had no protection.
Yet, the CIA did not publicize the accident, even though it occurred during the height of the Cold War and at a time that both sides took every opportunity for propaganda advantage. The U.S. government did not condemn the Soviets for the secrecy and destruction of homes without informed consent. Was it because officials in the West feared that the public might raise questions about the possibility of a similar explosion in France, the United Kingdom, or the United States?
Indeed, since the dawn of the atomic age, millions of people in other parts of the world have been affected by bomb production and testing. American, British, French, and Soviet soldiers were ordered to participate in atomic war exercises. Children in the United States have seen their risk of cancers rise from drinking milk contaminated with fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests. Conditions for uranium miners in India are lamentable, and who knows what damage has been caused by nuclear weapons in China, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan?
Few nuclear-weapon states have provided much information about the harm caused by their nuclear weapons establishments. For example, information about the intense fallout from French nuclear tests in Polynesia is coming to light only this year. The typical reaction of these establishments has been to deny damage, cover up problems, and simply assert national security requirements to be taken on trust, promulgated by fiat, or both.
The problem is by no means at an end, even leaving aside plans in the United States and other nuclear-weapon states to make more nuclear weapons. For example, poor radioactive waste disposal practices throughout the Cold War threaten some of the most important water resources in the United States. These include putting high-level liquid radioactive wastes from reprocessing into tanks that have leaked a million gallons into the ground near the Columbia River and dumping plutonium-laden wastes into unlined pits above Snake River Plain Aquifer, southeastern Idaho’s sole source aquifer.
Avoiding and Permitting Fallout
Efforts to keep damaging information about nuclear weapons hidden from the public began early. The very first nuclear test on July 16, 1945, led to severe fallout and hot spots of radioactive contamination 32 kilometers from the site. The affected people were not informed even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor were they evacuated. A fallout cloud hung over much of southeastern New Mexico in the days following the test, but even 60 years later, there has been no official investigation of the health effects. Col. Stafford Warren, a medical doctor in the Army who was the chief of radiation safety for the test, recommended that future tests should not be done within 240 kilometers of human habitation. The recommendation was ignored, with tragic effects.
In 1950, the United States had considered setting up a weapons testing site in North Carolina at a coastal location that would have allowed most fallout to land in the ocean. Instead, the United States chose to set up a continental nuclearweapon test site in Nevada with the knowledge that a western location would blow fallout over most of the country. The federal government risked the health of its citizens in large part to make life more convenient for weapons scientists at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and to avoid the political difficulties of acquiring coastal private property through eminent domain.
When the site became operational, tests were conducted when the wind blew away from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The result was ubiquitous fallout over most of the rest of the continental United States. The government reassured a skeptical public that it would provide ample warning of any dangers. Yet, it did not share the results of its 1950 research, which had shown that milk would be contaminated by fallout. Cows would eat grass on which iodine-131, an intensely radioactive fission product, had been deposited. The iodine-131 would concentrate in the milk. Growing children who drank the milk would get large doses of radiation to their thyroids, creating a risk of cancer and other thyroid diseases.[3]
Rather than address these realistic concerns, the military dismissed them. The opinion in military circles was that the public in the United States had a “hysterical and alarmist complex” about radiation that needed to be corrected to enable the United States to proceed with its testing activities. In internal documents, Department of Defense officials said the process of correction “would be a matter of reeducation over a long period of time.” The objective was in direct contradiction to the advice given by Warren in July 1945: the “reeducation” was supposed to go on until “the public will accept the possibility of an atomic explosion within a hundred or so miles of their homes.” At that point, the establishment of a test site in the continental United States would no longer be a problem. [4] People would then “feel at home with neutrons trotting around” and presumably become comfortable with nuclear tests nearby. It was after all, as the safety preparations were being done in December 1950, “the most important angle to get across.”[5]
The cover-up was a spectacular success, although the fallout was intense. After two nuclear tests (Shot Harry and Shot Nancy), 1,420 lambing ewes and 2,970 lambs in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona died of severe radiation injuries.[6] In the lawsuit that followed,[7] the government’s representatives provided what the judge nearly 30 years later concluded was “false and deceptive” representations, withheld information, and provided other information “in such a manner as to be deceitful” and, in sum, “manipulated” the court by “convoluted actions.”
In 1997, when the National Cancer Institute acting under congressional directive assessed milk contamination, it found that fallout from the tests would eventually cause between 11,000 and 212,000 thyroid cancers. The cancer risk fell primarily to those who had been children, with girls being at twice the risk of boys. Those who believed that they were leading healthy farm lives by drinking fresh milk got the highest doses.
An atomic Kodak moment was playing out in a parallel political and economic universe in the very same period. The photographic film company found its film was getting fogged because the corn husks it was using to make packaging had become contaminated with fallout. Kodak threatened to sue. The government quickly provided data on anticipated patterns of fallout to Kodak and the rest of the photographic film industry so they could protect their products.[8] Was it because Kodak knew too much? Was it because film was more precious than milk?
