A throng of people at the Kariakoo business hub in Dar es Salaam, where air pollution is rampant. Credit: Kizito Makoye Shigela/IPS

By Kizito Makoye
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania , Sep 24 2025 (IPS)

On a hot afternoon in Kariakoo, Dar es Salaam’s bustling commercial hub, the air is a swirling mix of diesel exhaust, charcoal smoke and dust kicked up by the shuffle of feet. Traders tie handkerchiefs over their noses to deter haze from drifting into their throats and lungs.

“There are just too many cars—the toxic smoke makes it hard to breathe,” says Abdul Hassan, a vegetable vendor who has worked in the market for 19 years.

A new study by the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and the Stockholm Environment Institute, published in Clean Air Journal, has confirmed what many city dwellers already know: the air is toxic. Real-time data collected from 14 monitoring stations across Dar es Salaam between May 2021 and February 2022 showed concentrations of particulate matter—PM2.5 and PM10 — consistently exceeded World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. At their peak, daily PM2.5 levels reached 130 µg/m³, more than eight times the WHO’s recommended limit.

These findings place Dar es Salaam firmly within the global air pollution crisis, underscoring the urgent need to deliver on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.9.1, which calls for a substantial reduction in deaths and illnesses from hazardous air.

“Air pollution is not an invisible issue—you can smell it and feel it in your lungs,” said Neema John, a street cook who works near Kariakoo market. “My children cough all night when the smoke from burning dumps drifts into our house.”

A Silent Killer

The study shows that people living near dumpsites, busy roads, and industrial zones face the greatest risks. At the Pugu Dampo landfill, particulate concentrations reached staggering levels—up to 2,762 µg/m³ for PM10—during months of uncontrolled waste burning. In Ilala and Kinondoni, home to factories and major intersections, daily averages were consistently above safe limits.

Health experts warn that such exposure is linked to asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, and premature deaths. In Tanzania, respiratory infections are a leading cause of hospital visits and child mortality.

“This is a public health emergency hiding in plain sight,” said Linus Chuwa, a Dar es Salaam–based public health specialist.

“When PM2.5 levels exceed WHO standards by such margins, they potentially inflict long-term damage to people’s health.”

Energy Poverty and Dirty Fuels

But the problem does not only stem from traffic and industry. According to the study, Dar es Salaam consumes nearly half of Tanzania’s total charcoal each year. With only 34 percent of the country’s electricity generated from clean hydropower, most households rely on charcoal and firewood.

This reliance on dirty fuels undermines SDG target 7.1.2, which aims to ensure access to clean energy for cooking and heating.

“For families, charcoal is cheaper and more accessible, but the smoke fills homes with toxic particles,” said Fatma Suleiman, who lives in the densely populated suburb of Mbagala. “We know it’s dangerous, but it is the only cheaper alternative?”

The Urban Sustainability Challenge

Dar es Salaam is one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities, its population now above six million. Its rapid sprawl, unregulated industries, and congested roads make it a typical example of the challenges captured under SDG target 11.6.2: reducing the environmental impact of cities by improving air quality.

The study found that during peak hours—6 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.—air pollution levels in traffic and industrial zones spiked sharply. Conversely, concentrations dropped during holidays, highlighting how transport and industrial activities drive emissions.

Policy efforts exist: the Bus Rapid Transit system and Standard Gauge Railway aim to reduce vehicle emissions, while Tanzania has signed onto regional and global clean air initiatives. Yet enforcement of air quality standards remains weak. The 2007 Air Quality Regulations are rarely applied, and monitoring remains limited.

A Boiling Cauldron

The warnings resonate most on Kongo Street, Kariakoo’s most notorious artery. Here, thousands push through a maze of wooden stalls while hawkers bellow prices, competing with the roar of motorbikes and rattling carts.

“You breathe smoke, dust, and even the stench from garbage that never seems to get collected,” said Mwanaidi Salum, a mother of three. “When I blow my nose, it’s black from dust and smoke.”

Although the study has identified other hotspots for  air pollution, the combination of heavy traffic, open-air cooking fires, and uncollected waste makes it a microcosm of the city’s pollution crisis.

Navigating Chaos, Swallowing Fumes

Cars and motorbikes lurch forward, horns blaring, leaving behind thick plumes of exhaust. Pedestrians leap aside, clutching bags to their chests. Wooden carts piled high with rice, bananas, and bales of used clothing block every path.

Researchers warn that children, street vendors, and the elderly are especially vulnerable to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

Jacqueline Senyagwa, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said the findings from Dar es Salaam expose risks that are far from abstract.

“While our study did not collect medical data, the air quality records we obtained from 14 monitoring stations clearly showed very high concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10—several times above the World Health Organization’s safe limits,” she explained. “Globally, long-term exposure to such particles is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, particularly among children and the elderly. We are talking about asthma, lung diseases, heart failure, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”

She noted that air pollution has become one of the biggest drivers of non-communicable diseases worldwide. “According to the WHO, it is the second-highest cause of non-communicable diseases globally. That should be a wake-up call for Tanzania.”

Yet despite these dangers, Senyagwa said Tanzania still lacks a robust national framework for air quality monitoring. “There are several reasons. First, there is limited awareness of the health impacts of air pollution among the public, policymakers, and regulators,” she said. “Solid waste is visible, and people demand action. But air pollution is invisible, and its effects take years to show, so action is often delayed.”

Technical capacity and resources are also a challenge.

“There are very few air quality experts in Tanzania, and most monitoring equipment has to be imported,” she noted. “Institutions like the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology have only recently started fabricating local monitors. On top of that, the mandates of public agencies are fragmented. NEMC, for example, is responsible for regulating air quality, but with limited human and financial resources, enforcement has been minimal.”

According to Senyagwa, even the data itself is scarce. “The 14 stations we installed represent some of the very first ambient air monitoring efforts in the country,” she said. “Without reliable data, many decision-makers underestimate the scale of the problem.”

Her team identified clear hotspots. “At the Pugu Dampo dumpsite, the main source is open waste burning, which produces dangerously high levels of particulates,” she said. “In Vingunguti, the pollution largely comes from industries and road traffic. And in Magomeni and other crowded residential areas, vehicle emissions are the biggest culprit.”

Still, she pointed out that practical interventions do exist.

“The government’s investment in the Bus Rapid Transit system is a positive step because reducing traffic will cut emissions,” she said. “We’ve also carried out awareness campaigns with local communities—from advising waste pickers at Pugu to wear masks and stop random fires to working with schoolchildren in Vingunguti alongside partners like Save the Children Tanzania and Muhimbili College of Health Sciences.”

Dar es Salaam’s air quality crisis, she stressed, is not unique. “When we compare our results with Kampala, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa, the pattern is very similar. PM2.5 and PM10 levels across these cities also exceed WHO limits,” Senyagwa said.

Still, Tanzania can learn from regional peers. “Nairobi has gone further by passing a County Air Quality Act in 2022 and rolling out low-cost sensors across the city,” she said. “In Uganda, Kampala University has started fabricating its own sensors, while the Kampala Capital City Authority has already developed a clean air action plan. Addis Ababa is moving towards tougher vehicle emission standards.”

“These examples show that solutions are possible,” Senyagwa added. “But Tanzania must first recognize air pollution as a major public health threat—and act with the urgency it deserves.”

Plan of Action

The authors recommend a robust national monitoring framework, stronger enforcement of emission standards, and investment in waste recycling and composting to reduce open burning. Public awareness campaigns on air pollution’s health risks, they argue, are equally vital.

For the city’s dwellers, however, the need is urgent and personal. “We can’t keep raising children in an environment where every breath is dangerous,” said Hassan.

Unless Tanzania addresses dirty energy and unchecked urban pollution, its economic gains risk being overshadowed by rising health costs and declining quality of life.

Yet despite the looming health risks, life goes on at Kariakoo, even as the air grows harder to breathe.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Fiji is a Pacific Island nation renowned for its tourism industry, but it has also endured four armed coups and 38 years of political instability. Credit: Julie Lyn

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Aug 14 2025 (IPS)

Fiji, a nation located west of Tonga in the central Pacific, is renowned for its natural beauty and beach resorts. But for 38 years it has endured a political rollercoaster of instability with four armed coups that overturned democratically elected governments and eroded human rights.

Now, following a peaceful transition of power at the last 2022 election, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and his coalition government want to deal with the past with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to pave the way for a more peaceful and resilient future.

The commission will “facilitate open and free engagement in truth-telling regarding the political upheavals during the coup periods and promote closure and healing for the survivors,” Rabuka, who led the first coup, told parliament before supporting legislation that was passed in December last year. Now he has pledged to oversee the country’s reconciliation and return to democratic norms.

The TRC is tasked with investigating what happened during the coups d’état of 1987, 2000 and 2006, related human rights abuses and the grievances that have driven the relentless struggle for power between Fiji’s indigenous and Indo-Fijian communities. Its focus is on truth-telling and preventing a repetition of conflict; it will not prosecute perpetrators of abuses or provide reparations to victims.

“This commission aims to serve the people of Fiji to come to terms with your own history… the purpose is not to put blame and to deepen the trauma and the difficulties, but to help the people of Fiji to move on for a better future for everyone,” Dr. Marcus Brand, the TRC chairman, who has extensive experience with transitional justice initiatives and held senior roles in the United Nations and European Union, said in January.

He is joined by four Fijian commissioners, namely former High Court Judge Sekove Naqiolevu, former TV journalist Rachna Nath, former Fiji Airways Captain Rajendra Dass, and leadership expert Ana Laqeretabua.

The Fiji Parliament, Suva, Fiji. Credit: Josuamudreilagi

Florence Swamy, Executive Director of the Pacific Centre for Peacebuilding, a non-governmental organization based in the capital, Suva, told IPS that the TRC is important to building trust in the country, where many people still experience fear and anxiety about the violence they witnessed.

“As a first step, it is creating a safe space for people to talk about what happened to them,” she emphasized.

Fiji’s political turmoil has roots in the past. British colonization in the nineteenth century was accompanied by policies that were intended to strengthen indigenous land rights and prevent dispossession, rights that were reinforced in Fiji’s first constitution at Independence in 1970.

But, at the same time, Fijian society was irrevocably changed by the organized immigration of Indians to work on sugar plantations and boost development of the colony. By the mid-twentieth century, the Indo-Fijian population was larger than the indigenous community and their demands for equal rights increased.

“Fijian Indians were brought to the country, in many cases, under the false pretense of better work and wage opportunities, to develop the economy of Fiji…while indigenous Fijians were hardly consulted about such a momentous decision,” Dr. Shailendra Singh, Head of Journalism at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, told IPS.

Soon the country’s politics were mired in a fierce contest for power. And in 1987, Rabuka, then an officer in the Fiji military, led the overthrow of the first elected Indo-Fijian government under Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra.

Rabuka then became Prime Minister from 1992 to 1999 before another Indo-Fijian government, led by Mahendra Chaudhry, was voted in. This triggered a second coup instigated by nationalist George Speight in 2000 in which the government was held hostage in the nation’s parliament for weeks. Then, in 2006, Frank Bainimarama, head of the armed forces, orchestrated the third coup, which he claimed was necessary to eliminate corruption and divisive policies in the government of the day presided over by Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase. For the next eight years he oversaw an authoritarian military government until democratic elections were held again in 2014.

Fiji’s capital city Suva. Credit: Maksym Kozlenko

The coups inflicted a significant human cost. Lawlessness, inter-community violence, military and police brutality, and arrests and torture of people critical of the regime occurred increasingly after 2006.

Three years later, Amnesty International called for “an immediate halt to all human rights violations by members of the security forces and government officials, including the arbitrary arrests, intimidation and threats, and assaults and detentions of journalists, government critics and others.” It also called for the repeal of the Public Emergency Regulations imposed by the government in 2009 that led to impunity for state officials involved in abuses.

Today, the demographic balance has shifted again in the wake of an outward exodus of Indo-Fijians, who now comprise about 33 percent of Fiji’s population of about 900,000, while Melanesians constitute about 56 percent. But societal divisions remain entrenched and the past has not been forgotten.

The commission is now preparing to hold hearings over the next 18 months. And Rabuka has promised to be one of the first to testify of his involvement in the political upheavals.

I will swear to say everything, the truth… I want to continue to live with a clear conscience. I want people to know that at least they understand my reasons for doing it,” he told the media in January. But the TRC also promises to place victims and survivors at the center of its mission, claiming that “their lived experiences are vital to fostering accountability, encouraging healing and building a more united and compassionate society.”

However, there are voices of caution, too, warning of the risks of reviving memories of conflict and pain and the need to prevent this from inflaming divisions.

While experts in the country speak of the need to go beyond the TRC and tackle structural issues of inequality and disenfranchisement, which have driven community grievances, “to make everyone feel a sense of belonging and loyalty to the country of their birth,” Singh said.

In particular, “indigenous fears concerning political dominance in Fiji” and “Indo-Fijians’ feeling of being marginalized by the state and not treated as equal citizens” need to be addressed, he continued.

The Fijian armed forces, which played a decisive role in executing the coups, often justifying their actions in protecting Fiji’s internal order, are also critical to the success of the country’s return to democratic governance.

In 2023 an internal reconciliation process began, aimed at ending military intervention in the country’s politics and elections. In April, during an official meeting with the TRC, the military leadership pledged ‘to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated, and that its role as a guardian of Fiji’s constitutional order remains anchored in service to all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, background or political belief.’

After the commission has concluded its estimated two years of work, it will make recommendations in its final report for public measures and policy reforms to support the country’s social cohesion. Here Swamy emphasizes that it is crucial the recommendations do not remain on paper but are acted on.

“In terms of the recommendations, who will be responsible for them? Will they ensure that the recommendations are implemented? And what mechanisms will be put in place to make sure that institutions are held accountable?” she declared.

Looking into the future, Swamy said that she would like to see her country become one “where everyone feels safe, where there is equal opportunity… a country where everyone can realize their potential.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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A mother receives a birth certificate for her youngest child in the village of Bindia, East Cameroon. Photo credit: UNICEF/Dejongh

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jun 17 2025 (IPS)

Registering the birth of a newborn, which is taken for granted in many countries, has profound lifelong repercussions for a child’s health, protection, and well-being. But after initially increasing this century, the global birth registration rate has declined in the past ten years, with some countries in the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa facing significant challenges. Embracing new registration technologies, increasing political will, and increasing parents’ understanding of its importance are paramount to reversing the trend.

Today about 75 percent of all children aged under 5 years are registered, up from 60 percent in 2000, reports the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

But Bhaskar Mishra, Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF Headquarters in New York, told IPS that a recent slowdown is due to persistent challenges.

“Rapid population growth, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, is outpacing registration systems. Weak infrastructure, limited funding, and low political prioritization have also contributed to the stagnation. Additionally, families often face barriers such as high fees, complex procedures, and limited access,” he said.

Some of these hurdles exist in East Africa, where the birth registration rate is 41 percent and the Pacific Islands where it is 26 percent. At the country level, it varies from 29 percent in Tanzania to 13 percent in Papua New Guinea and 3 percent in Somalia and Ethiopia. Of an estimated 654 million children aged under five years in the world, about 166 million are unregistered and 237 do not have a birth certificate.

In Papua New Guinea, the birth registration rate is being raised with the aid of mobile registration, an important means to reach rural and remote communities and help protect children living in vulnerable circumstances. Mangem IDP Camp, Madang Province, PNG. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

“Systemic and social obstacles, exacerbated by the lingering effects of COVID-19, which reversed gains achieved in previous years, mean that progress must accelerate fivefold to meet the Sustainable Development Goal target of universal birth registration by 2030,” Mishra emphasized.

One country that is striving to meet the challenge is Papua New Guinea (PNG). The most populous Pacific Island nation of about 11 million people comprises far-flung islands and an epic mountain range on the mainland where people’s daily hardships include extreme terrain, lack of roads, and unreliable transportation.

More than 80 percent of people live in rural areas and, in Madang Province, in the northeast of the country, the Country Women’s Association has worked to increase maternal and health awareness among pregnant women.

“Some don’t have access to health facilities as they are in very remote areas and it takes hours to get to a health facility, so all births are done in the village. But health facilities in some communities are rundown, there is no maintenance on the infrastructure and no health workers on the ground, so that is the most challenging,” Tabitha Waka at the association’s Madang Branch told IPS.

For a mother, recording the birth of her baby could entail long journeys in community buses along dirt tracks and unsealed roads to the registration office, along with the cost of the fares.

“Lack of information is another challenge. These rural mothers don’t have this kind of helpful information and they don’t know the importance of birth registration. And, in some communities, due to traditions and customs, they only allow mothers to give birth in the village,” Waka continued. Just over half of all births in PNG take place in a healthcare facility, according to the government.

