January/February 2009

Editorial
This issue comes out before our February meeting in York where our speaker will be Alun Morinan from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade [CAAT] so the emphasis will be on peace matters.
The work of Pax Christi is based on the gospel and inspired by faith. The three core values Pax Christi members place at the centre of their lives are: Peace, Reconciliation and Nonviolence. Rooted in Catholic Christianity it is, however, open to all who share its values and work. As a resource for those of us in the Justice & Peace movement it is invaluable. It works tirelessly, with minimum resources, which is why the annual collection on Peace Sunday is so important.
Chris Dove
Note: the views expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily coincide with those of the Commission

"Nuclear weapons - poor economics"
Pat Gaffney Gen. Sec. Pax Christi UK wrote an excellent letter to The Tablet in which she wrote: "Perhaps it is time to think critically about the whole instrument of war as a means to secure security and economic stability. Our existing models of economics and security cost the earth." Having noted that by the end of 2007 it is reckoned that the UK alone had spent £7 billion in operating expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan, she went on to highlight "the equally important but often hidden costs of war in these places - the social, environmental and human, and their impact will be for years to come - for the people of those countries and for families of our own armed forces.... What might £7 billion have done if spent on some of the real threats to security: domestic and global poverty, the destruction of the environment, resource wars over water, oil and mineral resources, a culture of fear and suspicion that leads to insecurity and the treatment of the other as an enemy.

Do we have to wait for another "crisis" before taking action for justice and peace in our world?"
Source: The Tablet 8 November 2008

It was interesting to see three retired British military commanders [Field marshal Lord Bramhall, Gen Lord Ramsbotham and Gen Sir Hugh Beach] calling for Trident to be scrapped as the independent deterrent has become “virtually irrelevant”. They called on Gordon Brown to spend the money saved on providing more funds for current operational commitments.
Source: The Times 16 January

Pax Christi's Peace Sunday leaflet made some very pertinent points based on the Pope's World Peace Day message: Combating Poverty : Building Peace. Under the heading 'The world needs works of mercy and justice - not works of war and destruction', Pax Christi make the following comparisons:
*750 million people go to bed hungry each night - world military expenditure for 2007 was £680 billion - that is £102 for each person in the world.
*2.1 billion people live on less than £1 a day - 26 million people were forced to leave home as a result of conflict.
*99% of maternal deaths occur in developing countries - in 2007 the UK spent 36.7 billion on defence and £4.5 billion on overseas development.
*the US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries - the cost of Trident, Britain's nuclear weapons system, is £2 billion a year.
*22% of the UK population live on low income - defined as less than 60% of median income - 80% of arms exports come from the USA, UK, Russia, France and Germany.
Depleted Uranium [DU] weapons
A Freedom of Information request from a CADU [Campaign against Depleted Uranium] supporter has revealed that the UK government has spent more than £375m
on up-dating anti-tank systems developed at the Royal Ordnance facilities at Birtley and Featherstone, AWE Aldermaston and the former AWE Cardiff.
Between March 10th and 14th 2008, the MoD and defence research company QinetiQ renewed the test firing of DU ammunition at the Dundrennan firing range near Kircudbright, Dumfries and Galloway, southern Scotland. The MoD claimed that the tests were necessary to monitor stocks of CHARM3 ammunition as they approach the end of their shelflife. CHARM3 120mm anti-tank ammunition is now the only type of uranium munition in use by UK forces.
News of the tests drew fierce condemnation from both the Scottish Nationalists and the Scottish Greens. Green Co-convener Robin Harper MSP said: “Depleted uranium shells leave behind the kind of pollution normally associated with dirty bombs, radioactive material that damages the environment and risks future health problems. There is no safe place to test these shells, and there is no appropriate battlefield to use them on either. The MoD should be ashamed of going back to Dundrennan with this discredited technology, and should instead commit to the ban requested by the European Parliament.” Also responding to the tests, an SNP spokesperson said: “When they were serving in areas where uranium weapons had been used, service personnel were issued with warning cards. That would suggest that the UK Government were well aware of the health problems associated with its use. We want to ask the Secretary of State for Defence about the UK’s position with regard to these international developments. The well being of the people and service personnel of Scotland is threatened.”
 Predictably the MoD denied that there was any danger:
“Agencies and regulatory bodies responsible for health and safety and environmental protection have agreed the arrangements. Comprehensive environmental monitoring programmes involving air, water, and soil sampling, have been in place at and around Kirkcudbright since the beginning of the DU munitions trials.”
DU contamination at Dundrennan has risen to its highest level for more than 10 years, according to a survey for the Ministry of Defence.
Soil on parts of the range is so contaminated that it breaches agreed safety limits. And the contamination is spreading, as DU fragments from shells misfired in the past start to corrode.
The contamination, revealed in a declassified scientific report passed to the Sunday Herald, was described as “very worrying” by Scottish environment minister Michael Russell: “The Scottish government was not adequately consulted on the test firing of DU shells at Kirkcudbright,” he said. “I have stated in the past that I am strongly opposed to the testing of such weapons on Scottish soil and this remains the case.”
More than 6000 DU shells were fired at the range near Dundrennan in Dumfries and Galloway between 1982 and 2004. Scientists from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire have been monitoring the Kirkcudbright range every year. According to their latest report, there was DU contamination in soil samples from three sites on the range. The highest registered 1384 millibecquerels of radioactivity per gram, which is worse than the contamination in any of the soil samples taken since comparable monitoring began in 1996. Two samples breached the “investigation level” agreed by the government’s Depleted Uranium Firing Environmental Review Committee.
Two other samples were above, or close to, the much higher “action level” agreed by the committee. Contamination at India Target on the range was “an order of magnitude higher than results obtained in previous years”, said the MoD report.The report also revealed that attempts to find DU shells which had misfired in the past had failed “despite extensive searching”.
Control measures prevented public access to the contaminated areas, it said, and radiation doses were assessed to be “negligible”. Environmental policy consultant, Dr David Lowry said: “Of course they say that no harm has been done, but we won’t know the full long-term effects of this contamination for years. We do know already that the DU shells fired in the invasion of Iraq have caused serious health implications.”
Source: Campaign against Depleted Uranium (CADU)