As a way to avoid publicity and lessen the political consequences, the United States and other countries also often tested weapons in areas home to foreign subjects or minority populations. The United States located its test sites in the Marshall Islands and on land claimed by the Western Shoshones in Nevada. The Soviets located their major test site in the land of the Kazakhs, near Semipalatinsk. The British conducted their tests on native lands in Australia and on Christmas Island in the Pacific. The Chinese located theirs on minority lands in western China. The French test sites were in the colonies in Algeria and Polynesia.
According to France’s conservative newspaper, Le Figaro, although fallout was anticipated and the genetic risk for the native population was considered greater than that for the general French public, “a preventive relocation of the people of the Gambiers [archipelago] was ruled out for political and psychological reasons.” Further, the evacuation of old people and children “who comprised a large fraction” of the population was considered “the most difficult,” so they were left in the path of the fallout.[9]
To be sure, the cover-ups were not entirely successful. Public protests in the 1950s and concerns about contamination of mother’s milk and baby’s teeth with strontium-90 were central to the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States signed in 1963. In a real, practical sense, the first arms control treaty was an environmental one. Yet, China and France did not sign. The French did not stop atmospheric testing until 1974; the Chinese did so in 1980.
Moving tests underground did not end the problem, even though it did greatly mitigate the problem of radiation doses from short-lived radionuclides such as iodine-131. Large amounts of plutonium, iodine-129, cesium-135, and other longlived radionuclides remain underground at the test sites. They possess the potential for migration into water bodies in the long term. No cleanup method has yet been devised.
The frequent claims of safety and lack of deleterious health effects of nuclear tests are perhaps most clearly contradicted by military plans to use fallout as a terror weapon. The fallout from the first ever underwater test at Bikini in July 1946 was so ubiquitous and so insidious in its effects that the Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation of the military aspects of the tests concluded that fallout may constitute a weapon of war. Of the long-term effects of the radioactivity, the 1947 evaluation stated that the contaminated areas:
irregular in size and shape, as wind and topography might form them, would have no visible boundaries. No survivor could be certain he was not among the doomed, and so added to every terror of the moment, thousands would be stricken with the fear of death and the uncertainty of the time of its arrival.[10]
Overall, estimates of cancer fatalities due to the global radiation doses from the atmospheric nuclear testing program of the five nuclear-weapon states that are parties to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and that are also the only permanent members of the UN Security Council, which gives them veto power over global security decisions, run into hundreds of thousands between the start of testing in 1945 and the end of the 21st century.
There are considerable uncertainties in the risk of cancer death from exposure to low levels of radiation, but all careful scientific evaluations, including the most recent ones, have concluded that every increment of exposure to radiation produces an incremental risk of cancer. The range of estimates of cancer deaths as a result of testing fallout, using the official U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cancer risk coefficients, is between about 200,000 to more than half a million.[11] The number of cancer cases, including thyroid cancer, which has a low fatality rate (about 5 percent), would be considerably greater. No sound global estimate of cancer incidence is possible because no study comparable to the 1997 U.S. National Cancer Institute study has been carried out on a global scale. Indeed, even the thyroid cancer risk in Canada due to testing in Nevada has not been evaluated, although it is apparent from the National Cancer Institute study as well as the similar dietary patterns between Canada and the United States that people in several parts of Canada would have been significantly affected.
Further Dangers
That was not the only damage caused by nuclear weapons establishments. There are many other examples. Some from the United States include:
• From the 1940s into the 1970s, more than 23,000 people were subjected to radiation experiments, many without their informed consent. They were administered by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Department of Veterans Affairs for purposes including determining the biology of radiation intakes, developing radiation weapons, and determining radiation’s effects on military personnel performance on the battlefield. One experiment involved feeding oatmeal with radioactive trace elements to more than 100 boys at a Massachusetts school. Others included testicular irradiation experiments on prisoners to determine what doses induce sterility and experiments on pregnant women. In 1993, after learning of a particularly troubling series of experiments involving the injection of plutonium into unknowing subjects, then-Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary remarked, “The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”[12]
• A quarter of a million armed forces personnel participated in nuclear weapons tests in the United States alone. They were marched into ground zero, they scrubbed plutonium from the decks of contaminated ships, and they flew planes through the mushroom clouds to sample them and to test how pilots might function in a nuclear war environment. It took until the end of the 1980s for the U.S. government to recognize the harm and begin a compensation program.
• During the Cold War, more than half a million weapons complex workers in the United States were exposed to radioactivity and chemicals in the course of their work. In the early decades, many were exposed without proper information or training, with authorities sometimes hiding the risks so that hazard duty would not have to be paid, among other reasons.[13] The atomic weapons establishment did not actually calculate radiation doses to workers received due to inhalation and ingestion, even though data were being collected and analyzed in the form of urine samples. Congress passed a compensation program for nuclear weapons workers in October 2000.
