Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• 14 May 2013
• Compassionate Judaism
• By Marc Gopin

This amazing portrait of Naomi, Ruth and Orpah, painted by William Blake in 1795, captures perhaps the most dramatic women’s story in the entire Hebrew Bible. It is a story that is associated with the holiday of Shavuot because of the mention of the importance of the harvest for the story and for this ancient holiday. This is a book I urge everyone to read, and read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Ruth

This is a tale the tragedy of drought, loss, death and homelessness, in other words the most common tale of forced emigration. But the story is unique in its description of undying devotion and selflessness and the unforgettable bond between two women suffering, and the heroic determination of Ruth to rebuild their lives.

What strikes me as important about their behavior and their relationship is how completely bereft it is of anger and violence toward others.

• News source:
• 3 May 2013
• Al-Monitor Palestine Pulse
• By Dalia Hatuqa

Amid the Western media’s obsessive search for a Palestinian Gandhi, many stories of peaceful, non-violent resistance are often overlooked. One such story is that of Budrus, a small West Bank village — dotted with ancient olive trees and cacti — lying very close to the Green Line (the internationally-recognized border separating Israel from the West Bank). In 2003, Budrus’ residents found out that Israel’s separation wall would swallow chunks of their land. It was then that the villagers decided to employ non-violent tactics to protect their trees and land.

• News source:
• 07/05/2013
• Responding to Conflict Training
• Strengthening Policy and Practice: meeting the challenges of complex environments

Dates: 13-18th October 2013

Location: Birmingham, UK

Course fee: £1100 (includes full board accommodation from the evening of 13th – afternoon of 18th October)

Course description

Strengthening Policy and Practice: meeting the challenges of working in complex environments is designed to draw on the experience and practice of participants, working in development, humanitarian aid or peacebuilding to influence internal policies and programmatic approaches. The course will identify how organisations can strive to balance their organisational mandate with the demands of working in complex and rapidly changing political contexts.

Course aims

The course will enable participants to contribute to developing constructive organisational and programmatic policies that will guide practical responses in the development, humanitarian and peacebuilding fields. It will draw on the experience of participants and tutors to examine the key issues that are emerging from field-based work.

Course objectives

Participants will:

• deepen their understanding of their work, from a conflict transformation perspective
• apply appropriate conflict analysis to their own organisational contexts
• explore the relationship between organisational policy and practice in situations of instability, conflict or violence
• examine issues relating to aid and conflict in order to develop conflict sensitive policies for their organisations
• consider the key policy and practice issues relating to the prevention of violent conflict and of building peace
• strengthen their competence to contribute pro-actively to the development of appropriate policies and best practices in their organisation/ institution for working in environments affected by conflict or violence

Suitable for

This course is for staff of international and national agencies and those with advisory and management responsibility for emergency, relief, development, and peacebuilding programmes. It is particularly relevant for those engaged in the planning and implementation of field-based programmes, and those concerned with developing policies for appropriate responses in complex political emergencies.

2013 participant feedback

“The structure was very interactive with joint task exercises, team work and opportunity for self reflection, critical learning and experience sharing.”

“Both facilitators made the learning fun and reflective. We are taking away not only the knowledge and skills but also the approach of delivering this knowledge and skill.”

“I have learned too many things to choose just one. What I think will be the most valuable in my work are practical tools for conflict analysis and transformation.”

For more information about the course and to apply, please visit our website www.respond.org or contact us at courses@respond.org.

• News source:
• 5 May 2013
• BBC
• By Anna Bressanin, producer. Camera by Ilya Shnitser

Arn Chorn-Pond was a child in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. Born into a family of artists and musicians, he was sent to a children’s labour camp where he escaped death by playing his flute for the camp guards…

As a Cambodian-American, he considers the festival his personal answer to the US bombing of Cambodia. “The US bombed Cambodia,” he says. “I am carpeting New York with artists.”

• News source:
• 30 April 2013
• Alabama Media Group
• By Barnett Wright

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Arnetta Streeter Gary vividly remembers turning a corner in downtown Birmingham 50 years ago and being met by the force of water coming at her at an estimated 50 to 100 pounds per square inch.

“We had been taught that if they put the water hose  on you, to sit down and cover your face so that the pressure of the water would not hurt your eyes,” said Gary, an Ullman High School student at the time. “If we balled up into balls, then the water would not hurt as much. But that was not so. I can remember us balling up, hugging together, and the water just washing us down the street.”

Gary was one of thousands of students from Birmingham’s elementary, middle, and high schools and nearby Miles College who participated in the May 1963 demonstrations. Called Demonstration Day, or D-Day, and later dubbed the Children’s Crusade, these marches led to concessions from the city’s white power structure.

March re-enacted

On Thursday, thousands of area high school and college students will assemble at Birmingham’s historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church–where students gathered 50 years ago–to re-enact those pivotal civil rights-era demonstrations.

Birmingham Councilman Jay Roberson said the way child marchers responded nonviolently to conflicts in 1963 is a lesson for young people today.