Births are registered and birth certificates issued to mothers at Nijereng Primary Health Centre, Adamawa State, Nigeria. Photo credit: UNICEF/Esiebo

But the country has made significant strides and, from 2023 to 2024, more than doubled the distribution of birth certificates from 26,000 to 78,000. Last July, 44 handheld mobile registration devices were supplied by UNICEF to the government and field officers have started a massive outreach mission to record births in local communities.

Then in December, the PNG Parliament passed a new bill to develop the national Civil and Identity Registry. “The Pangu-led government is a responsible government with policies based on inclusivity across the country… accurate and reliable identity information on our people is significantly vital for enabling effective service delivery and for their social well-being,” PNG’s Prime Minister, James Marape, told media in November.

There is already tangible progress, but the government’s goal to register up to half a million births every year “will require scaling up technology. The kits need to be deployed nationwide, especially in remote areas, and decentralizing certificate issuance,” Paula Vargas, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection in PNG told IPS. “There are bottlenecks in the process. For example, there is just one person in PNG authorized to manually sign birth certificates.”

On the other side of the world, more than half of all unregistered children live in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Ethiopia, among other countries in the region, is grappling with similar issues.

Located on the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is more than twice the size of PNG and has a high birth rate of 32 births per 1,000 people, compared to the global average of 16. Here the majority of Ethiopia’s more than 119 million people also live in vast and remote regions.

But while birth registration is free and the government is training healthcare extension workers in the procedures, the urban-rural divide persists. The burden on rural parents of multiple visits, with long distances and costs, required to complete registration is impeding progress.  The birth registration rate in the rural Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNP) is 3 percent, which is the national average, compared to 24 percent in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Dr. Tariku Nigatu, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Ethiopia’s University of Gondar, told IPS that improvements could be driven by “integrating the registration service with the health system, [increasing] availability of resources to support interventions to boost birth registration and infrastructure for real-time or near real-time reporting of births.”

UNICEF has also assisted Ethiopia in deploying mobile registration kits to healthcare workers in remote communities, including those experiencing instability, “ensuring that children born during emergencies or while displaced are not excluded from legal identity and protection,” Mishra said. Currently a humanitarian crisis and insecurity are affecting people’s lives in the northern Tigray region following a civil war from 2020-2022.

Lack of understanding and misconceptions about birth registration also need to be addressed, Nigatu emphasized.

Birth registration is the first step to reducing the risk of children being exploited, abused, trafficked and coerced into child marriage. A young mother in Mozambique ensures her newborn is protected with a birth certificate and legal identity. Photo credit: UNICEF/Fauvrelle

“There are myths in some communities that counting the newborn as ‘a person’ at an early age could bring bad luck to the newborn. They do not consider the child worthy of counting before people know it even survives the neonatal period,” he said. This is partly due to the country’s high neonatal mortality of 30 in every 1,000 live births, with around half occurring within 24 hours after birth, he explained.

Messaging also needs to reinforce how birth registration is of lifelong importance to a child. There are high risks and human disadvantages for the uncounted millions of children without an official existence. They will have a greater fight to rise out of poverty, to resist sexual exploitation, abuse, child labor, and human trafficking, and to access legal protection, voting rights, even formal employment, and property ownership.

But birth registration is only the first step to their protection and well-being.

“It only works when backed by strong systems and services. This includes linking registration to services such as immunizations, hospital births, and school enrollment,” Mishra said.

In the wider context, having accurate birth and population data is essential for governments to plan public services and national development and equally critical to assessing progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

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Children beg for food in Gusau, the capital of Zamfara, Nigeria. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

By Promise Eze
ABUJA, Jan 29 2025 (IPS)

In June 2024, 26-year-old Zainab Abdul noticed her two-year-old daughter growing pale, losing weight, and battling diarrhea. She wasn’t surprised. Since jihadist-linked bandits had forced them out of their village in Kadadaba, Zamfara State, in northwestern Nigeria, her family had been living in a refugee camp with limited access to food.

Abdul’s fears were confirmed at a center run by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where she was told her baby was suffering from acute malnutrition.

“I received ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), and it helped her a lot. She felt relief as they gave her injections, medicine and milk. As you can see, she’s now recovering gradually, unlike before,” Abdul told IPS.

While Abdul’s baby survived malnutrition, many others are not as fortunate. Nigeria is grappling with a severe malnutrition crisis, particularly in the northern region, where poverty, food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and soaring living costs are widespread. The country has one of the world’s highest rates of stunted growth among children, with 32 percent of those under five affected.

According to UNICEF, malnutrition impacts 2 million children in Nigeria, primarily in the north, and results in the deaths of approximately 2,400 children under five every day.

Shrouded in Violence

Experts say insecurity is a major cause of malnutrition in northern Nigeria. In the northwest, armed groups drive farmers off their land, shut down markets, and extort communities. This violence has forced over 2.2 million people to flee, with many now living in overcrowded camps with few resources.

Zainab Abdul and her two-year-old daughter at a refugee camp in Zamfara, northwest Nigeria. Credit: Promise Eze/IPS

In the northeast, ongoing conflicts disrupt farming and food production. Families returning to their land are afraid to farm far from military towns, leaving them at risk of hunger.

Food shortages are so bad that some families have to eat cassava peels to survive.

“We are suffering greatly. We barely have food to eat and have been unable to farm for over four years because bandits drove us from our communities. We don’t even have proper shelter. As I speak to you now, I haven’t eaten anything. We urgently need support from the government,” said Hannatu Ismail, a resident of a refugee camp in Zamfara.

Aminu Balarabe, a middle-aged doctor at a local clinic in Gusau, the capital of Zamfara, fears that if the problem is not addressed immediately, the outcome could be disastrous. Although the government has launched several military campaigns to eradicate the bandits and encourage people to return to their farms, Balarabe believes more needs to be done.

He lamented that the ongoing insecurity has already crippled healthcare services, making it difficult to diagnose and treat malnutrition effectively in the region.

“The solution is to tackle insecurity. People on the ground are mostly unprotected and left vulnerable. They are constantly in danger. If the government steps in, provides real support, and takes strong action to bring peace to these communities, things can change for the better. To fight this insecurity, the government must act urgently and decisively. It’s heartbreaking that some people cannot live in their towns or villages because of the insecurity. They are forced to live and sleep in camps,” Balarabe said.

Humanitarian Crisis

For years, organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), UNICEF, and MSF have raised alarms about the worsening malnutrition crisis, emphasizing the urgent need for more humanitarian aid. They have repeatedly called on Nigerian authorities, organizations, and donors to take immediate action to tackle the root causes of the crisis.

In 2024, MSF provided care to more than 294,000 malnourished children in northern Nigeria. The aid organization revealed that overcrowded conditions had left them treating patients on mattresses on the floor due to a lack of space.

By mid-2024, the ICRC reported a 48 percent increase in severe malnutrition cases with complications among children under five in health facilities it supports compared to the previous year.

Reduced funding has made it more difficult for organizations to care for malnourished children. The shortage of therapeutic food has persisted and worsened. Despite the rising cases of acute malnutrition worldwide, the UN’s humanitarian response plan still does not include Nigeria’s northwest region.

Oluwagbemisola Olukogbe, a nutritionist in Lagos, Nigeria, is concerned that malnutrition can severely impact children’s growth, human development, and economic progress, creating a cycle that holds society back.

“Chronic malnutrition and stunted growth in early childhood can lead to poor brain development, learning difficulties, and behavioral issues. This affects education, lowers productivity in adulthood, and increases the risk of the problem being passed to the next generation,” she told IPS.

Failed Solutions

In 2020, the Nigerian government introduced the National Multisectoral Plan of Action for Food and Nutrition, a 2021–2025 initiative aimed at tackling food security and malnutrition, with a focus on boosting food production through agricultural investment. However, Dr. Idris Olabode Badiru, a reader at the University of Ibadan, highlights that government investment in agriculture has been insufficient.

Although agriculture accounts for 24 percent of Nigeria’s GDP and employs more than 30 percent of the entire labour force, funding remains well below the 10 percent target set by the African Union in the 2003 Maputo Declaration.

Badiru says this underinvestment hampers productivity, fails to address the growing food demands of Nigeria’s rapidly increasing population and is unable to tackle food insecurity.

“Even if farmers in crisis areas can’t work their fields, nearby regions can still contribute to food production. These farmers should be supported to increase their output through measures like training programmes delivered by effective agricultural extension services. Unfortunately, many state extension agencies are not functioning well and need improvement to better assist farmers,” Badiru noted.

He added, “It’s also important to provide farmers with the necessary tools and financial support, although previous attempts have been hindered by fraud. To address this, better systems of accountability must be established. Moreover, agriculture shouldn’t be treated in isolation, as it depends on other sectors. Restoring essential infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, storage facilities, and electricity supply, is vital to improving agricultural productivity and addressing long-term challenges.”

The government’s efforts to distribute free grains to vulnerable populations, particularly in conflict-affected and economically struggling areas, have largely fallen short. These initiatives have been undermined by widespread corruption and diversion of resources, preventing aid from reaching those who need it most.

Bleak Future?

Save the Children International has revealed that an additional one million children in Nigeria will be suffering from acute malnutrition by April 2025 if no urgent action is taken.

UNICEF has urged the government to enhance nutrition programmes and reinforce primary healthcare, highlighting that an additional 200,000 children in the northwest will need therapeutic food in 2025.

For Abdul in the refugee camp in Zamfara, government aid is non-negotiable.

“We urgently need the government’s support with food. I can’t bear to think of how much these children have suffered from hunger. Most days, they eat only once in the morning and go without food until the next day or sometimes until late at night. Our children cry from hunger until they’re too exhausted to continue, and it breaks our hearts because we have nothing to give them,” she told IPS.

NOTE: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Experts from diverse fields seek answers to the question of what really makes people safe at an event organized by Soka Gakkai International and partners. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
BAKU, Nov 18 2024 (IPS)

At a time when the COP29 summit is primarily focused on climate finance as a tool to cool catastrophically high global temperatures and reverse consequences for all life on earth, delegates—alarmed and concerned by the state of world peace and stability—are seeking ways to enhance safety.Delegates at a side event organized by Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and SGI-UK, British Quakers, Quaker Earthcare Witness, and Friends World Committee for Consultation (Quakers), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), explored key questions on what climate action approaches contribute to a safer world for people and planet or risk a more unsafe world.

“We are negotiating in this COP for increased finance, yet everyone in this room who is a major fossil fuel extraction country, except Colombia, is increasing their oil and gas extraction. And outside, war is spreading, and finance for the military is at levels higher than at any time since the Cold War. We bring experts from various walks of life into discussions on what really makes us safe,” said event moderator Lindsey Fielder Cook from the Quaker United Nations Office. 

There were experts on techno-fixed reliance and risks to techno-fixed reliance, military spending, peace activists, climate finance in fragile states, and also others who spoke about their lives, faith, and working with youth. They talked about peace, climate finance, and climate action in an existential time and how human activities are also driving existential rates of species extinction and chemical pollution as we know.

Andrew Okem from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and an expert in science adaptation, vulnerability, and impacts observed, “Science has given us a range of actions that we as a society can implement and can contribute towards making our society better and safer for all of us, such as building climate-resilient agri-food systems. This includes diversifying climate-smart coping and climate-smart practices. Rapid decarbonization is critical, hence the need to phase out fossil fuels and a shift to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower.”

Tackling issues of peace and climate finance amid climate and conflict-driven existential threats. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

Okem spoke about the need for nature-based solutions, integrated water management, sustainable cities, and inclusive governance and decision-making. Emphasizing that any further delay “in concerted, anticipated global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss this great and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a developed and sustainable future for all.”

Lucy Plummer, member of the international grassroots lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International, which actively engages in society in the areas of peace, culture, and education, said she wanted to “amplify the COP16 message. We need to make peace with nature. I have closely followed discussions, including the round table on the global framework on children, youth, peace, and climate security.”

Saying that it was encouraging that the interconnection of climate and peace is being recognized and that there was great support for this initiative from states and other key stakeholders. But Plummer also felt that the most key issue was not mentioned at all—”our ongoing war with nature. It is a war because there is so much violence in the way that we relate to nature. We urgently need to disarm our ways of thinking about nature.”

“In yesterday’s peace talks and in all of the talks happening all around the COP29, this vital piece of the puzzle is missing. Humans’ separation from nature is the root of the climate crisis, and unless we rectify this and make peace with nature, we simply will not have the wisdom needed to resolve this crisis and prevent so much suffering. The Indigenous peoples know it and have been coming to these COPs every year trying to get us to understand this. Their messages have not changed. They get it, but for some reason we are not ready to hear it or we do not want to hear it.”

Dr. Duncan McLaren, a research fellow from the UCLA School of Law and an expert in technofixes and ethical mitigation options, spoke about his research that explores the justice and political implications of global technologies, including carbon removal. His recent work explores the geopolitics of geoengineering and the governance of carbon removal techniques in the context of net zero policy goals.

“Climate insecurity is all around us. We’ve seen floods, wildfires, droughts, and storms. Clearly, emissions cuts alone can no longer avert dangerous climate change. It is wishful thinking that we can avoid reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius with just more emissions at 8,000. So that is why I have been looking at other technologies and how they might work. Carbon removal can contribute to climate repair, the repair of humanity’s relationship with the earth,” McLaren emphasized.

“Carbon removal techniques can help us counterbalance recalcitrant emissions to achieve net zero. And more importantly, deal with the unfairly generated legacy of excess emissions. But as Professor Corrie and I show in our briefing paper for the Quaker UN Office, they will only make us safer if we keep the tasks they ask us to do small. Emissions need to be cut by 95 percent.”

Harriet Mackaill-Hill from International Alert spoke about climate, conflict, and finance and the need to define the COP29 New Collective Quantified Goal through these lenses.  She said the linkages between “climate and conflict are well established. While climate is never the sole cause of conflict, it is very much a stressor. Climate will exacerbate various stressors for conflict. These can be human security, food security, or competition over natural resources, which will in turn very much create and worsen conflict. How can people adapt to the impacts of climate change when in extreme vulnerability, sometimes conflict, when livelihoods or lives are at stake?”

Deborah Burton, co-founder of Tipping Point North South, spoke about the intersection between military spending and climate finance. Giving a perspective on what makes people unsafe in terms of military spending and military missions, she said there is a need to understand “the scale of global military missions in peacetime and war and the associated scale of military spending that enables those missions.”

“They combine to achieve one thing and one thing only: the undermining of human safety in this climate emergency. So, the estimated global military carbon footprint, and it is an estimate because it’s not fully reported by any stretch of the imagination, is estimated to be at 5.5 percent of total global emissions. This is more than the combined annual emissions of the 54 nations of the African continent. It is twice as much as emissions of civilian aviation, and that estimate does not include conflict-related emissions.”

Shirine Jurdi spoke of her lived experience from Lebanon linking to climate finance. She said, “There is no climate justice during war, and there is no ecological justice during war. With every bomb that drops, the land, the sea, and the people suffer irreparable harm.”

Stressing that “safety is not only about survival and its destruction. It is about thriving in peace under skies that are blue, not filled with smoke or phosphorus bombs. To create a safer world, let’s stop colonization and redirect resources from destruction to building sustainable, productive communities. Let us invest in ecological peacebuilding and restore the lands and the ecosystems damaged by conflict.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Current conflicts could bring the world precariously close to a nuclear war. Credit: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 7 2024 (IPS)

The warnings from the United Nations and from anti-nuclear activists are increasingly ominous: the world is closer to a nuclear war—by design or by accident—more than ever before.

The current conflicts—and the intense war of words—between nuclear and non-nuclear states—Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Palestine and North Korea vs. South Korea—are adding fuel to a slow-burning fire.

And according to a September 27 report in the New York Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin is quoted as saying he plans to lower the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons—and is prepared to use his weapons in response to any attack carried out by Ukraine with conventional weapons that creates “a critical threat to our sovereignty”.

The new threat follows a request by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for long-range missiles, additional fighter planes and drones from the US during his visit to Washington, DC, last month.

According to the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the US has provided more than USD 61.3 billion in military assistance “since Russia launched its premeditated, unprovoked, and brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine” on February 24, 2022, and approximately USD 64.1 billion in military assistance since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

The US has also used the emergency Presidential Drawdown Authority on 53 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine military assistance totaling approximately USD 31.2 billion from Department of Defense (DoD) stockpiles—all of which have triggered a nuclear threat from Putin.

Asked whether the nuclear threats looming over ongoing conflicts are for real or pure rhetoric, Melissa Parke, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, told IPS: “We currently face the highest risk there could be a nuclear war since the Cold War. There are two major conflicts involving nuclear-armed states in Ukraine and the Middle East where Russian and Israeli politicians have made overt threats to use nuclear weapons.”

She said there are growing geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed states, not just between Russia and the US over Western military support for Ukraine, but also between the US and China over American efforts to build a network of alliances around China, as well as US support for Taiwan—although thankfully we have heard no overt nuclear threats from either Washington or Beijing.

