Auteur/autrice : Heidi Barathieu-Brun

Sir Bill Morris – England

Linked with our presentations of TGWU – England, and with Migrant workers ‘boost UK growth’. See also Remembering British Unions.

He says: « I’m not sure that it [is] at the moment, given the march to mega-unions and mega-mergers », and: « I’ve watched the last two Labour Party conferences and the debate, and it seems to me that trade unions have an agenda not to promote some of the policy issues, but merely to defeat the government, defeat the platform ». (See on BBCnews, June 9, 2006).

Sir Bill Morris – England

Excerpt: … A delegation from Jamaica attended, headed by Senator Delano Franklin, Minister of State for Diaspora Affairs, along with Mr Ed Bartlett, representing the Jamaica Labour Party. The keynote address was given by Sir Bill Morris, Chancellor of UTech and a champion of the diaspora in the UK. It was an inspiring gathering of Jamaicans, eager to stand up and be counted … (see on the Jamaica Observer, June 12, 2006).

Excerpt: … Sir Bill Morris, the former union leader who headed an inquiry into professional standards in the Metropolitan Police, said it was essential that armed officers who were asked to confront suicide bombers should be confident that they had public support. Sir Bill Morris: ‘This is detracting from the fight against terrorism’ He denounced the squabbling that followed the leak of confidential witness statements gathered for the investigation being conducted by
the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) … (Read all on Google Group uk.politics.misc).

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Anica Mikus Kos – Slovenia

Linked with our presentation of The Medical Network for Social Reconstruction in the Former Yugoslavia, and of The Scope and Benefits of Youth Volunteering.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « The role of mental health professionals in war-related situations is to transfer knowledge and experience to parents, teachers, and others who are working to improve the quality of a child’s life. »

Anica Mikus Kos – Slovenia

She works for the Foundation « Together, » a Regional Center for the Psychosocial Well-Being of Children.

Read first this text about Community based approaches to mental health protection in the post war situation from Anica Mikus Kos.

Read also Case Study: Therapeutic Activities in Schools for Refugee Children in Slovenia (1992-1995).

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Blanca Campoverde – Ecuador

Linked with our presentation of the Fundacion Ninez y Vida, and linked with our presentation of Ecuador’s NGOs.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: “We can only contribute to the peace in the world with human qualities.”

Blanca Campoverde – Ecuador

She works for the ‘Fundación Niñez y Vida–Tierra de Hombres Ecuador‘.

This year, she will complete 50 years of life. Thirty of them were spent educating the children of underprivileged classes. Blanca Campoverde, early orphan and adolescent mother, came from a poor family. Now she is one of the most important figures in the education sector in her country. She directs the Fundación Niñez y Vida (Childhood and Life Foundation), an organization that takes care of the education and health of children and youth.“Blanca is a very special person with a great intelligence. She has taught herself so well that people even ask her in what university she has studied. And she is so dynamic that Edmond Kaiser, the founder of the non-governmental organization Tierra de Hombres (Terre des Hommes), immediately accepted her application and made her director of the day care center he founded in Quito.”, says Florence de Goumoëns, a Swiss educator, about the Ecuadorian educator Blanca Campoverde.

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Margarita Assenova – USA & Bulgaria

Margarita Assenova is a political analyst and journalist, who served as a research consultant for the CSIS Eastern Europe Project.

Margarita Assenova – USA & Bulgaria

Read this interview on ngoCHR about the theme The Commission is too soft on dictatorships.

Accompanying human rights activists to protect them from danger Liam Mahony, Peace Brigades International, USA Peace Brigades International (PBI) sends international observers to accompany human rights activists who are threatened by the government or paramilitary organizations. They serve as a reminder to perpetrators of human rights abuse that the international community is watching. In the event of an abduction, the observer alerts authorities in the country, their own native government and activists around the world. This brings the influence of the foreigner’s government and international contacts to bear on the perpetrators. Although the volunteers are the most visible symbol of the accompaniment tactic, the success of the approach depends on an international awareness of the situation through an extensive support network of concerned individuals and supporting organizations. This network is ready to apply special pressure in crisis situations involving PBI volunteers and the people they are protecting. Through e-mails, faxes and letters sent to authorities in the country in which the crisis is occurring, the recipients are made aware that the eyes of the international community are upon them. In selective situations, PBI also uses a high-level alert network of influential political and diplomatic authorities when it wishes to apply potent pressure. These are people who have especially strong influence on the government authorities in the country concerned. Margarita Assenova is one of them. (Read more on NewTactics).

Read her article Educating the European Way.

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Irene Morada Santiago – Philippines

She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: “A just peace is not achievable, nor is it sustainable without the energies, dreams, imagination and inspiration of women.”

Irene Morada Santiago – Philippines

She works for the Mindanao Commission on Women; the Mothers for Peace Movement; and the Institute for Women’s Leadership.

For 30 years, Irene Morada Santiago has been at the forefront of efforts to improve the status of women in the Philippines and the world. Starting as a grassroots organizer of minority Muslim women in southern Philippines, she has worked on issues of poverty, peace and conflict, politics and governance, empowering women so they are taken seriously and are placed in major decision-making positions. She was the executive director of the highly successful NGO Forum on Women 1995 in China, which will be remembered for its impact on the issues that confronted women at the end of the 20th century. Irene Morada Santiago still remembers the day two drunken soldiers broke into the seminar hall and opened fire with their M-16 rifles. In front of her, about 20 women and 23 children cowered for safety, terrified. “I had never seen so many scared women and children in my life,” says Irene. “And I felt responsible.” It was in the mid-1970s and at the height of the secessionist rebellion waged by the Moro National Liberation Front against the Philippine government. Martial law had been declared in 1972.