Cluster munitions
In the July/August 2008 newsletter I referred to the Dublin Conference and the good news that Gordon Brown had agreed to stop the use of these weapons. However, the treaty needed to be ratified by the 111 countries who signed up to the agreement. This happened in December, so please congratulate yourself if you wrote to your MP urging the government to act. Sadly the US refused to sign, and with Russia and China, America is one of the principal manufacturers and exporters of these weapons.
[So now we need to really press our MPs to get rid of DU weapons. Ed.]

Commission contacts
Barbara Hungin Chair 01642 784398
KateWard Secretary 01642 781676
Nan Saeki Treasurer 01904 783621
Chris Dove Editor 01947 825043
email: dove.whitby@phonecoop.coop
or 22 Blackburns Yard Whitby YO22 4DS
website www.middlesbroughjp.org

Please ….
As this is the first issue for 2009, may I ask for donations towards the cost of mailing copies? Out treasurer would be very pleased to receive donations.

Some further thoughts.
Nothing is more useless in developing a nation’s economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial
burden of war. King Hussein I of Jordan

The global arms trade, and its accompanying
glut of military spending, continues to represent the single most significant perversion of worldwide priorities known today. It buttresses wars, criminal activity and ethnic violence; destabilises emerging democracies; inflates military budgets to the detriment of health care, education and basic infrastructure; and exaggerates global relationships of inequality and underdevelopment.
Without massive and coordinated action, militarism will continue to be a scourge on our hopes for a more peaceful and just twenty-first century.
Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica, Nobel Peace Laureate

We cannot spend huge sums approximating to levels of military expenditure spent during the Cold War and expect development to make progress in eliminating poverty.”
Jayantha Dhanapala, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament.

A good read
We must all welcome President Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo facility and to forbid the use of torture and extraordinary rendition, which allowed the movement of detainees to foreign countries where they would be tortured.
A welcome Christmas present was a copy of 'An Imperfect Offering' by James Orbinski, Past President of Medécins sans Frontières, in which a chapter headed What you can do included these words:
The most important thing any of us can do is to actively and pragmatically assume our responsibilities as citizens, for the world we live in. In the first instance we can each support independent humanitarian action, and insist that in war governments and belligerents respect international humanitarian law, refugee law and the conventions prohibiting the use of torture. Beyond this, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.
Sadly our government is working out how we may withdraw from some of the restraints of the Human Rights legislation as far as refugees are concerned.

Middle East Solution?
The tragedy of the death and destruction in Gaza in recent weeks has highlighted the need to stop the flow of arms into the region. It will be no use preventing Hamas from replenishing their arms if Israel will continue to be supplied with vast quantities of much more powerful weapons from the USA.
My latest copy of the NCR reports that Israel has received an average of $2.7 bn a year in security assistance funding during the years of the Bush administration and as late as 2005 the amount of US military aid to Israel and Egypt alone represented a third of all US foreign aid.
In the same issue Rabbi Michael Lerner argues that “No country is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from a neighbouring territory day after day – say Mexico lobbying missiles into the USA.”
But Assistant Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Atalia Omer, an Israeli herself, says this is an invalid parallel as Hamas rockets are a mode of resisting an occupation as Israel controls the air, the sea and the checkpoints.
However Lerner goes on to argue that Israel, as the militarily superior power ought to take the first steps to end the conflict once and for all by:

1. Implementing a massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and the West Bank to end poverty and unemployment, and rebuild all that has been destroyed of the Palestinian infrastructure.

2. Dismantling the settlements or tell settlers they must become citizens of Palestine and live by the laws of
that state.

3. Accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees back into Israel each year for the next 30 years and offer to co-ordinate a world-wide effort to raise funds to compensate Palestinians for all they lost during the occupation.

4. Recognise a Palestinian state within borders already defined by the Geneva Accord of 2003.
Source: National Catholic Reporter 23 January.

Is it too much to hope that President Obama could help to move the countries in the dispute towards a settlement on these lines?

Count your blessings
I can’t recall where I read this and so cannot acknowledge the source, but nevertheless, think the sentiments are worth passing on.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who will not survive the week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people around the world.

If you have food in your refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy.

If your parents are still married and alive, you are very rare.

If you hold your head up with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read anything at all.