• During the 1950s, it was well known that exposure to radon and its decay products in unventilated mines was a health hazard and increased the risk of lung cancer, but the AEC, the Department of Energy’s predecessor, did not require that the mines be ventilated, choosing instead to emphasize production.[14]
Even today, people who live along the Savannah River and use its water downstream of the Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons materials plant, are drinking water contaminated with tritium, which is radioactive hydrogen. This contamination level is at about 5 percent of the present-day drinking water standard. However, these standards are set for a grown male, called “standard man,” and they do not consider the effects of radioactive water on developing fetuses. They do not consider miscarriages and other noncancer effects. No removal is planned of the source of the tritium contamination, which lies in the unlined pits and trenches where radioactive waste was dumped in cardboard and wooden boxes. Unless the long-lived and especially risky wastes, such as liquid highlevel wastes in tanks, are recovered and stabilized and isolated from the human environment, the risks will persist.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been similarly affected in other nuclear-weapon states. The main difference between them and the United States has been that the United States has been more open and hence has, under public pressure, acknowledged a wider scope and depth of harm, although that task is still far from done. India has strict secrecy laws surrounding its nuclear weapons activities, much like France and the United Kingdom. The least is known about China, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
It is a remarkable fact of nuclear weapons history and radiation risk that every nuclear-weapon state has first of all harmed its own people in the name of national security. For the most part, they have done so without informed consent.
Nor is the damage confined to nuclear- weapon possessors. Uranium for nuclear weapons was mined in many non-nuclear-weapon states. France got its uranium in large measure from its colonies, where working conditions in mines were—and continue to be—scandalous. The United Kingdom got its uranium partly from Namibia. The Soviets got much of their uranium from vast operations in Eastern Europe, notably in East Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. Health and environmental problems have typically been serious, so far as independent evidence indicates, but have usually been officially denied.[15]
The statement of then-Deputy Secretary of Energy W. Henson Moore at Rocky Flats in June of 1989 at the end of the Cold War was a kind of mea culpa about this. Nuclear weapons production, he told The Washington Post, has been “a secret operation not subject to laws... no one was to know what was going on.” He added that “the way the government and its contractors operated these plants was: This is our business, it’s national security, everybody else butt out.” The “everybody else” he was referring to was not a foreign power, but the people of the United States. Other countries have not had a comparable confession, although their nuclear establishments have been as high-handed and their people have likely suffered similar kinds of consequences.
In a reverse of the doctors’ dictum to “first do no harm,” nuclear weapons establishments have first harmed the people of their own countries, as well others around the world. They have shown a readiness to harm. Given the nature of the problem and its main sources, the permanent members of the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council should call for a global truth commission to investigate the harm that nuclear weapons production and testing have done and continue to do to people all over the world.
Corrected online August 29, 2008. See explanation.
Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He is the principal editor Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (MIT Press: 2000).
ENDNOTES
1. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: IPPNW Press, 1992), chap. 4.
2. Ibid.
3. Pat Ortmeyer and Arjun Makhijani, “Worse Than We Knew,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1997.
4. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The Health and Environmental Risks of Nuclear Weapons Testing in, on, and Above the Earth (New York: Apex Press, 1991), chap. 4.
5. Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing 1947-1974 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 43.
6. Philip L. Fradkin, Fallout: An American Nuclear Tragedy (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1989), p. 148. For a history of nuclear testing, see http://nuclearhistory. tripod.com/testing2.html#uk.
7. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 59.
8. Ortmeyer and Makhijani.
9. “Polynésie: Le Mensonge Nucléaire,” Le Figaro, May 19, 2005.
10. IPPNW and IEER, Plutonium, p. 143 (U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff evaluation of the 1946 tests at Bikini Atoll).
11. The total committed dose equivalent to the global population through the year 2100 is estimated at 544 million person-rem. IPPNW and IEER, Radioactive Heaven and Earth, p. 37. The doses are much larger if estimated for longer periods, mainly due to the very long-lived radionuclides, of which the most important is carbon-14, which gets into food and becomes incorporated into our bodies and all ecosystems. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years, meaning that significant amounts will remain for tens of thousands of years in the atmosphere in the form of radioactive carbon dioxide, to be taken up by plants. Carbon-14 also occurs naturally, created mainly by the interaction of cosmic rays with nitrogen in the atmosphere.
12. Arjun Makhijani and Ellen Kennedy, “Human Radiation Experiments in the United States,” Science for Democratic Action, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1994).
13. Arjun Makhijani, Bernd Franke, and Hisham Zerriffi, “Preliminary Partial Dose Estimates From the Processing of Nuclear Materials at Three Plants During the 1940s and 1950s,” 2000, available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/poison/uranium.htm.
14. Arjun Makhijani and Lisa Ledwidge, “Back to the Bad Old Days,” Science for Democratic Action, vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
15. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih eds., Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 and 2000), chap. 5.
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Saturday, April 23, 2011