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Index June 2006

Ronald V. Dellums – USA

He says as Major-elect: “We can solve the problems of Oakland. We can be a great city.” And: “I accept this responsibility with honor, humility, optimism and idealism,” Dellums said. “We can solve the problems of Oakland. We can be a great city.” (See People’s Weekly World).

He said: « What am I ducking about? I am equal to you intellectually, I am equal to you as a human being. I respect you, you respect me. And in an honest discourse in a free and open society, I have to have the right to step up and define who I am. What gives you the right to define who I am? I am not here to judge you, who are you to judge me? And if we’re going to deal with each other in a free and open society with a legitimate exchange of ideas in the marketplace, then I cannot put myself in a second-class role to you to allow you to assume the capacity to even think that you could judge me. So if I’m not going to judge you and you don’t judge me, now there are two equals in discourse. So I don’t accept the labels that you place upon me. And if there are other people out there who are wondering what all these labels are about, let me tell you who I am. » (See the whole interview on berkeley interview).

He was legislating for the people, as a U.S. Representative from California from 1971 until 1999.

See also R.V.Dellums Homepage.

Ronald V. Dellums – USA

The contest between Dellums and De La Fuente — Oakland’s longtime City Council president — triggered a debate over Oakland’s civic identity and a referendum on the eight-year tenure of outgoing Mayor Jerry Brown. While race per se was not an issue, class was. A housing and development boom under Brown forced out many lower-income residents, mainly African Americans, while more middle-class residents moved in. The result was an expanded tax base that boosted business activity in Oakland, but simultaneously left many lower-income residents feeling excluded. For poorer residents, Oakland is in crisis, with violent crime increasing and the schools in state receivership.

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Erzsebet Turos – Romania

She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « Considering the disastrous situation of care when I first started working here, we have made progress and to me the future looks optimistic. »

Erzsebet Turos – Romania

She is working in the Psychiatric Hospital Borsa.

Erzsebet Turos has worked as a general practitioner in a psychiatric hospital in Borsa in Cluj county, Romania, for several years. When Dr. Turos arrived, the hospital was pure horror and passive euthanasia was repeatedly taking place. Dr. Turos is highly appreciated by the 230 patients for her care and help. She has instituted occupational therapy and social activities where before there were none. Since December 2002, she has been cooperating with the German association Beclean e.V, which was founded by the staff of a psychiatric hospital in southern Germany to provide help to Romania.Erzsebet Turos has been working in the psychiatric hospital in Borsa for the past nine years. When she started to work, there were 215 chronic psychiatric patients with different diagnoses: schizophrenia, alcoholism, epilepsy and dementia. For these patients there were only two doctors: a psychiatrist who is also the general director of the hospital and another general physician, a woman who left the hospital shortly after Dr. Turos arrived. Since then, no other physician has come to work in Borsa.
The hospital is in an old castle, which belonged before the Communist era to a family of barons. It is the only chronic psychiatric hospital in Cluj county.

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Nang Charm Tong – Burma

Linked with our presentation of A Petition.

She says: « I told myself I had to do my best because I was the voice of the people and their suffering. I almost cried during the presentation, and time was so short, and my voice was shaking … » (Read on UNPO).

Read here about the World Pace Forum 2006 in Vancouver.

Nang Charm Tong – Burma

At age 16, Nang Charm Tong began working with human rights groups, interviewing sex workers, illegal migrants, HIV patients and rape victims. The following year, she spoke in Geneva on their behalf—and still speaks, in four languages, with the poise and confidence of a mature woman. (Read this long article on TIME).

Forum aims to give peace a chance – Thousands of delegates to spend five days in Vancouver discussing global challenges. (Read this article on NATIONAL).

She is one of the 1000 women proposed fort the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

Nang Charm Tong’s parents were so concerned for her safety in Burma that they sent their daughter across the border into Thailand at the age of 6, where she grew up in an orphanage – never to return home to Shan State. Over the years, atrocities against the Shan and other ethnic minorities by the Burmese military regime have produced a steady flow of refugees across the border. Nang Charm Tong, as witness to these women and children, began to advocate for their rights as a teenager. Now, at 23, she is a veteran activist and a winner of the 2005 Reebok Human Rights Award. (Read more on Christian Science Monitor).

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William Blum – USA

William Blum is an author and critic of United States foreign policy. A former State Department employee, he left in 1967 due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. His work devotes substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. Blum describes himself as a socialist and has supported Ralph Nader’s presidential campaigns. From 1972 to 1973 Blum was in Chile, where he reported on the Allende government’s « socialist experiment ». In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex- CIA and KGB agent Philip Agee and his associates. Agee wrote a scathing critique of CIA operations in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. (See wikipedia).

He writes: If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy of the past century, this is what crawls out … invasions … bombings … overthrowing governments … suppressing movements for social change … assassinating political leaders … perverting
elections … manipulating labor unions … manufacturing « news » … death squads … torture … biological warfare … depleted uranium … drug trafficking … mercenaries … It’s not a pretty picture. It is enough to give imperialism a bad name … (See this on his Homepage).

William Blum – USA

« It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: « You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was ‘to be as rich and as wise as an American’. What happened? » An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by country, intervention by intervention. » William Blum. (See Third World Traveler).

See also: Biography and more.

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