“But there is a dangerous trend in Western countries, among both commentators and politicians, to argue Russia is bluffing because it hasn’t yet used nuclear weapons. The terrifying reality is that we cannot know for certain if President Putin—or any leader of a nuclear-armed state—will use nuclear weapons at any time.”

The doctrine of deterrence that all nuclear powers follow requires creating such a sense of uncertainty, which is one of the reasons it is such a dangerous theory. “We do not know what could lead a situation to escalate out of control.”

“What we do know is what could happen if it does: nuclear weapons pose unacceptable humanitarian consequences, and in the event of nuclear weapons being used, no state has the capacity to help survivors in the aftermath,” said Parke, who formerly worked for the United Nations in Gaza, Kosovo, New York and Lebanon and served as Australia’s Minister for International Development.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking at the high-level meeting commemorating and promoting the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, described nuclear weapons as “double madness.”

The first madness is the existence of weapons that can wipe out entire populations, communities and cities in a single attack. “We know that any use of a nuclear weapon would unleash a humanitarian catastrophe—a nightmare spilling over borders, affecting us all. These weapons deliver no real security or stability—only looming danger and constant threats to our very existence.”

The second madness, he pointed out, is that, despite the enormous and existential risks these weapons pose to humanity, “we are no closer to eliminating them than we were 10 years ago.”

“In fact, we are heading in the wrong direction entirely. Not since the worst days of the Cold War has the specter of nuclear weapons cast such a dark shadow.”

“Nuclear saber-rattling has reached a fever pitch. We have even heard threats to use a nuclear weapon. There are fears of a new arms race,” Guterres warned.

Meanwhile, Russia is responding to the change in US nuclear posture as well as to the billions of dollars the collective West is pumping into the Ukrainian war effort by redrawing its own nuclear “redlines,” according to wire service reports.

Last week, at a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, President Putin announced that “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state… supported by a nuclear power should be treated as their joint attack.”

Tariq Rauf, former Head of Verification and Security Policy, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told IPS that Russia, in effect, is restating the conditions it has traditionally laid down in its negative security assurances to States parties to the NPT and to nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZ).

This, he pointed out, is essentially similar to that of the US, to the effect that: Russia will not attack or threaten to attack a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the NPT or NWFZ treaty with nuclear weapons, unless that non-nuclear-weapon State attacks Russia in collaboration with another nuclear-weapon State.

“Now, since we’re in a proxy war involving France, UK and the US (all three nuclear weapons states) materially assisting Ukraine in attacking sites inside the internationally recognized territorial borders of Russia, it is not surprising that Russia has warned Ukraine and its NATO backers that long-range fires against Russia targeting its strategic military bases could trigger a nuclear response by Russia.”

Responding to further questions, Parke of ICAN told IPS all nine nuclear armed states (US, UK, France, China, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) are modernizing and, in some cases, expanding their arsenals. Last year, ICAN research shows they spent $91.4 billion, with the United States spending more than all the others put together.

All these countries follow deterrence doctrine, which is a threat to the entire world given it is based on the readiness and willingness to use nuclear weapons.

This means all of the nuclear-armed states are tacitly threatening the rest of us, given research shows even a regional nuclear war in South Asia would lead to global famine killing 2.5 billion people.

The good news is the majority of countries reject nuclear weapons and support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The TPNW is the only bright spot in a world overshadowed by conflict. It came into force in 2021, which means it is now international law. Nearly half of all countries have either signed, ratified or acceded to the treaty, and more countries will ratify it.

“We are confident more than half of all countries will have either signed or ratified it in the near future. Pressure and encouragement from civil society and campaigners around the world have been key to bringing the TPNW into being and ensuring more and more countries join it.”

Asked about the role played by the United Nations on nuclear disarmament—and whether there is anything more the UN can do—she said: the United Nations has always played a key role in nuclear disarmament.

The very first meeting of the General Assembly called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Since then, it has been the forum in which countries have negotiated the key multilateral treaties on nuclear weapons, not just the ban treaty, the TPNW, but also the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The Secretary General continues to provide strong moral and political leadership, using his voice to make clear the unacceptable nature of these weapons and the urgent need to eliminate them.

The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) plays an essential role too, supporting and facilitating UN member states to join the TPNW. This week at the General Assembly high level meeting, we will see another ceremony where more countries will officially ratify the TPNW.

“It is essential the UN continues to be a strong voice for the elimination of nuclear weapons, supporting more countries that back the treaty to join it and also reminding the nuclear-armed states and their allies that support the use of nuclear weapons of the need to live up to their obligations and get rid of their nuclear weapons and the infrastructure that supports them,” Parke declared.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS NORAM, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

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The panel for the session on “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Imagining a World without Nuclear Weapons.” Credit: AD McKenzie/IPS

By AD McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 27 2024 (IPS)

In any discussion of world peace and the future of humanity, the issue of nuclear arms must be addressed, and now.

That was the message from a range of delegates at the “Imaginer la Paix / Imagine Peace” conference, held in Paris September 22 to 24, and organized by the Sant’Egidio Community, a Christian organization founded in Rome in 1968 and now based in 70 countries.

Describing its tenets as “Prayer, service to the Poor and work for Peace,” the community has hosted 38 international, multi-faith peace meetings, bringing together activists from around the world. This is the first time the conference has been held in Paris, with hundreds traveling to France, itself a nuclear-weapon state.

Occurring against the backdrop of brutal, on-going conflicts in different regions and a new race by some countries to “upgrade” their arsenal, the gathering had a sense of urgency, with growing fears that nuclear weapons might be used by warlords. Participants highlighted current and past atrocities and called upon world leaders to learn from the past.

“After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been blessed with many who have said ‘no’—’no’ a million times, creating movements and treaties, (and) awareness… that the only reasonable insight to learn from the conception and use of nuclear weapons is to say ‘no’,” said Andrea Bartoli, president of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue, based in New York.

Participating in a conference forum Monday titled “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Imagining a World Without Nuclear Weapons,”  Bartoli and other speakers drew stark pictures of what living in a world with nuclear weapons entails, and they highlighted developments since World War II.

“After the two bombs were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humans built more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and performed more than 2,000 tests. Still today we have more than 12,500, each of them with power greatly superior to the two used in August 1945,” Bartoli said.

Despite awareness of the catastrophic potential of these weapons and despite a UN treaty prohibiting their use, some governments argue that possessing nuclear arms is a deterrent—an argument that is deceptive, according to the forum speakers.

Anna Ikeda, program coordinator for disarmament at the UN Office of Soka Gakkai International. Credit: AD McKenzie/IPS

Jean-Marie Collin, director of ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a movement launched in the early 2000s in Australia and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017), said that leaders who cite deterrence “accept the possibility of violating” international human rights.

“Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy cities and kill and maim entire populations, which means that all presidents and heads of government who implement a defense policy based on nuclear deterrence and who are therefore responsible for giving this order, are aware of this,” Collin told the forum.

ICAN campaigned for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that was adopted at the United Nations in 2017, entering into force in 2021. The adoption came nearly five decades after the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which entered into force in 1970.

The terms of the NPT consider five countries to be nuclear weapons states: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China. Four other countries also possess nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel.

According to a 2024 ICAN report, these nine states jointly spent €85 billion (USD 94,6 billion) on their atomic weapon arsenals last year, an expenditure ICAN has called “obscene” and “unacceptable.” France, whose president Emmanuel Macron spoke about peace in broad, general terms at the opening of the conference, spent around €5,3 billion (about USD 5,9 billion) in 2023 on its nuclear weapons, said the report.

The policy of “deterrence” and “reciprocity,”  which essentially means “we’ll get rid of our weapons if you get rid of yours,”  has been slammed by ICAN and fellow disarmament activists.

“With the constant flow of information, we often tend to lose sight of the reality of figures,” Collin said at the peace conference. “I hope this one will hold your attention: it is estimated that more than 38,000 children were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children!”

All those killed—an estimated 210,000 people by the end of 1945—died in horrific ways, as survivors and others have testified. Delegates said that this knowledge should be the real “deterrent.”

At the forum, Anna Ikeda, program coordinator for disarmament at the UN Office of Soka Gakkai International, a global Buddhist movement, described testimony from a Hiroshima a-bomb survivor, Reiko Yamada, as one she would never forget.

“She (Yamada) stated, ‘A good friend of mine in the neighbourhood was waiting for her mother to return home with her four brothers and sisters. Later, she told me that on the second day after the bombing, a moving black lump crawled into the house. They first thought it was a black dog, but they soon realized it was their mother; she collapsed and died when she finally got to her children. They cremated her body in the yard,” Ikeda told the audience with emotion.

“Who deserves to die such a death? Nobody!” she continued. “Yet our world continues to spend billions of dollars to upkeep our nuclear arsenals, and our leaders at times imply readiness to use them. It is utterly unacceptable.”

Ikeda said that survivors, known as the “hibakusha” in Japan, have a fundamental answer to why nuclear weapons must be abolished—it is that “no one else should ever suffer what we did.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, USG and Rector of the United Nations University, and Ms. Kaoru Nemeto, Director of the United Nations Information Centre during a discussion ‘Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises.’ Credit: Naureen Hossain/IPS

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2024 (IPS)

Driving the Summit of the Future’s core messages of international solidarity and decisive action are young people who are determined to address the intersecting issues that the world contends with today.

During the Summit’s Action Days (20-21 September), it was young people who led the conversations of increasing and defining meaningful engagement, both on- and off-site from the United Nations Headquarters.

Not only are they driving the conversation, but in the Pact for the Future adopted by world leaders at the United Nations on Sunday (September 22), youth and future generations are at the forefront of global leaders’ concerns, and their role was clearly defined with the first ever Declaration on Future Generations, with concrete steps to take account of future generations in our decision-making, including a possible envoy for future generations.

This includes a commitment to more “meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.”

Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises, a side event whose co-organizers included Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the Future Action Festival Organizing Committee, with the support of the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC), brought together young activists to discuss the intersection between two different crises and what will define meaningful youth engagement.

Kaoru Nemoto, the Director General of UNIC in Tokyo, observed that it was “ground-breaking” to see the agenda of the Summit’s Action Days largely led and organized by youth participants, as signified by the majority of seats in the General Assembly Hall being filled by young activists.

“There is an undercurrent, a common message, that the youth can make this world a better place to live,” said Nemoto. “No matter what agenda you are working on, be it climate change, nuclear disarmament, fighting inequality… youth issues are cross-cutting, very strong cross-cutting issues across the board.”

Nemoto further added that the United Nations needs to do much more to engage youth for meaningful participation. This would mean allowing youth to consult in decision-making and to be in positions of leadership. Youth presence cannot be reduced to tokenism.

The climate and nuclear crises are existential threats that are deeply connected, said Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, the rector of the United Nations University. Climate instability fuels the factors that lead to conflict and displacement. Conflict, such as what is happening in Sudan, Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, increases the risk of nuclear escalation. As leaders in the present day tackle the issues, Marwala called on the youth to continue raising their voices and to hold those powers accountable.

Marwala noted that the United Nations University would be committed to “realizing meaningful participation” in all parties. For young people, while they are motivated and demonstrate a care for deeper social issues, they face challenges in having their voices heard or in feeling galvanized to take action. Marwala noted that it was important to reach out to those young people who are either not involved or feel discouraged from getting involved in political work and activism.

Chief among the Summit of the Future’s agenda is increasing youth participation in decision-making processes. It has long been acknowledged that young activists and civil society actors drive greater societal change and are motivated to act towards complex issues. Yet they frequently face challenges in participating in policymaking that would shape their countries’ positions.

Among these challenges are representation in political spaces. Within the context of Japan, young people are underrepresented in local and national politics. As Luna Serigano, an advocate from the Japan Youth Council, shared during the event, there is a wider belief among young voters in Japan that their voices will go unheard by authorities.

This is indicated in voter turnout, which shows that only 37 percent of voters are in their 20s, and only 54 percent of voters believe that their votes matter. By contrast, 71 percent of people in their 70s voted in elections. People in their 30s or younger account for just 1 percent of professionals serving in government councils and forums. The Japan Youth Council is currently advocating for active youth participation in the country’s climate change policy by calling for young people to be directly involved as committee members to work on a new energy plan for the coming year.

Yuuki Tokuda, a co-founder of GeNuine, a Japan-based NGO that explores nuclear issues through a gender perspective, shared that young people are out of decision-making spaces. Although their voices may be heard, it is not enough. As she told IPS, the climate and nuclear crises are on the minds of young people in Japan. And while they have ideas on what could be done, they are not informed on how to act.

There is some hope for increasing participation. Tokuda shared within policymakers on nuclear issues, of which 30 percent include women, have begun to engage with young people in these discussions.

“It is time to reconstruct systems so that youth can meaningfully participate in these processes,” said Tokuda. “We need more intergenerational participation in order to work towards the ban of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.”

During the event, what meaningful youth engagement should look like was discussed. It was acknowledged that efforts have gone towards giving a space to the perspectives of young people. Including young people in the discussions is a critical step. It was suggested that direction should shift towards ensuring that young people have the authority to take the action needed to resolve intersecting, complex issues. Otherwise, the inclusion is meaningless.

“The future-oriented youth is more needed than ever to tackle the challenges in building and maintaining peace,” said Mitsuo Nishikata of SGI.

“As a youth-driven initiative such as what the Future Action Festival demonstrates, youth solidarity can stand as a starting point for resolving and passing issues.”

Next year (2025) will mark 80 years since the end of World War II and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bombings. Nishikata pointed out that this will be a time for crucial opportunities to advance the discussions on nuclear disarmament and climate action, ahead of the Third Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 30^th UN Climate Conference (COP30).

“We will continue to unite in our desire for peace, sharing the responsibility for future generations and expanding grassroots actions in Japan and globally.

Other commitments for the Pact for the Future included the first multilateral recommitment to nuclear disarmament in more than a decade, with a clear commitment to the goal of totally eliminating nuclear weapons.

It also pledged reform of the United Nations Security Council since the 1960s, with plans to improve the effectiveness and representativeness of the Council, including by redressing the historical underrepresentation of Africa as a priority.

The pact has at its core a commitment to “turbo-charge” implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the reform of the international financial architecture so that it better represents and serves developing countries.

“We cannot build a future that is suitable for our grandchildren with a system that our grandparents created,” as the Secretary-General António Guterres stated.

This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Are decades of arms control treaties being threatened? Credit: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 17 2024 (IPS)

The constant drumbeat of nuclear threats seems never ending—emanating primarily from the Russians, Israeli right-wing politicians and North Koreans.

The threats also prompt one lingering question: Can there be a World War III without the use of nuclear weapons?

In a report August 27, Reuters quoted a senior Russian official as saying the West was playing with fire by considering allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with Western missiles—and cautioned the United States that World War III would not be confined to Europe. 

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s longstanding foreign minister and former UN ambassador, said the West was seeking to escalate the Ukraine war and was “asking for trouble” by considering Ukrainian requests to loosen curbs on using foreign-supplied weapons.

Putting it in the right context, the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA) pointed out last week, “the global nuclear security environment could hardly be more precarious.”

Carol Giacomo, chief editor of Arms Control Today, the ACA’s flagship publication, said that weeks before the US elects a new president, the global nuclear security environment could hardly be more precarious.

“Russia continues to raise the specter of escalating its war on Ukraine to nuclear use; Iran and North Korea persist in advancing their nuclear programs; China is moving to steadily expand its nuclear arsenal; the United States and Russia have costly modernization programs underway; and the war in Gaza threatens to explode into a region-wide catastrophe entangling Iran and nuclear-armed Israel, among other countries,” she pointed out.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are refusing to enter arms control talks with the United States, new countries are raising the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons and decades of arms control treaties are unraveling.

The situation has also prompted Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Agency (IAEA), to warn, in an interview with The Financial Times on August 26, that the global nonproliferation regime is under greater pressure than at any time since the end of the Cold War.

The U.S. presidential election campaign has not engaged publicly on most of these issues in any serious way despite the fact that whichever candidate wins will, once inaugurated, immediately inherit the sole authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons, wrote Giacomo, a former member of The New York Times editorial board (2007-2020).

Dr M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Graduate Program Director, MPPGA at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS the dangers posed by nuclear arms, and the very powerful institutions and governments that possess these weapons of mass destruction, have never been greater.

“In the last 16 months, we have seen government officials from Russia (Dmitry Medvedev) and Israel (Amihai Eliyahu) threatening to use, or calling for the use of, nuclear weapons against Ukraine and Gaza respectively” he noted.

The rulers of these countries have already shown the willingness to kill tens of thousands of civilians. “Going further back, we can remember U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea. Coming from a person like Trump and a country like the United States that is the only one to use nuclear weapons in war, there is good reason to take such a threat with utmost seriousness”.