Advancement of Women: UN SC Resolution (S/Res) 1325

OSAGI HomeGender MainstreamingFocal Point
Landmark resolution on Women, Peace and Security
The Security Council adopted resolution (S/RES/1325) on women and peace and security on 31 October 2000. The resolution reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and in post-conflict reconstruction and stresses the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security. Resolution 1325 urges all actors to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts. It also calls on all parties to conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, in situations of armed conflict. The resolution provides a number of important operational mandates, with implications for Member States and the entities of the United Nations system.
Inter-agency coordination to implement resolution 1325
In order to ensure collaboration and coordination throughout the United Nations system in the implementation of the Security Council resolution, the Interagency Network on Women and Gender Equality established the Interagency Taskforce on Women, Peace and Security which is chaired by the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women. As of 2004, the Taskforce includes representatives from DAW/DESA, DDA, DPA, DPKO, DPI, ESCWA, ILO, OCHA, OHCHR, OHRM, OSAGI, SRSG/CAC, UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UN-HABITAT, UNICEF, UNIFEM, UNU, WFP. Observers: IOM and the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security (Hague Appeal for Peace, International Alert, International Women's Tribune Centre, Women's Caucus for Gender Justice, Women's Committee on Refugee Women and Children, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom).
In 2003, the Taskforce developed an Action Plan on the implementation of the resolution and contributed to the preparation of the Secretary-General's study. The 2003 annual report described the achievements of the Taskforce in 2002 and the 2004 annual report includes information on needs assessment checklists, briefing notes for Security Council missions and analysis of the gender content of Secretary-General's reports to the Security Council.
Reports by the Secretary-General
Relevant documents and reports
Publications

