Interviews

In the midst of conflict and hate, a new solidarity is born. Israeli citizens confront their own military and defend the rights of their Palestinian fellow countrymen. Two activists relate stories of occupation and non-violent opposition. The organization called Ta’ayush was founded by Israelis and Palestinians in order to end the Israeli occupation

The Congolese journalist, Caddy Adzuba, is in Spain to receive the award granted by ‘El Club de las 25’, a women’s journalists’ association, for her work raising awareness of the conflict in her country and how this violence is affecting women in particular. Despite receiving death threats, she is pressing forward with the project ‘A Loudspeaker for Silence’.

And this is powerfully resonant in Latin America. In other words, people feel the tremendous violence of the impossibility to live in minimal living conditions that equate to a decent life. And the worst of the situation is the injustice of the distribution of resources that cause suffering to a huge majority of people and is accepted as “the norm”.

Former boxing World Champion, Mensur Peljto is accompanying the World March for Peace and Nonviolence on its Balkan route between Istanbul and Geneva. As the only Bosnian member of the team, and given that most peace and nonviolence activists are unfamiliar with boxing champions, he was an unknown quantity but very quickly he won the hearts of everyone in the bus.

Given the rise of religious fundamentalism and blatant attacks on minorities especially minority women.  There is widespread practices of discrimination and social exclusion of women from Dalit (untouchable) communities, despite constitutional guarantees of equality and decades of targeted interventions by government. 

*“I’m doing it because I am convinced that this is the most wonderful demonstration in history since it is going to change the way we think about violence”*, according to Miguel Hirsch, who sets off this week to join the rest of the members of the international team of Marchers for peace and nonviolence who will travel for 90 days.

Poor families often want their children to work in order to earn money for the family. There are employers who like child labourers in the unskilled and semi-skilled sector as child labourers are cheap and work quickly. People in society from the top to the bottom are responsible for child labour, there must be a collective will power to stop child exploitation.

It is a mistake to think that certain problems do not concern us, only because they happen thousands of miles away from us and affect people we have never met, or whom we perceive as “different” from us. The world we live in is increasingly interconnected, and what happens in seemingly remote places can affect all of us in the form of violence, conflict, insecurity.

Noam Chomsky speaks about the future and predicts difficult situations for China and India. On the other hand he analyzes the appearance of progressiveness in Latin America as very important. For the first time in 500 years, LA is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration and also is beginning to face some of its massive internal problems.

Pressenza speaks with Henk-Jan Brinkman – by Anne Farrell