DISARMAMENT: Ban the Bomb Campaign Heads into 21st Century

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Nov 1 1999 (IPS) - The action by the US Senate in refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) will only spark new demands for nuclear disarmament in the new century, according to peace activists.

“This situation will create another movement; it will be the beginning of more activism by pacifists,” says Alejandro Calvillo, the executive director of Greenpeace Mexico.

Calvillo and other activists overseas say there are no immediate plans of action but they are certain that campaigns in the new year will convey the same message of the past: nuclear weapons remain a threat to world peace and security.

The activists say that street protests, like those in Mexico City after India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests last year, will not be the only strategy the anti-nuclear lobby hopes to pursue, suggesting changes have occurred within the ban-the-bomb movement.

Activists intend working within the establishment, governments in most cases, to agitate against another nuclear arms race.

Calvillo says his movement intends approaching the Mexican government in this regard and it expects a positive response, given the history of Mexico’s opposition to nuclear proliferation.

The Mexican government led the way in getting other Latin American regimes to agree on a treaty to keep the region free of nuclear weapons. It also has been a prominent player in the group known as the New Agenda Coalition (NAC) – which also includes Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden.

In June, the NAC issued a joint ministerial statement calling for the “speedy, final and total elimination of all nuclear weapons”.

In Europe, activists like Karel Koster also see a usefulness in working with sympathetic regimes.

“We have a very active NGO (non-governmental organisation) community trying to raise awareness of the problem amongst members of the public,” she told IPS after the US Senate vote.

“Part of our political establishment is also for the total elimination of nuclear weapons….the ruling Labour Party (in Britain) is very positive in this respect.”

For those who remember the raucous days of the Cold War era -when the streets of the world’s capitals were turned into stages for anti-nuclear demonstrations and governments were perceived as “the enemy”, the current response served as a significant indicator that times have changed.

This metamorphosis does not surprise people like Jan Oberg, director of the European-based Transnational Foundation.

Oberg notes in an essay titled ‘Peace Work and Movements at the Turn of the Century’ that individual exhaustion among activists surfaced soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“The peace movement was a major force for changing people’s attitudes and undermining the two-bloc Cold War system,” says Oberg. “However activists were taken by surprise, as was everybody else, at the crumbling of the Soviet empire and the rapidity of change in the political environment. They were outmaneuvered as quite a few nuclear arms disappeared.”

There also is a generation factor as, according to Oberg, the anti-nuclear movement was populated at its height by those who grew up during the Cold War years in the 1950s and people in the “flowery, youth, rebellious Sixties”.

“Like everybody else,” he observes, “they grew older. Thus, quite a few dropped out of the movements, put on a tie, bought a house, started a career (quite often in the state apparatus they had protested against); in short, conformed to the reality that be – and quite comfortably so.”

Furthermore, ideology also has some bearing. The political Left, which gave leadership during the Cold War years, was “struck by a crisis” when the Soviet empire was dismantled. The political currents that followed lacked the clear definition of a world that had been divided hitherto into two political camps.

But not all activists have decamped. Those with the fire still burning in them moved on to more pressing issues that had entered the global consciousness. They gave energy and leadership to movements such as the “environment, feminism, human rights, New Age and various kinds spiritual, soul-searching individual endeavours.”

The role of these NGOs in shaping public policy was acknowledged during a panel discussion last week, to mark the UN’s “Disarmament Week” programme.

Huang Yu, a director of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, emphasised “the key role of the NGOs” to get member states of the UN to ratify the treaty on chemical weapons.

At the same gathering Daryl Kimball, of the Washington-based Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, said that the US Senate’s decision to vote against the treaty was “a blow to international security”.

Other delegates agreed that the senate’s action had undermined the progress that had been made over the past five to 10 years toward outlawing nuclear weapons.

The CTBT, signed in 1996, bans all nuclear weapons explosions, including those for peaceful purposes and those conducted underground. The Senate’s refusal to ratify it, however, stalled international efforts to bring the treaty – signed by 154 nations – into force.

It was to avoid this happening that prompted the leaders of France, Britain and Germany to publish a joint letter in the ‘New York Times’ prior to the US vote, pleading for the senators to join other countries who have ratified the treaty.

For peace activists, their appeal will not go unheeded.

They are the governments to which the anti-nuclear lobby will be turning in their campaign to avoid another nuclear arms race, demonstrating in the process the new face of the international peace movement.

As Calvillo says, “There are pacifists in governments now!”