OSAGI Home
Focal Point for Women.
Gender MainstreamingIANWGEContact
Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI)
 United Nations, Two United Nations Plaza,
44th St. 12th Floor, NY ,NY 10017
URL: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi
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U. S. Imperialism in Latin America, Patricio Guzman Film

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/movies/patricio-guzmans-nostalgia-for-the-light-to-open.html

Surveyor of a Desert Where the Past and Present Coexist

Icarus Films
A scene in Patricio Guzmán's “Nostalgia for the Light,” which is set in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where Mr. Guzmán first filmed 40 years ago.
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: March 16, 2011
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The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the driest place in the world and surely one of the most desolate. But it has always proved fertile ground for the Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, who first filmed there 40 years ago and has now returned to make “Nostalgia for the Light,” a meditation on astronomy, archeology, geology and human rights.
Enlarge This Image
Loic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Patricio Guzmán
“The Atacama is where many elements of our past are concentrated and conserved,” Mr. Guzman, 69, said in an interview last month in Manhattan. “Not just the past of Chile, but of the Earth and even the galaxy. I’d been wanting for the longest time to make a film that brought all of this together, but the hardest part was that those four worlds are parallel lines.”
What finally enabled Mr. Guzmán to make “Nostalgia for the Light,” which opens on Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village, was his realization that the subjects he wanted to address did have a point in common: the preservation of memory. The women who comb the desert looking for the remains of loved ones who disappeared under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet share that trait with the archaeologists and geologists who work in the shadow of the astronomical observatories that dot the Atacama, drawn by its clear skies.
Remembrance has, of course, also been the main theme of Mr. Guzmán’s own body of work, which has been primarily political. But his best-known film, the three-part, four-and-a-half-hour “Battle of Chile,” has come to be regarded as something more than just the record of a particular historical moment.
“The way in which Guzmán understands that historical consciousness is elusive and impossible to fix is one of the most vital contributions he has made, and it all begins with ‘Battle of Chile,’ ” said Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, which last month organized “History, Memory, Cinema,” a retrospective of Mr. Guzmán’s work. “Like Claude Lanzmann he is interested not just in the past but the past in the present, how the past continues to live and shapes the present moment in ways we may not be aware of.”
Beginning April 1 BAMcinématek, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will also sponsor a retrospective of Mr. Guzmán’s work, called “Obstinate Memories: The Documentaries of Patricio Guzman.” That weeklong event will include two showings of “Nostalgia for the Light” as well as “Battle of Chile,” which Florence Almozini, BAMcinématek’s program director and chief curator, calls “a masterpiece of documentary film, perfect in a way.” The program will also feature Mr. Guzmán’s later films about Salvador Allende and General Pinochet.
“I find his films to be not just informative but extremely hypnotic and mesmerizing, so a retrospective is long overdue,” Ms. Almozini said. “He definitely has a strong point of view politically. But he also has an artistic vision and an aesthetic, so you get both beauty and relevance.”
In some respects “Nostalgia for the Light” represents a return to Mr. Guzmán’s origins. As Mr. Guest noted, “his first steps as an artist were as a writer of science fiction, which gives him a certain visionary quality and an acute understanding of paradox.” In the interview Mr. Guzmán himself recalled a childhood in Santiago in which he read Jules Verne and monitored the night sky, memorizing the Southern Hemisphere constellations.
Today, at his home in Paris, he also has a small telescope and a collection of books about astronomy. It was one of those books, a dense text by the French astrophysicist Michel Cassé that Mr. Guzmán described as “full of theorizing, with many equations,” that provided the film’s evocative title.
“I think that in this film I felt more free,” Mr. Guzmán said. “In treating the desert and the cosmos, I found more possibilities for metaphors and for metaphysical, philosophical reflection. I was faced with a horizon that allowed me to develop a kind of poetry that I’ve always had in me but have never had a chance to show.”
At one juncture in “Nostalgia for the Light,” for instance, Mr. Guzmán’s camera moves between NASA photographs of asteroids in space and shots of bone fragments of victims of Pinochet who remain unidentified. Up close the two are indistinguishable, underlying his notion of the cosmos as a unified whole comprising “the same material.”
Mr. Guzmán began making films relatively late: after studying history and philosophy in Chile he graduated from film school in Madrid in 1970, at 29. His return to Chile shortly thereafter coincided with the start of the Allende government’s socialist experiment, which immediately became his focus, and remains so.
“We first met during the Allende period, when I would come across him lugging a camera and a very small crew,” recalled the Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman, who now teaches at Duke University. “He was always popping up wherever there was trouble. He went to the places which were most dangerous, but also to those not on the radar, where you wouldn’t expect anyone to show up. He was always willing to take risks in that direction.”
The area where Mr. Guzmán shot “Nostalgia for the Light” is barely 50 miles from the site of the mine accident and subsequent rescue of 33 miners that captivated the world’s attention last year. He filmed there extensively during the Allende era and incorporated footage of abandoned mining camps into “Nostalgia for the Light,” so he was not amused by what he viewed as the grandstanding of President Sebastián Piñera, which he said distracted attention from the real issues.
“Work conditions haven’t improved; there’s still no protection,” he said. “The rescue became a media show, but the real story will only come out in five years or so. Will the miners have been paid an indemnity? Will their quality of life have improved? Will there be a stronger law so that mines cannot be opened without an escape tunnel? Will they have medical care and social security, or will they still be living in poverty?”
Mr. Guzmán’s own relationship with his homeland, which he left after being imprisoned during the 1973 American-supported coup that overthrew Allende, remains complicated and ambiguous. As he notes, he has now “lived more time outside Chile than in it.” But he also remains profoundly connected by remembrances that he cannot — and does not want to — discard.
“I believe that each of us carries a mental knapsack, in which we store the memory of our parents, our first communion, the first day at school, graduation day, perhaps the death of those parents, the first girlfriend,” he said. “That never leaves. It’s stuck to us. So it really doesn’t matter where you are.”
A version of this article appeared in print on March 17, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition.
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http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-03-16/film/nostalgia-for-the-light-a-stark-ravishing-plea-for-remembrance/