Such great dangers, he argued, can be ameliorated only with great visions, by people demanding that no one should be killed in their name, especially using nuclear weapons but not only using nuclear weapons.

This would require people to make common cause with people all over the world, and refuse to be divided by the “narrow nationalisms” that Albert Einstein identified as an “outmoded concept,” as far back as 1947.

Norman Solomon, executive director, Institute for Public Accuracy and national director, RootsAction.org told IPS the momentum of the nuclear arms race is moving almost entirely in the wrong direction. The world and humanity as a whole are increasingly in dire circumstances, made even more dire by the refusal of the leaders of nuclear states to acknowledge the heightened jeopardy of thermonuclear annihilation for nearly all of the Earth’s inhabitants.

As the nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, he said, have propelled the drive to keep developing nuclear weaponry. There are always rationalizations, but the result is proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“Nations with smaller nuclear arsenals and those with nuclear-arms aspirations are keenly aware of what the most powerful nuclear states are doing. Preaching about nonproliferation while proliferating is hardly a convincing role model to halt the spread of nuclear weapons to more and more countries,” Solomon pointed out.

“Notably, amid the vast amount of media coverage and diplomatic verbiage about Israel, rarely do we read or hear mention of the fact that Israel — uniquely in the Middle East — possesses nuclear weapons. Given Israel’s impunity to attack other countries in the region, it would be a mistake to have any confidence in Israeli self-restraint with military matters.”

The return of a cold war between the U.S. and Russia, said Solomon, is fueling the nuclear arms race to a dangerous extreme. Arms control has become a thing of the past, as one treaty after another in this century has been abrogated by the U.S. government. The Open Skies and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties were canceled by President Trump.

Earlier, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty was canceled by President George W. Bush. The absence of those pacts makes a nuclear war with Russia more likely. But President Biden has not tried to revive those agreements snuffed out by his Republican predecessors, he argued.

“If sanity is going to prevail, a drastic change in attitudes and policies will be needed. The current course is headed toward unfathomable catastrophe for the human race”, said Solomon, author, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.”

Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation, told IPS: “Looking around today’s world, we see a growing mob of nationalist authoritarian governments and leaders—including in nuclear-armed Russia, Israel, India, China, North Korea and increasingly, the United States. All of them are busily preparing for war in the name of peace.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Reflecting the urgency of this moment, in June, the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), the official nonpartisan association of more than 1,400 American cities with populations over 30,000, adopted a sweeping resolution, titled “The Imperative of Dialogue in a Time of Acute Nuclear Dangers.”

The resolution rightly “condemns Russia’s illegal war of aggression on Ukraine and its repeated nuclear threats and calls on the Russian government to withdraw all forces from Ukraine.” But it also calls on the President and Congress “to maximize diplomatic efforts to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible.”

The resolution, Cabasso said, “calls on the U.S. government to work to re-establish high-level U.S.-Russian risk reduction and arms control talks to rebuild trust and work toward replacement of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the only remaining bilateral nuclear arms control treaty, set to expire in 2026.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Erico Platt looks at the disarmament exhibition that she staged, "Three Quarters of a Century After Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Hibakusha—Brave Survivors Working for a Nuclear-Free World." Credit: UNODA/Diane Barnes

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 1 2024 (IPS)

The upcoming 79th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place on August 6 and 9, 1945, remains a grim reminder of the destructive consequences of nuclear weapons.

The US bombings killed an estimated 90,000 to 210,000, with roughly half of the deaths occurring on the first day in Hiroshima.

But despite an intense global campaign for nuclear disarmament, the world has witnessed an increase in the number of nuclear powers from five—the US, UK, France, China and Russia—to nine, including India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

Is the continued worldwide anti-nuclear campaign an exercise in futility? And will the rising trend continue—with countries such as Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and South Korea—as potential nuclear powers of the future?

South Africa is the only country that has voluntarily given up nuclear weapons after developing them. In the 1980s, South Africa produced six nuclear weapons, but dismantled them between 1989 and 1993. A number of factors may have influenced South Africa’s decision, including national security, international relations, and a desire to avoid becoming a pariah state.

But there is an equally valid argument that there have been no nuclear wars—only threats—largely because of the success of the world-wide anti-nuclear campaign, the role of the United Nations and the collective action by most of the 193 member states in adopting several anti-nuclear treaties.

According to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the United Nations has sought to eliminate weapons  of mass destruction (WMDs) ever since the establishment of the world body. The first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946 established a commission to deal with problems related to the discovery of atomic energy, among others.

The commission was to make proposals for, inter alia, the control of atomic energy to the extent necessary to ensure its use only for peaceful purposes.

Several multilateral treaties have since been established with the aim of preventing nuclear proliferation and testing, while promoting progress in nuclear disarmament.

These include the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water, also known as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which was signed in 1996 but has yet to enter into force, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Jackie Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, California, which monitors and analyzes US nuclear weapons programs and policies, told IPS: “As we approach the 79^th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is facing a greater danger of nuclear war than at any time since 1945.”

“The terrifying doctrine of “nuclear deterrence,” which should long ago have been delegitimized and relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with multilateral, non-militarized common security, has metastasized into a pathological ideology brandished by nuclear-armed states and their allies to justify the perpetual possession and threatened use—including first use—of nuclear weapons,” she pointed out.

“It is more important than ever that we heed the warnings of the aging hibakusha (A-bomb survivors): What happened to us must never be allowed to happen to anyone again; nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist; no more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis!”

This demands an irreversible process of nuclear disarmament. But to the contrary, all nuclear armed states are qualitatively and, in some cases, quantitatively upgrading their nuclear arsenals and a new multipolar arms race is underway, she noted.

“To achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons and a global society that is more fair, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable, we will need to move from the irrational fear-based ideology of deterrence to the rational fear of an eventual nuclear weapon use, whether by accident, miscalculation, or design.”

“We will also need to stimulate a rational hope that security can be redefined in humanitarian and ecologically sustainable terms that will lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons and dramatic demilitarization, freeing up tremendous resources desperately needed to address universal human needs and protect the environment.”

In this time of multiple global crises, “our work for the elimination of nuclear weapons must take place in a much broader framework, taking into account the interface between nuclear and conventional weapons and militarism in general, the humanitarian and long-term environmental consequences of nuclear war, and the fundamental incompatibility of nuclear weapons with democracy, the rule of law, and human wellbeing,” declared Cabasso.

Dr. M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Graduate Program Director, MPPGA at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS, “The glass is half-full or half-empty depending on how one looks at it.”

“The fact that we have avoided nuclear war since 1945 is also partly due to the persistence of the anti-nuclear movement. Historians like Lawrence Wittner have pointed to the many instances when governments have chosen nuclear restraint instead of unrestrained expansion.”

While South Africa is the only country that dismantled its entire nuclear weapons program, many countries—Sweden, for example—have chosen not to develop nuclear weapons even though they had the technical capacity to do so. They did so in part because of strong public opposition to nuclear weapons, which in turn is due to social movements supporting nuclear disarmament, he pointed out.

Thus, organizing for nuclear disarmament is not futile. Especially as we move into another era of conflicts between major powers, such movements will be critical to our survival, declared Ramana.

According to the UN, a group of elderly hibakusha, called Nihon Hidankyo, have dedicated their lives to achieving a non-proliferation treaty, which they hope will ultimately lead to a total ban on nuclear weapons.

“On an overcrowded train on the Hakushima line, I fainted for a while, holding in my arms my eldest daughter of one year and six months. I regained my senses at her cries and found no one else was on the train,” a 34-year-old woman testifies in the booklet. She was located just two kilometres from the Hiroshima epicenter.

Fleeing to her relatives in Hesaka, at age 24, another woman remembers that “people, with the skin dangling down, were stumbling along. They fell down with a thud and died one after another,” adding, “still now I often have nightmares about this, and people say, ‘it’s neurosis’.”

One man who entered Hiroshima after the bomb recalled in the exhibition “that dreadful scene—I cannot forget even after many decades.”

At a disarmament exhibition in UN Headquarters in New York, a visitor reads text about a young boy bringing his little brother to a cremation site in Nagasaki, Japan. Credit: UNODA/Erico Platt

A woman who was 25 years old at the time said, “When I went outside, it was dark as night. Then it got brighter and brighter, and I could see burnt people crying and running about in utter confusion. It was hell…I found my neighbor trapped under a fallen concrete wall… Only half of his face was showing. He was burned alive”.

The steadfast conviction of the Hidankyo remains: “Nuclear weapons are absolute evil that cannot coexist with humans. There is no choice but to abolish them.”

Addressing the UN Security Council last March, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that with geopolitical tensions escalating the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades, reducing and abolishing nuclear weapons is the only viable path to saving humanity.

“There is one path—and one path only—that will vanquish this senseless and suicidal shadow once and for all.  We need disarmament now,” he said, urging nuclear-weapon States to re-engage to prevent any use of a nuclear weapon, re-affirm moratoria on nuclear testing and “urgently agree that none of them will be the first to use nuclear weapons.”

He called for reductions in the number of nuclear weapons led by the holders of the largest arsenals—the United States and the Russian Federation—to “find a way back to the negotiating table” to fully implement the New Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, or START Treaty, and agree on its successor.

“When each country pursues its own security without regard for others, we create global insecurity that threatens us all,” he observed.  Almost eight decades after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons still represent a clear danger to global peace and security, growing in power, range and stealth.”

“States possessing them are absent from the negotiating table, and some statements have raised the prospect of unleashing nuclear hell—threats that we must all denounce with clarity and force,” he said.  Moreover, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cyber and outer space domains have created new risks.”

From Pope Francis, who calls the possession of nuclear arms “immoral”, to the hibakusha, the brave survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to Hollywood, where Oppenheimer brought the harsh reality of nuclear doomsday to vivid life for millions around the world, people are calling for an end to the nuclear madness.  “Humanity cannot survive a sequel to Oppenheimer,” he warned.

When Nagasaki marked the 78th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city last year, the mayor Shiro Suzuki, urged world powers to abolish nuclear weapons, saying nuclear deterrence also increases risks of nuclear war, according to an Associated Press (AP) report.

He called on the Group of Seven (G7) industrial powers to adopt a separate document on nuclear disarmament that called for using nuclear weapons as deterrence.

“Now is the time to show courage and make the decision to break free from dependence on nuclear deterrence,” Suzuki said in his peace declaration. “As long as states are dependent on nuclear deterrence, we cannot realize a world without nuclear weapons.”

Russia’s nuclear threat has encouraged other nuclear states to accelerate their dependence on nuclear weapons or enhance capabilities, further increasing the risk of nuclear war, and that Russia is not the only one representing the risk of nuclear deterrence, Suzuki said.

Suzuki, whose parents were hibakusha, or survivors of the Nagasaki attack, said knowing the reality of the atomic bombings is the starting point for achieving a world without nuclear weapons. He said the survivors’ testimonies are a true deterrent against nuclear weapons use, the AP report said.

This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

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The newly-signed Sierre Leone law outlawing child marriage also says that those who entered into marriage as children before the new legislation came into effect can petition for annulment. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
FREETOWN & NAIROBI, Jul 11 2024 (IPS)

“A person shall not contract marriage with a child,” Sierra Leone’s landmark Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 says, outlawing, in no uncertain terms, child marriage, giving consent to and attempted child marriage, officiating, attending and promoting child marriage, and use of force or ill-treatment of a child.

The legislation was signed by Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio earlier in July in a ceremony organized by First Lady Fatima Bio, whose “Hands Off Our Girls” campaign played a crucial role in this achievement.

Men who marry girls under 18 face 15 years in prison, a fine of around USD 4,000, or both.

Fatou Gueye Ndir, Senior Regional Engagement and Advocacy Officer for Girls Not Brides, told IPS that the power of the new legislation towards ending harmful practices cannot be overemphasized, as “it also includes provisions for enforcing penalties on offenders, protecting victims’ wives, and ensuring access to education and support services for young girls affected.” 

Girls Not Brides is a global partnership of over 1,400 civil society organizations committed to ending child marriage and enabling girls to fulfill their potential. Fatou says the new law has injected new life into the fight against child marriage and early and forced marriages in Sierra Leone.

“This is a turning point. We call upon the government to continue to provide support services for affected girls and access to education, which are essential so that girls are protected and are not negatively impacted by criminalization of child marriage.”

The law also prohibits conspiracy to cause child marriage and aiding and abetting child marriage. So comprehensive is the new law that it also prohibits cohabitation with a child, any attempt to do so, conspiracy to cause cohabitation with a child and, aiding and abetting cohabitation with a child.

Fatima Maada Bio, the First Lady of Sierra Leone, championed the legislation with her Hands Off Our Girls campaign. Credit: UN

UNICEF says in 2020 alone, nearly 800,000 girls under the age of 18 were married, accounting for a third of the girls in Sierra Leone. Half of them married before they turned 15. So prevalent is the child marriage scourge that approximately nine percent of all children will have gotten married by age 15, and 30 percent by age 18.

Hannah Yambasu, director for Women Against Violence and Exploitation in Society Sierra Leone (WAVES-SL), which is a national NGO, told IPS that in the absence of a law prohibiting child marriages, “the compulsory education policy, where all children must go to school, has not been enough to keep girls within the education system. There are ethnic groups and communities that believe girls, in and out of school, should not turn 18 years old before getting married.”

She says girls entered risky territory at the age of 12 and that many were subsequently forced into child marriages and their lifelong consequences.

Yambasu agrees, saying that the law in and of itself is not enough and concerted efforts must be made to sensitize the community on all sections of the law, especially as the Customary Marriage and Divorce Act 2009 allowed for child marriages with the consent of a parent or guardian and did not stipulate a minimum age of marriage. Stressing that massive, grassroots civic education is urgently needed.

Fatou said effective implementation of the law will lead to substantial gains and positive outcomes in education, health and the economic advancement of women. Emphasizing that child marriage and education are strongly interlinked, as girls who stay longer in school are protected from child marriages. Furthermore, girls will have fewer disruption caused by early marriage or early pregnancy and, are more likely to perform better.

“Child marriage is linked to girls’ pregnancy, so the law will progressively help reduce maternal and infant mortality. Delaying marriage and pregnancy will significantly lower the risk associated with early childbirth, including all the complications that often lead to higher rates of maternal and infant mortality,” Fatou says.

Further indicating that girls who avoid early child marriage are less likely to experience the psychological trauma or stress associated with child marriage, leading to improved mental health outcomes.

“When more girls complete their education, there will be a larger pool of educated women entering the workforce, contributing to economic growth and development. Educated women are more likely to secure better-paying jobs, which can elevate the economic status of their families, reducing poverty levels,” she says.

The rapid rise in the child population in Africa necessitates radical steps towards ending all harmful practices, including child marriage, as they derail progress towards universal access to education. Child marriage is particularly a major obstacle to sustainable development. Six of the world’s 10 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are in West and Central Africa, where the average prevalence across the region remains high—nearly 41 per cent of girls marry before reaching the age of 18.

The new Sierra Leone law is timely, especially in light of the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024, which details the significant challenges the world is facing in making substantial strides towards achieving the SDGs. It features areas with setbacks while also showcasing where tangible progress has been made, for instance, the world continues to lag in its pursuit of gender equality by 2030.

While harmful practices are decreasing, the report finds it are not keeping up with population growth. One in five girls still marries before age 18, compared to one in four 25 years ago—68 million child marriages were averted in this period.

The report raises concerns that far too many women still cannot realize the right to decide on their sexual and reproductive health. Violence against women persists, disproportionately affecting those with disabilities. With just six years remaining, current progress falls far short of what is required to meet the SDGs. Without massive investment and scaled-up action, the report calls into question the achievement of the SDGs.

The UN’s Summit of the Future will be held in September 2024. A once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance cooperation on critical challenges and reaffirm existing commitments, including to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Yambasu understands these challenges all too well, as she works closely with adolescent girls, women and vulnerable persons, including those with disabilities and implores all governments, stakeholders and the older generation to give girls a chance to live their life as they choose

“A chance to go to school and to later on choose the husband of their choice. They go into forced marriages with their hearts bleeding and the trajectory of their lives changing for the worst. All children deserve protection and happiness, and we now have a legal blueprint to safeguard their dreams,” she says.

Stressing that girls deserve “access to all the tools necessary to fully participate in developing our nations in Africa. We need to rise up against all harmful practices. The traditions are there, yes, and we want to preserve them. But let us keep only those that develop and advance our communities.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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A sewer worker who is popularly known as Mithoo emerges from the sewer. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jun 12 2024 (IPS)

A dark head emerges, followed by the torso. The balding man heaves himself up, hands on the sides of the manhole, as he is helped by two men. Gasping for breath, the man, who seems to be in his late 40s, sits on the edge, wearing just a pair of dark pants, the same color as the putrid swirling water he comes out from.

