East Asian Pacifists Feel Lonely

By Kalinga Seneviratne

East Asia may either be the growth engine of the future, or the first nuclear battle field of the 21st century. It is to avoid the latter that NGOs from the region are seeking support from civil society groups at the WSF.

East Asian civil society is poorly represented here and a panel discussion titled 'Building East Asian Civil Society' held at PUC on Friday attracted only a few participants from outside the subregion. This shows the daunting task they face in building up international solidarity for a North East Asian Nuclear Free Zone (NEANZ) treaty.

The treaty that civil society groups from Japan and South Korea are promoting will include a declaration by Japan, South Korea and North Korea that they will not build or own nuclear weapons. A second part of this treaty will be an agreement where the US, China and Russia promise not to attack them with nuclear weapons.

"They (the two Koreas and Japan) share borders with these three nuclear weapon states and it is essential that they (the nuclear powers) give an undertaking not to attack as part of the (NEANZ) treaty," Emiko Ichinose from the Japanese Peace Boat currently anchored in Rio told TerraViva.

"We need to get this guarantee, before putting pressure on North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons. That way we could get rid of tension in the region," she added.

The East Asian NGOs are keen to drum up international support at the WSF for the idea, but, they admit that their civil society groups need to be more active in forums like this.

Tetsuji Tanaka from ATTAC, a Japanese NGO working with the WTO, environment and peace issues told the panel discussion that civil society groups started to function in Japan only in the early 1990s after the Japanese government and the people realised the important role European NGOs played at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

He said that Japanese NGOs are yet to attract the level of funding European NGOs get from domestic sources, but they are slowly making progress. There were only two Japanese delegates to the first WSF and today there are about 100 at Porto Alegre, he pointed out. And a recent peace rally in Tokyo in support of the NEANFZ attracted some 8,000 people.

Kim Choony of the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement explained that in South Korea, the civil society movement only began to grow in the 1992 to 1997 democratic reform period, but has become a very powerful force domestically. Their biggest success was the solidarity between over 900 civil society groups to pressure political parties to choose candidates who were not seen to be corrupt for the 2000 general elections.

"Civil society intervened at the party level to clean up the political system," she said. "Through our movement we got 80 percent of the candidates elected to congress."

Choony also said that at the presidential elections in December, civil society groups, especially the youth, were instrumental in the victory of Roh Moo-Hyun over the US-backed opposition candidate. But, she says that the time has come for Korean civil society groups to change their style from issues-based to strategy-based, so that they could play a more active role in the international arena.

Yujiun Lee from Green Korea United agreed. "Inside Korea we are well organised and the government and media take us seriously," he told TerraViva, adding that internationally they are handicapped by the lack of English language communication skills.

Lee, however, is confident that the Korean civil society movement will soon overcome this barrier and they will play a far more active role in the WSF next year in India. "People in Asia are slowly beginning to realise the importance of the WSF and we are going to get more involved next time. It’s going to happen," he added.