“Nostalgia for the Light: A Stark, Ravishing Plea for Remembrance”

A A A Comments (1) By Michael Atkinson Wednesday, Mar 16 2011

Details

Nostalgia for the Light
Directed by Patricio Guzmán
Icarus Films
Opens March 18, IFC Center
Chile’s self-appointed, one-man Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Patricio Guzmán has devoted the past four decades to chronicling the short-lived Allende administration and the Pinochet dark ages that followed, long after his countrymen wanted him to stop. At first blush, though, his new documentary detours toward astronomy, landing rather Herzog-ishly in the Atacama Desert, the elevation and absolute dryness of which make it one of the globe’s optimal observatory locations. Guzmán uses the stars’ distance to ruminate on the nature of time—as in, everything, even light, even this, is in the past. He eventually winds his way around to how time has treated the ghost-town-turned-concentration-camp of Chacabuco, its ex-prisoners, the dumped bones of disappeared Pinochet victims, and the tough, striking old women who still scour the desert plateau on foot hunting for remains. Guzmán fugue-weaves all over the place, montage-cutting from the lunar surface to giant close-ups of calcified bone, and the film’s philosophical musings slowly funnel down into a silent yowl of rage and a desperate plea for remembrance. (If Guzmán is to be believed, Chileans have an even stronger urge to forget than Americans do.) Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Lightis most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker’s stubborn righteousness.

See Michael Atkinson’s review in InThese Times (May 2011), which reports on Guzman’s five films that focus on the theme of Allende, his overthrow by the Nixon Admin., the CIA,  and General Pinochet, and the Pinochet dictatorship, torture, disappearances, murders, and embrace of neo-liberal economics.. Particularly see his first in the series, THE BATTLE CRY (1975-79), on the “homicidal autocracy” of the Pinochet regime, 4 hours: the ascension of Allende and the “subsequent CIA-fueled coup that bloodied the streets.”   “The film is a scalding lesson in orchestrated class disaster and power-mad malice that should be required viewing for high schoolers everywhere.”  D

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WILPF: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom


Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

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This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (July 2008)
Founded in 1915, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is the oldest women's peace organization in the world.[citation needed] It is a non-profit non-governmental organization working "to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace" and to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation. WILPF has National Sections in 37 countries.
WILPF is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland and maintains a United Nations Office in New York City.