This is an all-too-familiar sight in Karachi, with its over 20 million residents producing 475 million gallons per day (MGD) of wastewater going into decades-old crumbling sewerage-systems. 

After over a hundred dives into the sewers in the last two years, Adil Masih, 22, says, “I have proved to my seniors, I can do the job well.” He hopes to be upgraded from a kachha (not formally employed) to a pucca (permanent) employee at Karachi’s government-owned Karachi Water and Sewerage Company (KWSC), formerly known as the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board and is commonly referred to as the water board, in the next six months.

Earning Rs 25,000 (USD 90) a month, which Adil gets as a lump sum of Rs75,000 (USD 269) every three months, the pay will rise to Rs 32,000 (USD 115), which is the minimum wages in Sindh province set by the government once he becomes pucca.

Sewer work is dirty but essential work in a busy city like Karachi. A worker popularly known as Mithoo rests after unblocking sewage. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

“The first time is always the most terrifying experience,” recalls Amjad Masih, 48, sporting a metallic earring in his left lobe. Among the 2,300 sewer cleaners under the employment of the KWSC, to do manual scavenging to unclog the drains, he claims to have taught Adil the dos and donts of diving into the slush. “You have to be smart to outdo death, which is our companion as we go down,” he says.

It is not the army of cockroaches and the stink that greets you when you open the manhole lid to get in, or the rats swimming in filthy water, but the blades and used syringes floating that are a cause for concern for many as they go down to bring up the rocks and the buckets of filthy silt.

But getting into the sewers is a last resort. “We first try to unclog the line using a long bamboo shaft to prod and loosen the waste, when that fails, we climb down into the gutters and clean them with our hands,” explains Amjad, employed with the water and sanitation company since 2014, and becoming permanent in 2017.

Toxic cauldron

Although the civic agency claims the workers are provided personal protective equipment to shield them from chemical, physical and microbial hazards, many, like Amjad, refuse to wear it.

“I need to feel the rocks and stones with my feet to be able to bring them up,” he says. “Nothing happens,” adds Adil. “We go to the doctor for treatment and are back at work.”

A former KWSC official, speaking to IPS on condition of anonymity, said there have been several deaths and injuries. “It is up to the supervisors to ensure they only send men down the manhole who comply with safety regulations.” He said the protective gear must include gas masks, ladders, and gloves as the “bare minimum,” as there are definite health risks as well as the risk of losing your life.

More than the physical hazards, it is the invisible danger stalking these men, in the form of gases like methane, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide—produced when wastewater contains chlorine bleaches, industrial solvents and gasoline—when mixed with concrete in drainpipes—that have taken the lives of these cleaners.

Earlier in March, two young sanitation workers, Arif Moon Masih, 25, and Shan Masih, 23, died after inhaling toxic fumes in Faisalabad, in the Punjab province. In January, two workers in Karachi met with a similar fate while cleaning sewerage lines.

According to Sweepers Are Superheroes, an advocacy campaign group, around 84 sewage workers have died in 19 districts of Pakistan over the past five years. In neighboring India, one sewer worker dies every five days, according to a 2018 report by the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis.

“I had almost died once,” recalls Amjad, of how he got “gassed” and passed out. “Luckily for me, I did the job and came up and then collapsed.”

But there have been quite a few of his colleagues, he says, who have died due to inhalation while still inside.

Adil said he has inhaled gases quite a few times too. “My eyes burn, and when I come out, I vomit and drink a bottle of cold fizzy drink and am set again,” he said. But the last time it happened, he had to be hospitalized as he had passed out.

With time, says Amjad, they have learned to take precautions.

“We open the manhole lid to let the gases escape before going in,” he says. A dead rat floating on the surface is a giveaway that there are gases, he adds.

The KWSC cleaners work as a team of four. One is sent down wearing a harness tied to a rope. If something is not right or he’s done the job, he tugs at the rope, and the three men waiting outside immediately pull him out. But the man is pulled out after three to four minutes have elapsed without waiting for the tug “in case he has become unconscious,” explains Amjad. He claims to be able to hold his breath for as long as five minutes because “I have to sometimes go as deep as 30 feet.” Adil is only able to do a maximum of seven feet and hold his breath for no more than two minutes, but the gases are found in shallower drains. Along with buckets of silt, the drains are often clogged with stones and boulders that need to be brought up, to allow the water to flow freely.

Amjad and Adil also take on private work, like the rest of the KWSC sanitation workers. The agency knows but looks the other way. “If they can get earn a little extra, it is ok,” says the officer.

“We are called to open up blocked drains by residents and restaurant management and for a couple hours of work, we are able to earn well,” says Adil.

Adil Masih and Amjad Masih work in the sewers of Karachi, a dangerous and low-paying occupation. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

Janitorial work reserved for Christians

Adil and Amjad are unrelated but carry the same surname—Masih—which points to their religion—both are Christians. According to WaterAid Pakistan, 80 percent of sanitation workers in Pakistan are Christians, despite them making up just 2 percent of the general population according to the 2023 census. The report Shame and Stigma in Sanitation, published by the Center for Law & Justice (CLJ) in 2021, connects sanitation work to the age-old caste system prevalent in the Indian sub-continent that attached birth to occupations.

“This ruthless practice has died down to a large extent in Pakistan, but sanitation is probably the only occupation where this traditional caste structure continues,” it points out.

The CLJ’s report carries a survey of the employees of the Water and Sanitation Agency (WASA), which provides drinking water and ensures the smooth working of the sewerage systems, and the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC), which is tasked with collecting and disposing of solid waste from households, industries and hospitals in Lahore city, in the Punjab province. WASA has 2,240 sanitation workers, out of which 1,609 are Christians. The LWMC has 9,000 workers and all of them are Christians. 87 percent of the employees in both organizations believed “janitorial work is only for Christians,” while 72 percent of Christian workers said their Muslim coworkers “believe that this work is not for them.”

The same is true for Karachi as well. Till about five years ago, the KWSC would advertise for the job of sewer cleaners, specifically asking for non-Muslims but stopped after receiving criticism from rights groups.

“We removed this condition and started hiring Muslims for the cleaning of sewers, but they refuse to go down the sewers,” said the KWSC official. In Punjab province, the discriminatory policy of employing only non-Muslims belonging to minorities for janitorial work was struck down in 2016.

With half of Karachi being dug and new drainage lines being laid, much of the work is being carried out by Pathans (Muslims belonging to an ethnic group) and, until last year, by Afghans too. “They are wading in the same filthy water,” says Amjad.

He got a much more lucrative job—working as a sweeper in an apartment building and earning more.

“Being a permanent employee with a government department means lifelong security; the job is for keeps,” he explains. “And on a day-to-day basis too, life is slightly easier. You are not harassed by the police, get sick leave and free healthcare, and there are retirement benefits too, and you cannot be kicked out on any one person’s whim.”

Way Forward

But Amjad and Adil’s work and how they are treated by their employers are in complete contrast to what the Pakistani government has signed under the Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 8—of improving the working conditions of sanitation workers. It also seems unlikely that targets 8.5 “full employment and decent work with equal pay” and 8.8 “protect labour rights and promote safe working environments” will be met by 2030.

Farah Zia, the director of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, talking to IPS, pointed out that Pakistan had made little progress in meeting the criteria for decent work for sanitation workers, considered amongst the most “marginalized labour groups in Pakistan’s workforce.”

Not being “paid a living wage or to live in an environment free of social stigma,” Zia said they were not even provided ample safety equipment and training to protect themselves from occupational hazards. In addition, she pointed out that the 2006 National Sanitation Policy was outdated and fell “short of addressing these concerns.”

The same was observed in Sindh province, where Amjad and Adil live. “Although the Sindh government had adopted a provincial sanitation policy in 2017, it did not address the concerns related to the working and living conditions of these workers in the province,” Zia pointed out

In 2021, in line with SDG 8, WaterAid Pakistan (WAP) worked with the local government in the Punjab province’s Muzaffargarh district to ensure the safety of sanitation workers. Apart from provision of safety equipment and access to clean drinking water, the organization advocated that these “essential workers receive the respect and dignity they deserve,” said Muhammad Fazal, heading the Strategy and Policy Programme of the WAP.

Naeem Sadiq, a Karachi-based industrial engineer and a social activist who has long been fighting for the rights of these men has calculated the highest and lowest salaries in the public sector.

“The ratio of the salary of a janitor to the senior most bureaucrat in the UK is 1:8, while in Pakistan it is 1:80. The ratio of the salary of a janitor to the senior-most judge in the UK is 1:11, while in Pakistan it is 1:115. The ratio between the salary of a janitor and the heads of the highest-paid public sector organizations in the UK is 1:20, while in Pakistan it is 1:250,” he told IPS.

Sadiq wants a complete ban on manual scavenging. “I don’t know how we let our fellow men enter a sewer bubbling with human waste and poisonous gases,” he tells IPS, adding, “We need machines to do this dirty, dangerous work.”

The KWSC has 128 mobile tanker-like contraptions equipped with suctional jetting machines that remove the water from the sewers so that cleaners can go down a 30-foot manhole without having to dive into it to remove silt, timber and stones that cannot be sucked out and have to be brought up manually,’’ said the KWSC official.

That is not good enough for Sadiq. A year ago, he and a group of philanthropists came up with a prototype of a simple gutter-cleaning machine (using the motorbike’s skeleton), which he claims is the cheapest one in the world, costing Rs 1.5 million (USD 5,382).

“It can be sent deep into the sewer to bring up stones, rocks, sludge and silt, and a high-pressure jetting contraption to unclog the lines.”

It is now up to the government to use the design and start manufacturing the contraption called Bhalai (kindness, benefit). “We are absolutely willing to share the design,” said Sadiq.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres (center right) attends a Security Council meeting on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation on March 18, 2024. With geopolitical tensions escalating the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades, reducing and abolishing nuclear weapons is the only viable path to saving humanity. The UN chief told the Security Council delegates that he was deeply concerned about the continuous erosion of the international non-proliferation architecture.Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 7 2024 (IPS)

The continued veiled threats from Russia, warning of nuclear attacks on Ukraine, have prompted some politicians in Europe to visualize a nuclear-armed European Union (EU).

But Volkert Ohm, Co-Chair of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) in Germany, told IPS that the call for nuclear weapons for the EU contradicts international law.

“The Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is that even in extreme circumstances of self-defense, states may only defend themselves with weapons that fulfil the conditions of international humanitarian law.”

“Nuclear weapons do not fulfill them. Nuclear radiation is inherent in any nuclear weapon; thus, “clean” nuclear weapons cannot exist. Debates and statements by politicians in the EU, and particularly in Germany, are neglecting international law on many levels,” he pointed out.

Facing the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House, the head of the EU’s biggest political grouping is calling for Europeans to prepare for war without support from the United States and to build their own nuclear umbrella, according to POLITICO, a US-based online publication.

Manfred Weber, leader of the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), has described Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as “the two who set the framework” for 2024.

The 27 member states of the European Union (EU) are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.

But France is the only EU member that is also one of the world’s nine nuclear powers, along with the US, UK, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

John Burroughs, Vice President, International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and Senior Analyst, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS that interest in some quarters in the European Union (EU) or some European entity acquiring nuclear weapons stems in part from the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine accompanied by illegal nuclear threats.

But the solution is not some form of increased European reliance on nuclear arms. Rather, it is bringing Russia’s war on Ukraine to an end soon, which would involve painful compromises on Ukraine’s part, he said.

“That would eliminate the very real potential for nuclear war arising out of the conflict, and it would open the way for getting arms control and disarmament negotiations with Russia back on track.”

This, he pointed out, is a far better path than the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the EU or another European entity. That would violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as the IALANA Germany statement points out, reinforce nuclear arms racing already underway, and tend to greenlight the spread of nuclear weapons in other regions.

“The interest in European nuclear weapons has also been spurred by concern over statements by former and possible future US President Donald Trump implying US disengagement from NATO. This concern is exaggerated.”

The US government as a whole is deeply committed to NATO, as is illustrated by the fact that Congress passed and President Biden signed a law requiring that a withdrawal from NATO be approved by Congress. It is also true that French and British nuclear arsenals are available for defense of Europe through NATO or otherwise, said Burroughs.

“While they are not as large and diverse as the US or Russian arsenals, it does not take many nuclear weapons to cause Russia or any other country to think twice about aggression. More fundamentally, as the IALANA Germany statement conveys, reliance on nuclear arms, US or European, is incompatible with a law-governed world, and increasing such reliance is going in the wrong direction,” he declared.

“We want NATO, but we also have to be strong enough to be able to defend ourselves without it or in times of Trump,” Weber said in a phone interview with POLITICO on the return leg of a train trip to Kyiv.

“Regardless of who is elected in America, Europe must be able to stand on its own in terms of foreign policy and be able to defend itself independently,” the influential German conservative said.

That brought him to the vexing question of European nuclear defenses. NATO currently relies heavily on U.S. nuclear warheads, which are deployed on six military air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, according to POLITICO.

“Europe must build deterrence; we must be able to deter and defend ourselves,” he said. “We all know that when push comes to shove, the nuclear option is the really decisive one.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has significantly upped his nuclear rhetoric and regularly made veiled atomic threats toward the West.

Within the EU, the only country that would be able to play a larger role is France, which has about 300 nuclear warheads.

The other European nuclear power—but outside the EU—is Britain, with fewer than some 260 warheads. “Perhaps, just to make the options clear, we are now at a point where, after the years and decade of Brexit, we should open a constructive dialogue with our British friends,” Weber continued.

Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation, Oakland, California, told IPS that in light of the Russian Federation’s illegal war of aggression in Ukraine and its attendant drumbeat of nuclear threats, a number of former German government officials and politicians have called for the European Union to acquire its own nuclear arsenal.

For example, former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of the Green Party told Der Speigel last year, “As long as we have a neighbor Russia that follows Putin’s imperial ideology, we cannot do without deterring this Russia.”

Asked whether deterrence includes Germany acquiring its own nuclear weapons, he said, “That is indeed the most difficult question.” Noting that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “also working with nuclear blackmail,” he said: “Should the Federal Republic of Germany possess nuclear weapons? No. Europe? Yes. The EU needs its own nuclear deterrent.”

As pointed out in the IALANA Germany statement, such plans would violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and other applicable laws. But more alarming is the growing normalization of nuclear threats and legitimization of nuclear proliferation suggested by Fischer and others, said Cabasso.

At a time when all of the nuclear armed states are qualitatively and, in some cases, quantitatively upgrading their nuclear arsenals, a new multipolar arms race is underway, and the dangers of wars among nuclear armed states are growing, adding more nuclear-armed actors to the world stage is a truly terrifying prospect, she pointed out.

Germany and other EU members should rebuff any suggestion of acquiring nuclear weapons and take the lead in rejecting reliance on nuclear weapons, use every diplomatic means at their disposal to lower the temperature with Russia and bring the Ukraine war to an end, and promote negotiations among nuclear-armed states to begin the process of nuclear disarmament, declared Cabasso.

Dr M.V. Ramana, Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told IPS that the vast majority of the countries that are part of the European Union have signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear-weapon State Parties.

According to Article 2 of the NPT, each “non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly.”

Likewise, nuclear-weapon State Parties to the NPT that are either part of the EU (i.e., France) or not (e.g., the United States) are obligated under Article 1 of the NPT “not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices,” he said.

Even without going into the details of who might control these proposed “nuclear weapons for the EU”, it is clear that such an arsenal would contradict the spirit of the NPT and weaken the already weak non-proliferation and disarmament norms.

As IALANA says, EU states should distance themselves from this idea and work for a world free of nuclear weapons, declared Ramana.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

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Soka Gakkai International representative and member of the organizing committee for the Future Action Festival, Tadashi Nagai, stressed the importance of coalition and movement building and youth engagement to escalate progress towards attainment of the SDGs. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, May 23 2024 (IPS)

The world has crossed the halfway point to the end of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) era amid multiple, unprecedented, and significantly destructive global shocks. Two of the most pressing global challenges are the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear armament. Of serious concern is a severe lack of youth engagement on issues of critical global importance.

Speaking to IPS during the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference, the outcome of which will inform high-level discussions when the UN hosts hundreds of world leaders, policymakers, experts, and advocates in September at the Summit of the Future in New York, Tadashi Nagai stressed the importance of coalition and movement building and youth engagement to escalate progress towards attainment of the SDGs.

“In March 2024, the Future Action Festival took place in Tokyo, attended by approximately 66,000 people and over half a million viewers via live streaming. The event was a collaborative effort by youth and citizen groups to foster a deeper understanding and proactive stance among young people on nuclear disarmament and climate change solutions as two issues of global concern,” said Nagai, a representative of the Soka Gakkai International organization and the organizing committee of the Future Action Festival at the Nairobi conference. 

The organizing committee comprised representatives from six organizations, including GeNuine, Greenpeace Japan, Japan Youth Council, Kakuwaka Hiroshima, Youth for TPNW, and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Youth. Nagai said the high impact committee is reflective of a tangible, impactful coalition and movement building towards resolving issues of global, national, and local concern in the two major existential threats today—nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.

Nagai spoke of the inalienable link between youth engagement and the delivery of the promise of a peaceful world—a requisite for the attainment of the SDGs and other related global and national commitments. In the lead-up to the Future Action Festival, a youth awareness survey was conducted across Japan from November 2023 to February 2024, targeting individuals ranging from their 10s to their 40s. The survey focused on thematic areas such as society, climate change, nuclear weapons, youth and social systems, and the United Nations.

The survey results were illuminating, providing insights into how the youth perceive these issues and their possible role in resolving them. On the realization of a world free from nuclear weapons for instance, survey results showed that 82 percent of the respondents said nuclear weapons are not needed. Based on a sample size of 119,925 respondents, nuclear abolition is a widely shared vision among young people in Japan.

“We come with lessons from Japan on how civil society organizations represented at the Nairobi conference can build impactful, informative, and life-transforming coalitions and movements to address the most existential threats facing humanity today. This particular conference is unique, historic, and highly critical as it comes ahead of the UN Summit of the Future. The Future Action Festival was an opportunity to collect the voices of young people on issues of critical importance to the global community, in the same way that the outcome of the Nairobi conference will inform the UN Summit later on in September,” Nagai said.

Through the festival, the committee was determined to contribute to UN initiatives and endorse the newly-established UN Youth Office. Additionally, it aims to create momentum to strengthen international cooperation and solidarity toward a peaceful and sustainable future.

With this in mind, a joint declaration from the Future Action Festival was submitted to the UN to inform, influence, and shape high-level discussions at the Summit towards the production of three international frameworks: the Pact for the Future (available as a zero draft), the Global Digital Compact, and the Declaration on Future Generations. Nagai said that the Pact for the Future must be ambitious, inclusive, and innovative.

Under the theme, Summit of the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow, the summit aims to forge a new global consensus on what a collective future should look like and what can be done today to secure it. Enhancing cooperation on critical challenges and addressing gaps in global governance, reaffirming existing commitments, including to the SDGs, towards a reinvigorated multilateral system better placed to positively impact lives. The Summit of the Future will create conditions to help fast-track implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development be more readily attained.

Affirming the critical role of young people in sustainable development, the position of world leaders in the 2030 Agenda is that SDGs would only be attained if they were of the people, by the people, and for the people. The 2030 Agenda invites citizen engagement, especially from young people, to “channel their infinite capacities for activism into the creation of a better world,” Nagai said.

Hence the link between the civil society conference, the summit, and other events such as the Future Action Festival—all geared towards effectively addressing issues of global concern such as climate change, war, and worsening inequalities. Every proposal offered by the UN Secretary-General for consideration at the UN Summit of the Future will have demonstrable impacts on the achievement of the SDGs.

Ultimately, the Nairobi conference was a process of renewal of trust and solidarity at all levels—between peoples, countries, and generations. Making a case for a fundamental rethink of political, economic, and social systems so that they deliver more fairly and effectively for everyone.

At the closing of the conference, Mithika Mwenda, of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, emphasized the need for “boldness and honest conversations” to achieve the radical transformations needed to ensure sustainable development for all, poverty alleviation, and ultimately, an action-oriented Pact for the Future (one of the expected outcomes of the Summit).

Civil society groups and organizations also recommended a corresponding renewal of the multilateral system, with the Summit of the Future as a defining moment to agree on the most critical improvements necessary to deliver a future defined by equality, fairness, and shared prosperity.

Secretary-General António Guterres and Kenyan President William Ruto praised the efforts of civil society and underscored their “indispensable contributions.”

In his address, Guterres said time and again that he had witnessed the enormous impact of civil society in every corner of the world; easing suffering, pushing for peace and justice, standing for truth, and advancing gender equality and sustainable development, with many working at great personal risk.

Regarding current conflicts, including Gaza, Sudan, and ongoing crises in the Sahel, Great Lakes, and Horn of Africa regions, he said that the UN would not give up on the “push for peace, justice, and human rights.”

He recognized that civil society was crucial to addressing many issues in the world, including closing digital divides and revitalizing the collective approach to peace and security.

“We need to be informed by your frontline know-how. We need your can-do attitude to overcome obstacles and find innovative solutions,” said Guterres. “We need you to use your networks, knowledge, and contacts to implement solutions and to persuade governments to act.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

A view of the Earth and a satellite as seen from outer space. Credit: NASA via UN News

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 7 2024 (IPS)

When the 15-member UN Security Council failed last month to adopt its first-ever resolution on outer space—co-sponsored by the US and Japan—the Russian veto led to speculation whether this was a precursor for a future nuclear arms race in the skies above.

The vetoed resolution was expected to “affirm the obligation of all States parties to fully comply with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, including not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

Randy Rydell, Executive Advisor, Mayors for Peace, and a former Senior Political Affairs Officer at the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), told IPS that the Security Council’s record on disarmament issues has long suffered from the same plague that has also tormented the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva: namely the veto and the CD’s “consensus rule.”

Sadly, this vote on the outer space resolution should surprise no one, he said.

The world is facing a crisis of the “rule of law” in disarmament. Key treaties have failed to achieve universal membership, failed to be negotiated, failed to enter into force, failed to be fully incorporated into domestic laws and policies of the parties, and failed to be fully implemented, while other treaties have actually lost parties, he pointed out.

While the Outer Space Treaty will remain in force despite this unfortunate vote, Rydell argued, the specters of the existing nuclear arms race proliferating one day into space, along with unbridled competition to deploy non-nuclear space weapons, have profound implications not just for the future of disarmament but also for the peace and security of our fragile planet.

“The Charter’s norms against the threat of use of force and the obligation to resolve disputes peacefully remain the most potentially effective antidotes to the contagion unfolding before us, coupled with new steps not just “toward” but “in” disarmament”.

“I hope the General Assembly’s Summit of the Future in September will succeed in reviving a new global commitment to precisely these priorities,” declared Rydell

By a vote of 13 in favor to 1 against (Russian Federation) and 1 abstention (China), the Council rejected the draft resolution, owing to the negative vote cast by a permanent member.

Besides the US,  UK and France, all 10 non-permanent members voted for the resolution,  including Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Switzerland.

Jackie Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation, told IPS it is impossible, amidst the current geopolitical rivalries and fog of propaganda, to evaluate the ramifications of the Security Council’s failure to adopt this resolution—though it does underscore the dysfunction in the Security Council created by the P-5’s veto power.

“Russia and China have long been proponents of negotiations for a comprehensive treaty on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, and in 2008 and 2014 submitted draft treaty texts to the moribund Conference on Disarmament,” she said.

The United States, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, rejected those drafts out of hand, said Cabasso, whose California-based WSLF is a non-profit public interest organization that seeks to abolish nuclear weapons as an essential step in securing a more just and environmentally sustainable world.

A week after its April 24 veto, Russia submitted a new draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council that goes farther than the U.S.-Japan proposal, calling not only for efforts to stop weapons from being deployed in outer space “for all time,” but for preventing “the threat or use of force in outer space.”

The resolution reportedly states this should include bans on deploying weapons “from space against Earth, and from Earth against objects in outer space.” By definition, this would include anti-satellite weapons.

With new nuclear arms races underway here on earth, with the erosion and dismantling of the Cold War nuclear arms control architecture, and with the dangers of wars among nuclear armed states growing to perhaps an all-time high, it certainly remains true, as recognized by the UN General Assembly in 1981, that “the extension of the arms race into outer space [is] a real possibility.”

“We are in a global emergency and every effort must be made to lower the temperature and create openings for diplomatic dialogue among the nuclear-armed states. To this end, the U.S. and its allies should call Russia’s bluff (if that’s what they think it is) and welcome its proposed new resolution in the Security Council,” declared Cabasso.

Speaking after the vote, the representative of the United States said that this is not the first time the Russian Federation has undermined the global non-proliferation regime, according to a report in UN News. “It has defended—and even enabled—dangerous proliferators.”

Moreover, with its abstention, the US said, China showed that it would rather “defend Russia as its junior partner” than safeguard the global non-proliferation regime, she added.

“There should be no doubt that placing a nuclear weapon into orbit would be unprecedented, unacceptable, and deeply dangerous.”

The US said Japan had gone to great lengths to forge consensus, with 65 cross-regional co-sponsors who joined in support.

Japan’s representative said he deeply regretted the Russian Federation’s decision to use the veto to break the adoption of “this historic draft resolution.”

Notwithstanding the support of 65 countries that co-sponsored the document, one permanent member decided to “silence the critical message we wanted to send to the world,” he stressed, noting that the draft resolution would have been a practical contribution to the promotion of peaceful use and the exploration of outer space.

The representative of the Russian Federation, noting that the Council is again involved in “a dirty spectacle prepared by the US and Japan, said, “This is a cynical ploy.  We are being tricked.”

Recalling that the ban on placing weapons of mass destruction in outer space is already enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, he said that Washington, D.C., Japan, and their allies are “cherry-picking” weapons of mass destruction out of all other weapons, trying to “camouflage their lack of interest” in outer space being free from any kinds of weapons.

The addition to the operative paragraph, proposed by the Russian Federation and China, does not delete from the draft resolution a call not to develop weapons of mass destruction and not to place them in outer space, he emphasized.

Meanwhile, outlining the treaty’s history, Cabasso said that in Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1967, States Parties agreed “not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

Yet, according to the UN Yearbook, by 1981, member states had expressed concern in the General Assembly that “rapid advances in science and technology had made the extension of the arms race into outer space a real possibility, and that new kinds of weapons were still being developed despite the existence of international agreements.”

In his May 1 testimony to the House Armed Services subcommittee, John Plumb, the first Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, claimed that “Russia is developing and—if we are unable to convince them otherwise—to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space which will be an indiscriminate weapon” that would not distinguish among military, civilian, or commercial satellites.

In February, President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no intention of deploying nuclear weapons in space. It is troubling, therefore, that on April 24, Russia vetoed the first-ever Security Council resolution on an arms race in outer space, said Cabasso.

The resolution, introduced by the United States and Japan, would have affirmed the obligation of all States Parties to fully comply with the Outer Space Treaty, including its provisions to not deploy nuclear or any other kind of weapon of mass destruction in space. China abstained.

Before the resolution was put to a vote, Russia and China had proposed an amendment that would have broadened the call on all countries—beyond banning nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—to “prevent for all time the placement of weapons in outer space and the threat of use of force in outer space.”  The amendment was defeated, she said.

This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

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Analysts say the film Oppenheimer would have benefitted from showing the impact on those the bombs were unleashed upon. Credit: The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 10 2024 (IPS)

The award-winning Hollywood movie Oppenheimer portrays the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped create the atomic bomb, which claimed the lives of an estimated 140,000 to 226,000 people and devastated the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The tragedy was best described as a humanitarian disaster of Biblical proportions. But the film focuses on the creation of the bombs, not the devastation it caused.

In a Time magazine piece last February, Jeffrey Kluger recounts a meeting at the White House between US President Harry S. Truman and Oppenheimer, aptly describing it as “the man who built the bombs and the man who dropped the bombs.”

Suffering from an unforgivable guilt, Oppenheimer reportedly told Truman, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”

But history recalls just what happened next differently, says Time.

Truman apparently said, “Never mind, it’ll come out in the wash.”

Or another story, where an unrepentant Truman hands a handkerchief to Oppenheimer and says, “Well here, would you like to wipe your hand?”

In the film, Truman merely brandishes the handkerchief.

A former Hiroshima mayor, Takashi Hiraoka, who spoke at a preview event for the film, was more critical of what was omitted from the movie.

He was quoted as saying: “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted. The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans.”

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) said the release of the Oppenheimer film, and the wave of (media) attention surrounding it, creates an opportunity to spark public attention on the risks of nuclear weapons and invite new audiences to get involved in the movement to abolish nuclear weapons.

“We can educate about the risks, and share a much-needed message of hope and resistance: Oppenheimer is about how nuclear weapons began, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is how we end them.”

Speaking of the historical perspective, Dr Alon Ben-Meir, a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU), told IPS that the Manhattan Project, which was spearheaded by Oppenheimer to develop a nuclear weapon, started while the Second World War was raging and Germany had been on the march, conquering one country after another in Europe.

However, by the time the nuclear weapon was developed, Germany had surrendered, but Japan continued to fight. Based on documented historical accounts, Japanese forces were fighting in every trench, in every front, to the last soldier, and the word’surrender’ was not in their vocabulary, he said.

General Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of the US Army, provided counsel to President Truman at the time that if the war were to continue for another one to two years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and perhaps more than a million Japanese would be killed.

When Truman asked what he would suggest, General Marshall and others indicated that bombing one or even two sites in Japan with a nuclear weapon could bring the war to a swift conclusion and save the lives of millions from both sides.

Truman was finally persuaded that this may be the only solution, specifically given that the Japanese were determined to fight until the bitter end, said Ben-Meir, who taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

“Once the bombs were dropped and Oppenheimer realized the extent of the damage and death that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he felt personally responsible for the catastrophic impact of the bomb, stating to President Truman that he felt that he had blood on his hands because of what happened.”

Truman then told Oppenheimer that although he was behind the development of the nuclear weapon, the decision to use it was his own, and Oppenheimer bore no responsibility whatsoever.

President Truman allegedly handed Oppenheimer his handkerchief to presumably wipe his hands off the bloodstains. Nevertheless, Oppenheimer left the president’s office completely distraught, said Ben-Meir.

“The Japanese do not believe that Truman was concerned about the potential loss of Japanese lives had the war continued, but was mainly concerned about American lives. This sadly remains a point of contention but was mostly overcome due to the strong alliance that was subsequently developed between the US and Japan.”

Of course, what compounded Oppenheimer’s profound despair over what happened was that he was subsequently accused of being a member of the Communist Party and had his security clearance revoked, ending his work with the US government (he was posthumously exonerated), declared Ben-Meir.

Broadly, though, according to National Public Radio (NPR), many Japanese viewers expressed discomfort with Oppenheimer’s storytelling and felt the portrayal was incomplete.

“The film was only about the side that dropped the A-bomb,” Tsuyuko Iwanai, a Nagasaki resident, told NPR. “I wish they had included the side it was dropped on.”

Upon witnessing the first successful nuclear test, Oppenheimer reportedly quoted from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am Death: the destroyer of the worlds,” according to UNFOLD ZERO, a platform for UN focused initiatives and actions for the achievement of a nuclear weapons-free world.

“Indeed, Oppenheimer was so impacted by the potential of the nuclear bomb to destroy the world that, following the end of the Second World War, he became deeply involved in international nuclear weapons control, peace and the promotion of world governance”.

“The movie should remind us of how important and relevant these ideas are today—as wars are raging, tensions between nuclear armed States are increasing and the threat of nuclear war is as high as it has ever been,” said UNFOLD ZERO.

“The thinking, passion and commitment of Oppenheimer regarding these issues is barely touched upon in the movie, despite it being so important today for re-awakening our collective understanding of the nature of nuclear deterrence, the risks of nationalism and the importance to strengthen the rule of law, prevent nuclear war and achieve peace through global governance.”

Addressing the UN Security Council on March 18, Secretary-General António Guterres referred to the movie, which won seven Oscars at the Hollywood Academy Awards ceremony on March 10, including the four major awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.

“The Doomsday Clock is ticking loudly enough for all to hear. From academics and civil society groups, calling for an end to the nuclear madness,” he said.

“To Pope Francis, who calls the possession of nuclear arms ‘immoral’. To young people across the globe worried about their future, demanding change. To the Hibakusha, the brave survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—among our greatest living examples of speaking truth to power—delivering their timeless message of peace.”

Humanity cannot survive a sequel to Oppenheimer, Guterres warned.

This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.

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Soka Gakkai International (SGI) sponsors a workshop on education for global citizenship in the post-2015 development agenda. Credit: Hiro Sakurai / SGI

By Joel Jaeger
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 29 2014 (IPS)

Civil society leaders and U.N. development experts gathered on Wednesday to discuss the role of education for global citizenship in the post-2015 development agenda.

The workshop, sponsored by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), was part of the U.N.’s 65th Annual Department of Public Information/Non-Governmental Organization (DPI/NGO) Conference.“We are part of a bigger humanity.” -- Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury

Education “is linked to all areas of sustainable development and is vital in achieving all Sustainable Development Goals and targets,” Hiro Sakurai, SGI’s U.N. liaison office director, told IPS.

“Education for global citizenship deserves particular attention and emphasis in this regard as it helps link issues and disciplines, brings together all stakeholders, and fosters shared vision and objectives,” he said.

Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, former under-secretary general and high representative of the U.N., gave the event’s keynote address. He expressed his excitement at the increased prominence of global citizenship in development circles.