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[edit] Positions

WILPF envisions a world free of violence, poverty, pollution and dominance. WILPF stands for equality of all people in a world free of racism, sexism and homophobia; the building of a constructive peace through world disarmament; and the changing of government priorities to meet human needs. Their aims and principles are published at: http://www.wilpfinternational.org/AboutUs/index.htm#aims.
Broad areas of concern are:
  • Disarmament, Demilitarization and Good Governance
  • Environmental Sustainability
  • Global Economic Justice

[edit] History

The forerunner to WILPF, the Woman's Peace Party (WPP) was formed in January, 1915 in Washington, D.C. at a meeting called by Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. The approximately 3,000 women attendees approved a platform calling for the extension of suffrage to women and for a conference of neutral countries to offer continuous mediation as a way of ending war. WPP sent representatives to an International Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom, held in The Hague from April 28 to April 30, 1915. The Congress was organized by the German feminist Anita Augspurg (1857–1943), Germany's first female jurist, and Lida Gustava Heymann (1868–1943) at the invitation of the Dutch pacifist, feminist and suffragist Aletta Jacobs to protest against the war then raging in Europe, and to suggest ways to prevent war in the future. The Congress, attended by 1,136 participants from both neutral and belligerent nations, adopted much of the platform of WPP and established an International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP) with Jane Addams as president. WPP soon became of US Section of ICWPP.
Jane Addams met with President Woodrow Wilson and is said to have worked out some common ground on peace. However, at their 2nd international congress, held in Zürich in 1919, ICWPP denounced the final terms of the peace treaty ending World War I as a scheme of revenge of the victors over the vanquished that would sow the seeds of another world war. They decided to make their committee permanent and renamed it the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. WILPF moved its headquarters to Geneva to be near the proposed site of the League of Nations, although WILPF did not endorse empowering that organization to conduct food blockades or to use military pressure to enforce its resolutions.
Two WILPF leaders have received the Nobel Peace Prize for their peace efforts and international outlook and work with WILPF: Jane Addams, in 1931 and Emily Greene Balch in 1946.

[edit] WILPF and the United Nations

WILPF has had Consultative Status (category B) with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 1948 and has Special Consultative Relations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), as well as special relations with the International Labour Organization (ILO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations and agencies. WILPF has advocates and lobbies for the democratization of the UN, the Security Council and all other UN organizations and agencies; monitors Security Council and General Assembly activities in order to promote reforms; opposes the privatisation and corporatisation of the UN, especially the global compact with corporations; and advocates for the abolition of the Security Council veto.

[edit] PeaceWomen

PeaceWomen is a project of the WILPF, based out of their United Nations Office in New York City. Its mission is described on its website as follows:
The PeaceWomen Project promotes the role of women in preventing conflict, and the equal and full participation of women in all efforts to create and maintain international peace and security. PeaceWomen facilitates monitoring of the UN system, information sharing and the enabling of meaningful dialogue for positive impact on women’s lives in conflict and post-conflict environments.[1]
PeaceWomen's work focuses on six core areas of action to promote its mission: [1]
  • monitoring the UN Security Council’s implementation of SCR1325
  • providing a comprehensive online information source on women, peace and security at www.peacewomen.org
  • monitoring the UN system’s implementation of SCR1325
  • advocating for the rapid and full implementation of SCR1325 and related resolutions
  • managing the translation initiative and general outreach related to women, peace and security

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b About Us - PeaceWomen - A Project of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Retrieved 22 July 2010.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993) ISBN 0-8156-0269-3
  • Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Pioneers for Peace: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 1915-1965 (1965; Oxford: Alden Press, 1980) ISBN 0-9506968-0-3
  • Carrie A. Foster, The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915-1946 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995) ISBN 0-8156-2662-2
  • Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1989) ISBN 0-8203-1147-2

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_International_League_for_Peace_and_Freedom"
 
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