According to Ambassador Chowdhury, global citizenship requires “self-transformation” and can be a “pathway to a culture of peace.”

Progress requires a “determination to treat each one of us as a global citizen,” he said. “We are part of a bigger humanity.”

Saphira Ramesfar of the Baha’i International Community also spoke to the transformative nature of global citizenship.

“It is not enough for education to provide individuals who can read, write and count,” she said. “Education must be transformative and bring shared values to life, cultivating an active care for the world itself and for those with whom we share it. Education needs to fully assume its role in building just, unified and inclusive societies.”

In the past, attempts to build global citizenship have focused on the young, but Ambassador Chowdhury argued for a more expansive understanding of the concept.

“I believe that education for global citizenship is for all of us, irrespective of our age, irrespective of whether we are going through a formal education process or not,” Chowdhury said.

Anjali Rangaswami of the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs explained how NGOs have actively participated in the crafting of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Past years have set “a very high standard for civil society engagement,” according to Rangaswami.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set to expire in 2015, included a target of universal primary education. The SDGs, if adopted in their current draft form, would aim for universal secondary education as well.

Under target four, the SDGs specifically mention education for global citizenship, an issue left unaddressed by the MDGs.

The U.N’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), which lists “fostering global citizenship” as one of its three main priorities, was influential in this new development.

According to Min Jeong Kim, head of GEFI’s secretariat team, the initiative was launched by the secretary-general in 2012 because “at that point education had sort of stagnated after rapid growth following adoption of [the] MDGs.”

After the panel speakers concluded, participants in the workshop broke into small groups to share their own perspectives on education for global citizenship.

The event was also co-sponsored by the Baha’i International Community, Global Movement for a Culture of Peace, Human Rights Education Associates, Sustainable Development Education Caucus and Values Caucus, bringing a wide variety of expertise to the table.

The SDGs are an opportunity for a whole new outlook on education.

Education should be focused on developing meaningful lives, rather than focused on making a living, Ambassador Chowdhury told IPS.

So far the paradigm has been “if you get a good job, then your education is worth it, and if you do not get a good job, then your education is worthless,” he said. “That has to change.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at joelmjaeger@gmail.com

An old woman stands in front of her house, which was destroyed by flash floods in Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Jun 25 2014 (IPS)

A consortium of faith-based organisations (FBOs) made a declaration at a side event Wednesday at the 6^th Asian Ministerial Conference On Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR), to let the United Nations know that they stand ready to commit themselves to building resilient communities across Asia in the aftermath of natural disasters.

Hosted this year by the Thai government, the conference is an annual collaboration with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), with the aim of bringing regional stakeholders together to discuss the specific challenges facing Asia in an era of rapid climate change.

“I have seen the aftermath of disasters, where religious leaders and volunteers from Hindu temples, Islamic organisations and Sikh temples work together like born brothers." -- Dr. Anil Kumar Gupta, head of the division of policy planning at the National Institute of Disaster Management in India
A report prepared for the Bangkok conference by UNISDR points out that in the past three years Asia has encountered a wide range of disasters, from cyclones in the Philippines and major flooding in China, India and Thailand, to severe earthquakes in Pakistan and Japan.

In 2011 alone, global economic losses from extreme weather events touched 366 billion dollars, of which 80 percent were recorded in the Asia-Pacific region.

While the region accounts for 39 percent of the planet’s land area and hosts 60 percent of the world’s population, it only holds 29 percent of global wealth, posing major challenges for governments in terms of disaster preparedness and emergency response.

FBOs believe they can fill this gap by giving people hope during times of suffering.

“It’s not about the goods we bring or the big houses we build,” argued Jessica Dator Bercilla, a Filipina from Christian Aid, adding that the most important contribution religious organisations can make is to convince people they are not alone on the long road towards rebuilding their lives after a disaster.

The FBO consortium that drafted the statement – including Caritas Asia, Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the ACT Alliance – held a pre-conference consultative meeting here on Jun. 22^nd during which some 50 participants from various faiths discussed the many hurdles FBOs must clear in order to deliver disaster relief and assist affected populations.

The final FBO Statement on Disaster Risk Reduction drew attention to faith organisations’ unique ability to work closely with local communities to facilitate resilience and peace building.

A declaration enshrined in the statement also urged the United Nations to recognise FBOs as a unique stakeholder in the Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (HFA2) to be presented to the 3^rd U.N. World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR) in 2015.

It also wants national and local governments to include FBOs when they organise regular consultations on DRR with relevant stakeholders, as FBOs are the ones who often sustain development programmes in the absence of international NGOs.

For example, since 2012 Caritas Indonesia has been working with a coastal community that has lost 200 metres of its coastal land in the past 22 years, in the Fata Hamlet of Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggar Province, to build community resilience to rising seawaters.

The agency helped community members form the Fata Environment Lover Group, which now uses natural building methods to allow seawater to pass through bamboo structures before reaching the coast, so that wave heights are reduced and mangroves are protected.

Collectively, the three partners to the declaration cover a lot of ground in the region.

Caritas Asia is one of seven regional offices that comprise Caritas International, a Catholic relief agency that operates in 200 countries. SGI is a Japanese lay Buddhist movement with a network of organisations in 192 countries, while ACT is a coalition of Christian churches and affiliated organistaions working in over 140 countries.

All three are renowned for their contributions to the field of development and disaster relief. Caritas International, for instance, annually allocates over a million euros (1.3 million dollars) to humanitarian coordination, capacity building and HIV/AIDS programmes around the world.

“We would like to be one of the main players in the introduction of the DRR policy,” Takeshi Komino, head of emergencies for the ACT Alliance in the Asia-Pacific region, told IPS. “We are saying we are ready to engage.”

“What our joint statement points out is that our commitment is based on faith and that is strong. We can be engaged in relief and recovery activity for a long time,” added Nobuyuki Asai, programme coordinator of peace affairs for SGI.

Experts say Asia is an excellent testing ground for the efficacy of faith-based organisations in contributing to disaster risk reduction.

According to a survey by the independent Pew Research Centre, the Asia-Pacific region is home to 99 percent of the world’s Buddhists, 99 percent of the world’s Hindus and 62 percent of the world’s Muslims.

The region has also seen a steady increase in the number of Catholics, from 14 million a century ago to 131 million in 2013.

Forming links between these communities is easier said than done, with religious and communal conflicts plaguing the region, including a wave of Buddhist extremism in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, a strong anti-Christian movement across Pakistan and attacks on religious minorities in China and India.

Some experts, however, say that the threat of natural catastrophe draws communities together.

According to Dr. Anil Kumar Gupta, head of the division of policy planning at the National Institute of Disaster Management in India, “When there is a disaster people forget their differences.

“I have seen the aftermath of disasters, where religious leaders and volunteers from Hindu temples, Islamic organisations and Sikh temples work together like born brothers,” he told IPS, citing such cooperation during major floods recently in the northern Indian states of Uttarakhand and Kashmir.

Loy Rego, a Myanmar-based disaster relief consultant, told IPS that the statement released today represents a very important landmark in disaster risk reduction.

“FBOs need to be more visible as an organised constituency in the roll-out of future frameworks,” he stated.

Rego believes that the biggest contribution FBOs could make to disaster risk management is to promote peaceful living among different communities.

“Respecting other religions need not be done in a secular way,” he said. “It only happens when they work with other FBOs in an inter-faith setting.”

(END)

Faith leaders gathered at the United States Peace Institute to solidify a common stance on nuclear disarmament. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Apr 25 2014 (IPS)

On the eve of next week’s meeting at the U.N. headquarters in New York on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), more than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

Gathered at the U.S. Institute of Peace here Thursday, the participants, composed of influential representatives of the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, among others, said their traditions teach that the threat posed by nuclear weapons was “unacceptable and must be eliminated”.“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons.” -- Hirotsugu Terasaki

Soka Gakkai International, a global grassroots Buddhist organisation based in Japan, hosted the event.

“The continued existence of nuclear weapons forces humankind to live in the shadow of apocalyptic destruction,” according to a statement issued at the end of the one-day conference.

“The catastrophic consequences of any use of nuclear weapons cannot be fully communicated by numbers or statistics; it is a reality that frustrates the power of both rational analysis and ordinary imagination.”

Signatories of the statement include representatives from the Muslim American Citizens Coalition and Public Affairs Council, the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Pax Christi International.

The conference, the latest in a series on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, came as delegates from around the world prepared to convene in New York for the NPT PrepCom, set to run Apr. 28 through May 9. That meeting will help lay the groundwork for the 2015 Review Conference, also slated for New York, on implementing the NPT’s goals of non-proliferation and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear deterrence theory does not work like it used to. In order to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, the only way is to create an era in which there are no nuclear weapons,” Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, told IPS.

“The president of our organisation has said, ‘Nuclear weapons are not a necessary evil, they are an absolute evil.’”

Prodding the process

One goal of Thursday’s symposium was to flesh out the fatal consequences of nuclear weapons, including ramifications that go well the immediate fallout of a nuclear strike.

For instance, keynote speaker Dr. Andrew Kanter, former director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told the participants of scientific findings that even a small detonation could cause a widespread deadly famine by accelerating climate change and disrupting global agriculture.

Others discussed the need to engage the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council in the broader conversation. As a first step, Thursday’s statement will be presented next week to the chair of the NPT PrepCom.

“We need to think again about what we mean by security and how we experience security,” Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International, said. “As faith-based communities, we are in a position to ask those kinds of questions.”

Since 1970, when the NPT became effective, its regular review conferences have produced few successes other than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bars all nuclear explosions – including those, such as took place in the Marshall Islands, for testing purposes.

Additionally, the five nuclear-armed signatories have met annually since 2009. Last week, they met in Beijing where they reaffirmed past commitments and solidified a reporting framework to share national progress on meeting treaties.

Also present at Thursday’s symposium was Anita Friedt, an official on nuclear policy at the U.S. State Department. She described some of the reasons that nuclear abolition has been such a frustratingly slow process.

More than 100 representatives of 11 faith groups from around the world have pledged to step up their efforts to seek the global abolition of nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy of SGI

“Why can’t we just stop and give up nuclear weapons? This is really hard work,” Friedt said.

“If we just say today we’re just going to give up nuclear weapons, there’s no incentive for other countries to do so, necessarily. Unfortunately, it is more complex than it may seem at the surface.”

There are also significant bureaucratic challenges to the ongoing NPT negotiations. The U.S. Congress, for instance, failed to ratify the CTBT in 1999 and only barely ratified President Barack Obama’s New START Treaty – a strategic arms-reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia – in 2010.

“It’s a slower pace than I would like; it’s a slower pace than our president would like,” Friedt said.

Yet SGI’s Terasaki says global faith communities are well placed use their broad leverage to try to influence, and speed up, this process. Thursday’s event, he noted, was the first time such a discussion had come to the United States.

“We want to help re-energise the voice of faith communities,” he said, “and explore ways to raise public awareness of the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons.”

Obligation to disarm

The conference occurred on the same day that the Marshall Islands filed an unprecedented lawsuit before the International Court of Justice against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed countries for not upholding their commitments to the NPT and international law.

“Article VI [of the NPT] defines an obligation to negotiate in good faith for an end to nuclear arms and disarmament,” David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a consultant to the Marshall Islands lawsuit, filed Thursday, told IPS.

“This lawsuit indicates that each of the nuclear armed states are modernising their nuclear arsenal. You can’t modernise your arsenal and say you’re negotiating in good faith.”

Five countries are currently party to the NPT: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. However, the Marshall Islands is also suing India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, claiming that those countries are bound to the same nuclear disarmament provisions under international law.

The small island nation, in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean, is not suing for monetary compensation. Rather, its government wants the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare the nine countries in breach of their treaty obligations and to issue an injunction ordering them to begin negotiating in good faith.

Krieger says the Marshall Islands have “suffered gravely” as a result of nuclear testing carried out by the United States between 1946 and 1958.

“They don’t want any other country or people to suffer the consequences that they have,” he said, noting that the residents of the Marshall Islands have suffered health effects in the generations since the testing stopped, including stillborn babies and abnormally high rates of cancer.

Out of the nine nuclear-armed countries, only the United Kingdom, India and Pakistan accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction. The other six countries, including the United States, are not to be invited to the court in order to state their reasons for not fulfilling their obligations under the NPT.

Still, just to be sure that the United States answers for its responsibility to the NPT, the Marshall Islands has also filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

Nobel Laureate Betty Williams started her speech to a peace forum at the U.N. headquarters Thursday with perhaps the last thing the audience would expect her to say.

From left: H.E. Mr. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations; Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, Former Under-Secretary-General and High Representative; and Ms. Betty Williams, 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate. Credit: Minh Le/IPS

She urged them to stop glorifying working for peace.

“We could sit all day here and glorify it, but it’s not a thing that should be glorified,” she said. “It’s a thing that should be done in reality, every single day of our lives.”

Williams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for promoting a peaceful society, believes that each person, as a global citizen, has a role to play in bringing peace to the world.

“We can’t say ‘I don’t have to do it. Let them do it.’ Every child that dies in our world from conditions of malnutrition, from disease, from war, we are all guilty. As a human family, we are all guilty,” she said.

Her sentiment for global solidarity and responsibility was echoed by many others at the forum, where diplomats, educators and peace activists gathered to discuss the topic of “Global Citizenship and the Future of the U.N.”

The Feb. 20 event, sponsored by the U.N. Alliance of Civilisations and organised by Soka Gakkai International (SGI), Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, also saw the launch of “A Forum for Peace: Daisaku Ikeda’s Proposals to the U.N.”

The book is a collection of 30 years of annual peace proposals by Buddhist thinker Ikeda, whose recommendations for global change and for the U.N. are seen as words of wisdom by Williams and other speakers at the forum.

“This is the book that really needs to be read by all of us,” said Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury, former under-secretary-general and high representative.

“No human being in the world history has written so consistently and so substantively about the work of the U.N.,” he said, adding that many of Ikeda’s proposals, including the empowerment of women and young people in creating peace, have been reflected in the way the global body operates.

Ikeda’s concept of the “Culture of Peace,” Chowdhury said, is essential to make the world a secure place for future generations, by promoting peace through dialogue and nonviolence.

Global citizenship

In his remarks sent to the forum, Ikeda said he has “repeatedly stressed the importance of fostering an awareness of our role and responsibility as global citizens,” which he considers the spiritual basis for countries to resolve conflicts and the source of hope for the future of the U.N.

He then called for a brand new programme of education specifically for global citizenship to be promoted by the U.N.

Education, Ikeda said, needs to deepen understanding of challenges facing humankind and promote a shared pledge among all people “not to seek one’s happiness and prosperity at the expense of others.”

In 2012, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched “Education First,” an initiative aiming to get every child into school, increase education quality and foster global citizenship.

According to the U.N., it is not enough to only produce students who can read, write and count, but they also need to learn how to “think and act for the dignity of fellow human beings.” The problem with the current education system is that the values of peace, human rights, respect, cultural diversity and justice are not often embedded and emphasised in the ethos of schools.

William Gaudelli, associate professor of social studies and education at Teachers College, said in order to have a new generation of global citizens, first it is necessary to have teachers who are more open to and more thoughtful about the world.

The concept of global citizenship, he said, is not a novelty and in fact can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who described himself as “a citizen of the world”.

Gaudelli said while it may seem a “crazy” idea now to ask people who live in “neatly divided countries” to think of themselves as global citizens, the world really needs to come together to solve ongoing problems.

“There are so many challenges, from infectious diseases, small arms trading, human trafficking, global warming, animal extinction and the list grows,” he said, calling for all members of the global society to truly listen to and learn from others, rather than waiting for “an opening to talk.”

Role of the U.N.

Olivier Urbain, who edited the book, said he was impressed by Ikeda’s firm belief in the power of ordinary people and his trust in the potential of solidarity.

He also noted that Ikeda’s promotion for a world without war does not stop with abolishing actual nuclear warheads, but it also deals with the mentality behind the fact that the world still have these weapons.

“It’s not possible to build one’s happiness on the misery of another human being. The same thing with countries: it is not possible to build true lasting national security on the misery and terror of other countries that are so terrified by the weapon,” he said.

Despite conflicts and threats around the world, Urbain said there was “a tremendous sense of hope” when he read the book.

“As long as we have the space for personal creativity and solidarity, there is nothing that human beings cannot overcome,” he said.

Urbain said the U.N., therefore, needs to create channels and mechanisms for people’s voices to be heard and, in so doing, let itself be empowered by the people.

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, High Representative for the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, said the peaceful and prosperous co-existence of peoples and nations is the cornerstone of the U.N. mission.

“We are bound together as the international community in the belief that despite different cultures, languages and religions, there are fundamental shared values and principles that underpin our humanity,” he said.

“We are bound together as the U.N. family because we recognise that it is through the celebration of our diversity, as well as through the promotion of tolerance and dispelling fears of the “other”, that we will build a more peaceful world,” he told the forum.

Even though it was clear that many speakers were believers in the U.N., they did not shy away from the fact that the global organisation is not perfect. That is why reforms and recommendations proposed by thinkers like Ikeda are important, they said.

“The U.N. is all that we have in our world to try and make it better,” said Williams. “I know that in certain areas it could do with a lot of improvements but give me one organisation in the world that is being run smoothly?”

“What could we do if we didn’t have this organisation? How much worse would it be?” she asked.

Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, speaking in Nuevo Vallarta on progress towards a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy of Kimiaki Kawai

By Emilio Godoy
NUEVO VALLARTA, Feb 15 2014 (IPS)

Countries in favour of nuclear disarmament have reached the point where they are ready to set a date for the start of formal negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons, a decision that could be taken in Austria at the end of this year.

This was the general sense at the close on Friday Feb. 14 of the two-day Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, held in the tourist centre of Nuevo Vallarta in western Mexico. Delegates from 146 nations and over 100 non-governmental organisations from all over the world were in attendance."We are more advanced than the nuclear powers in acknowledging that there should be no weapons.” -- Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai International

Participants denounced the humanitarian effects of possession and use of nuclear arsenals and sent a powerful message in favour of the destruction of all nuclear warheads, 19,000 of which are still in the possession of China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“It’s a step towards a road map for the objective of prohibition, and I assume that the third conference will provide the road map for that aim. We are more advanced than the nuclear powers in acknowledging that there should be no weapons,” Japanese Hirotsugu Terasaki, vice-president of Soka Gakkai and executive director of Peace Affairs of Soka Gakkai International, a pacifist Buddhist organisation, told IPS.

“It’s about the creation of an environment for abolition [because] the nuclear powers defend non-proliferation, but they maintain their arsenals,” he said at the conference.

The Austrian government announced on Thursday Feb. 13 that they would host the third conference at the end of the year. It will precede the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the main binding international instrument for limiting atomic armaments, which has made no progress for the past 15 years.

Héctor Guerra, the coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which has a membership of 350 organisations from 81 countries, told IPS that the process “is ready for the next steps and for the transition” to a “binding international instrument for the elimination” of nuclear weapons.

Ideally, “the entire international community” would participate, but if the nuclear powers abstain, “there is no problem,” said Guerra. In his view, the new treaty “would establish international regulations that would facilitate the delegitimisation of the weapons in international negotiations.”

As with the Oslo conference in 2013, the five nuclear powers authorised by the NPT (U.S., China, France, U.K. and Russia) were not present at Nuevo Vallarta.

Pakistan, however, was present, although like Israel and India it has not signed the NPT, which currently has 190 states parties.

Since the Oslo conference, the abolitionist movement has made headway in the denunciation of humanitarian impacts. In May 2013 the preparatory committee for the NPT Review Conference highlighted this angle, as did the General Assembly of the United Nations a few months later in New York.

At Nuevo Vallarta the factors of human error and technological failure in the maintenance and management of nuclear arsenals came under scrutiny, illustrated in detail by journalist Eric Schlosser in his book “Command and Control”.

“Many times the arms were almost used due to miscalculation and mistakes,” Patricia Lewis, the head of international security research for the London-based NGO Chatham House, told IPS.

“The probability is greater than what we know and we have to consider what we don’t know. Today’s situation is even riskier,” she said.

Lewis presented the findings of a study in which she and her team reviewed nuclear incidents in tests, military exercises and potential risk alerts between 1962 and 2013, involving the U.S., the former Soviet Union, the U.K., France, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Among its results, the study found lax physical and operational security practised at all levels by the U.S. air force.

Until all warheads are eliminated, Lewis recommended avoidance of large-scale military exercises at times of high political tension, and slowing the triggering of attack threat alerts.

Terasaki concluded that “nuclear weapons have made humanity their hostage.”

In Guerra’s view, a ban on nuclear weapons should be in place by 2020. “The political conditions are becoming ripe for negotiations,” which should be carried out in the U.N. framework, he said.

A group of about 20 “eminent persons” is to be tasked with an unenviable job: convince eight recalcitrant countries to join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The eight holdouts – China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United States – have not given any indication of possible ratifications, leaving the treaty in limbo."The vast majority of the states recognise the immense political impact of the treaty's entry into force." -- Hirotsugu Terasaki of Soka Gakkai International

Under the provisions of the CTBT, the treaty cannot enter into force without the participation of the last of the eight key countries.

“We are working hard day-in and day-out to make the treaty into law,” Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), told reporters Wednesday.

He urged non-signatories to understand that ratification would enhance not only international security, but their own national security as well.

Zerbo said the proposed group, comprising former prime ministers and other highly regarded figures from both states parties and non-signatory states, will be launched during the eighth Conference on Facilitating the Entry into Force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The conference is scheduled to take place in New York on Sep. 27.

Providing an update on the treaty’s current status, Zerbo said 183 countries had signed, of which 159 had already ratified it.

But in accordance with its Article XIV, the treaty will enter into force after all 44 states, including the missing eight, listed in its Annex 2 have ratified it.

With the General Assembly belatedly commemorating the annual International Day Against Nuclear Tests Thursday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lamented the fact that the CTBT has still not entered into force, even though 20 years have passed since the Conference on Disarmament began negotiations on the treaty.

The International Day Against Nuclear Tests was commemorated worldwide on Aug. 29 but the General Assembly meeting took place Thursday.

In a message to the Assembly, Ban said with the adoption of the Partial Test Ban Treaty 50 years ago, the international community completed its first step towards ending nuclear-weapon-test explosions for all time.

“This objective remains a serious matter of unfinished business on the disarmament agenda,” he said.

Urging all states to sign and ratify CTBT without further delay, Ban singled out the eight holdouts as having a special responsibility.

“None should wait for others to act first,” he implored. “In the meantime, all states should maintain or implement moratoria on nuclear explosions.”

John Loretz, programme director at International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told IPS the moratorium has been honoured by most of the nuclear-weapon states since the 1990s. The exceptions, he said, have been India and Pakistan, both of whom tested nuclear weapons in 1998, but have not done so since then, and North Korea, which has conducted three very small tests since 2006.

When Pyongyang conducted its third test last February, the 15-member U.N. Security Council condemned the test as “a grave violation” of its previous resolutions and described North Korea as a country which is “a clear threat to international peace and security”.

Hirotsugu Terasaki, executive director of the Office of Peace Affairs of the Tokyo-based Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which has long campaigned for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, told IPS he would like to pay special attention to the efforts of the Preparatory Commission for the CTBTO which has played an important role in preventing and prohibiting nuclear test explosions.

Since North Korea’s first nuclear tests in 2006, 23 countries have ratified the CTBT, he noted. “And nearly 95 percent of the world ratifying the CTBT implies that the vast majority of the states recognise the immense political impact of the treaty’s entry into force.”

Following their nuclear tests in 1998, both India and Pakistan announced their decision to extend the moratorium of nuclear testing. In this sense, he pointed out, the CTBT has had a major positive impact on the prevention of nuclear testing.

“The international community sees the CTBT as a positive step,” Terasaki added.

Asked what remains to be done, Terasaki told IPS the key to bringing the CTBT into force is its ratification by the U.S. and China.

The United States revealed that Z machine plutonium trials were conducted between April and June this year at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to assess the working order of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Despite this, President Barack Obama’s June address in Berlin renewed his commitment to U.S. ratification of the CTBT.

“This statement is important and welcomed but will require serious follow-through to win the support of the U.S. Senate,” he added.

The Obama administration will need the strong support of the international community. And the role of civil society is indispensable in putting pressure on the U.S. policy-makers to deliver on their commitments, Terasaki said.

Also, on Aug. 7, he said, Zerbo met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his trip to China. Wang stressed China’s continued commitment to the CTBT and reconfirmed the importance of the early ratification of CTBT.

Zerbo stated that there is a strong case for China to demonstrate leadership and pave the way for the remaining eight countries to ratify the CTBT.

The international community must work together to support China in overcoming the various technical and political barriers that stand in the way of the treaty’s ratification, Terasaki added.

The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel possess a total of approximately 19,000 nuclear weapons. Credit: Courtesy ICAN

By Baher Kamal
MANAMA, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

After a week of activities in Oslo during the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, major anti-nuclear campaigners moved Monday to the Bahraini capital, Manama, in yet another step towards the abolition of atomic weapons.

“Nuclear weapons – the most inhuman and destructive of all tools of war – are at the peak of a pyramid of violence in this increasingly interdependent world,” said campaigners during the presentation of an anti-nuclear exhibition, promoted by the Bahraini and Japanese ministries of foreign affairs, on Mar. 11 in Manama.

“The threat of atomic weapons is not in the past,” the organisers said. “It is a major crisis today.”

Co-organised by the Bahrain Centre for Strategic, International and Energy Studies (Derasat), Soka Gakkai International (SGI), the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the United Nations Information Center (UNIC) and Inter Press Service (IPS), the exhibition — “From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Towards a World Free from Nuclear Weapons” — will be held in Manama from Mar. 12-23.

“This exhibition –the first ever in an Arab country – (represents another) step toward making the human aspiration to live in a world free from nuclear weapons a reality,” SGI’s executive director for peace affairs, Hirotugu Terasaki, told IPS.

“The very existence of these weapons – the most inhuman of all – implies a major danger,” said Terasaki, who is also the vice president of this Buddhist organisation that promotes international peace and security, with more than 12 million members globally.

Asked about the argument used by nuclear powers that the possession of such weapons is a guarantee of safety and security – the so-called “deterrence doctrine” – Terasaki said, “The world should now move beyond this myth.”

“Security”, he said, begins with basic human needs: shelter, clean air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. People need to work, to care for their health, to be protected from violence, according to the SGI exhibition.

Terasaki believes nuclear weapons differ from “conventional” weapons in two main regards.

“First is their overwhelming destructive power. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 delivered a blast equivalent to about 13 kilotons of TNT,” he said.

Some 140,000 people lost their lives just at the end of that year, he said.

“Since then nuclear weapons with yields of more than 50 megatons have been developed, several thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

Whereas conventional weapons can, at least to some degree, distinguish between military and civilian targets, nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately, destroying all life on a massive scale, according to Terasaki.

“The second point to emphasise is the radioactivity they leave behind. After fires caused by the explosion are extinguished and silence returns, radioactivity (lingers on) for months and can cause leukaemia or other diseases, even affecting people who only enter the area after the bombing. These diseases are often inherited by sufferers’ offspring.”

Before moving to Bahrain, the SGI exhibition had toured 230 cities in 29 countries, and had been translated into eight languages including, now, Arabic.

Among its key objectives in Bahrain is to contribute to the discussion on a Middle East nuclear weapons free zone.

“What we celebrate today reflects a sincere expression of the true spirit of Islam,” Bahraini Minister for Foreign Affairs Ghanim bin-Fadl Al-Buainain said at a press conference Monday.

“The pure meaning of Islam is ‘peace’,” he said, “but unfortunately Islam’s image and principles have (today) been distorted…”

Al-Buainain also referred to the third nuclear test carried out by North Korea last month, saying that the biggest threat to “international peace and security is the global and regional arms race, especially nuclear arms”.

He also called attention to Iran’s nuclear programme, “which maintains its peaceful functions”. However, this programme has “far-reaching effects on the environment, wildlife and marine life…as well as security risks in the Gulf region if it transforms into a militaristic nuclear programme,” added the Bahraini minister.

Speaking at the same press conference, Japan’s ambassador in Manama, Shigeki Sumi, reaffirmed Japan’s commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons, since “Japan has been the sole country that suffered from the catastrophic human consequences of nuclear bombing during World War II”.

Nasser Burdestan, ICAN’s regional campaigner in Bahrain who played a key role in organising the anti-nuclear exhibition, stressed the need to advance the effort of so-called “human diplomacy”.

“Biological weapons were prohibited in 1975; chemical weapons in 1997; land mines in 1999, and cluster bombs in 2010. It is now time to abolish nuclear weapons,” said Burdestan.

Two major anti-nuclear events in Oslo preceded this historic exhibition: the ICAN Civil Society Forum (Mar. 2-3) that brought together more than 500 campaigners, experts, scientists and physicians, followed by an inter-governmental conference (Mar. 4-5), organised by Norway, which drew representatives from 127 states, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, in addition to civil society.

Notable at the Oslo conference was the complete absence of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

At the start of 2012 eight states possessed approximately 4,400 operational nuclear weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

“Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert. If all nuclear warheads are counted—operational warheads, spares, those in both active and inactive storage, and intact warheads scheduled for dismantlement—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel together possess a total of approximately 19,000 nuclear weapons,” SIPRI reported.

Meanwhile, SGI’s president and eminent Buddhist leader, Daisaku Ikeda, has launched a global peace proposal, a blueprint consisting of three concrete proposals that will serve as a launching point for the larger goal of total global disarmament by the year 2030.

The proposal expresses the hope that NGOs and forward-looking governments will establish an action group to initiate, before the year’s end, the process of drafting a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) outlawing nuclear weapons, which swallow some 105 billion dollars annually.

In a study entitled “Don’t Bank on the Bomb”, ICAN reported that more than 300 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers in 30 countries have invested heavily in nuclear arms producers, while 20 companies are involved in the manufacture, maintenance and modernisation of U.S., British, French and Indian nuclear forces.

(END)

The world’s nuclear environment has increasingly turned politically toxic, replete with threats, accusations and open defiance of Security Council resolutions.

A long outstanding international conference on a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, to be hosted by Finland, is still far from reality. So is a proposed Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) aimed at eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

And last week, a renegade North Korea defied the United Nations by conducting its third nuclear test, while Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reserved his country’s right to nuclear weapons in a region where Israel’s nuclear arsenal has the implicit blessings of the Western world.

“We believe nuclear weapons must be eliminated,” said Khamenei, “We don’t want to build atomic weapons.” But if Iran was forced to do so, he warned, “No power could stop us.”So long as these weapons exist, there is a very real possibility that they will be used, either by accident or design.

As the ultimate goal of a nuclear-weapons free world keeps receding, the leader of a Tokyo-based lay Buddhist non-governmental organisation (NGO) launched a global campaign last week for a nuclear summit of world leaders in 2015.

Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International (SGI), says the annual G8 Summit in 2015 could be an “expanded summit” focusing on a nuclear weapons-free world and marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“This would be an appropriate opportunity for such a nuclear summit,” he adds.

Tim Wright of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) told IPS his organisation supports the call by Ikeda and others to begin a process in 2013 aimed at achieving a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

“We urge all nations, including those which are part of a nuclear alliance, to participate constructively in such a process,” he said.

The involvement of NGOs will also be essential, Wright pointed out. “And a global ban on nuclear weapons is feasible, necessary and urgent.

“So long as these weapons exist,” he argued, “there is a very real possibility that they will be used, either by accident or design. Any such use would have catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences.”

In his 2013 Peace Proposal ‘Compassion, Wisdom and Courage: Building a Global Society of Peace and Creative’ released last week, Ikeda offers three concrete proposals.

First, to make disarmament a key theme of the U.N.’s post-2015 economic agenda, including Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Specifically, he proposes halving world military expenditures relative to 2010 levels and abolishing nuclear weapons and all other weapons judged inhumane under international law.

These should be included as targets for achievement by the year 2030.

Second, initiate the negotiation process for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, with the goal of agreement on an initial draft by 2015. Japan, as a country that has experienced nuclear attack, should play a leading role in the realisation of a NWC, he asserts.

Further, it should undertake the kind of confidence-building measures that are a necessary predicate to the establishment of a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and to creating the conditions for the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

“To this end, we must engage in active and multifaceted debate cantered on the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons to broadly shape international public opinion,” says Ikeda.

“If possible, Germany and Japan, which are the scheduled G8 host countries for 2015 and 2016, respectively, should agree to reverse that order, enabling the convening of this meeting in Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” Ikeda notes.

Third, an expanded G8 summit in 2015 which could double as a nuclear summit of world leaders.

In past peace proposals, he has urged that the 2015 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) be held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a vehicle for realising a nuclear abolition summit.

Nevertheless, he says, the logistical issues involved in bringing together the representatives of almost 190 countries may dictate the meeting be held at the U.N. headquarters in New York, as is customary.

“In that event, the G8 Summit scheduled to be held several months after the NPT Review Conference would provide an excellent opportunity for an expanded group of world leaders to grapple with this critical issue,” according to Ikeda.

Ikeda says SGI’s efforts to grapple with the nuclear weapons issue are based on the recognition that the very existence of these weapons represents the ultimate negation of the dignity of life.

“At the same time, nuclear weapons serve as a prism through which to perceive new perspectives on ecological integrity, economic development and human rights,” he says.

This in turn, he says, “helps us identify the elements that will shape the contours of a new, sustainable society, one in which all people can live in dignity.”