• News source:
• originally published 7 February 2013
• Yes! Magazine
• By Sarah van Gelder

The four founders of Idle No More didn’t start out famous. Until flash-mob round dances, prayer circles, and blockades spread across Canada, few people knew Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean, and Nina Wilson…

YES! Magazine Executive Editor Sarah van Gelder spoke with two of the founders on January 13: Sylvia McAdam, an author and educator from the Nehiyaw (Cree) Nation, and Sheelah McLean, an instructor at the University of Saskatchewan whose ancestors were European settlers.y 6 Territory!”

• News source:
• 16 April 2013
• Guardian
• Four stone benches quietly pay tribute to the service of conscientious objectors in the second world war
• By Martin Wainwright

In the first year of the second world war a tribunal heard evidence about a “fine young man”, a Methodist Sunday school teacher and Cambridge graduate, whose conscience forbade him to take up arms.

He was my father, Richard Wainwright, and the hearing’s ruling in his favour led to six years’ work with the Quaker-run Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU), from cleaning hospital bedpans in Gloucester to saving German families and refugees from reprisals after the allied victory.

His pacifist war service will be recognised this weekend with that of more than 1,300 colleagues in the FAU, 17 of them killed in action, and their counterparts in the Friends Relief Service (FRS) which helped civilian victims of war, first in the 1940-41 blitz and then overseas in the wake of the fighting.

• News source:
• 4 April 2013
• CBC
• compiled by George Stromboulopoulos

On April 4, 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot while delivering a speech from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

It’s been 45 years since that night. To pay tribute to King and his legacy, here are some photographs from his remarkable life, along with some of the powerful things he said over the years.

• News source:
• originally published 11 January 2013
• Electronid Intifada
• By Asa Winstanley

As a film, 5 Broken Cameras works on both an artistic and a political level. It’s a deeply personal film to Burnat in many ways, while also being a chronicle of the struggle of his village, Bilin, against Israel’s apartheid wall and policies of dispossession.

• News source:
• 21 February 2013
• IMEMC
• By Saed Bannoura

The Radio Bethlehem 2000 has reported that dozens of residents have been injured after Israeli soldiers attacked the weekly nonviolent protest demanding the army to reopen a main street it blockaded 12 years ago, in Hebron, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank.

• News source:
• 21 February 2013
• Huffington Post | Blog
• By Gabriel Kohan and Mark Donig

The two-year anniversary of Egypt’s revolution has not been a happy one. Anti-government protests have once again swept through the country, and as activists have begun to resort to violence, President Mohamed Morsi has chosen to respond in kind. Cairo’s economy is in shambles, its alliances with the West are in question, and its newly ratified constitution leaves secularists, women and minorities on the political sidelines for the foreseeable future. Simply put, those who predicted a rosy future for Egypt are left to scratch their heads, wondering how their prophecies could have turned out so wrong.

As the world witnesses Egypt’s depressing slide two years on, now is an opportune time to re-examine the nonviolent protests that unintentionally paved the way for it…

• News source:
• 19 February 2013
• Economist
• By D.H.

IN 2005 Emad Burnat was given a video camera to record the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. It was while he dutifully chronicled the formative years of his son that Mr Burnat unexpectedly became the film-maker behind “Five Broken Cameras”, a sombre documentary about the struggle of his native West Bank village of Bil’in against Israel’s construction of the separation wall.

The film’s premiere in the Palestinian territories took place recently at the Ramallah Cultural Palace, a multimillion-dollar centre unmatched in its size and facilities in the territories. The audience featured mainly young Palestinians and foreign expatriates, a common mix in a city that has become the West Bank’s administrative capital.

• News source:
• 3 February 2013
• Olympian
• By John Dodge

Dressed in black, they stand in silence — straight-backed, dignified and opposed to violence in its many brutish forms.

And after 60 minutes of quiet reflection, they hold hands, voice their first names, say “peace,” and walk away.

Drive down Fourth Avenue in downtown Olympia between 5 and 6 p.m. Fridays and you will see them lined up facing north toward Budd Inlet from near the Heritage Park fountain. There were more than 70 women there on the eve of the war in Iraq in March 2003, far fewer after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.

They are the Women in Black, Olympia’s contribution to a world-wide network of women committed to peace in a world wracked by violence.

• News source:

• News source:
• 21 January 2013
• Waging Nonviolence
• By George Lakey

Some people feel inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., to do service projects. But the U.S. civil rights movement that he led was not about days of service, it was about days of confrontational action. Think about the hundreds of action groups that grew in the North as well as the South, many winning campaigns against racial discrimination. They mobilized and radicalized people; that movement gave me my first experience of civil disobedience.

Some of those early groups, of course, flourished, and some fell apart quickly. Since then we’ve learned a lot about how to start action groups in a way that increases their chance to thrive, wage a campaign, learn from it and grow. To celebrate King’s holiday, I’ll share some of the wisdom that has accumulated, often through trial and error.

The steps for beginning a group are not really as simple as a food recipe, but I’ll take the risk of writing this in a recipe-kind-of-way. Remember that every situation is always unique. You’ll need to think with friends through each step, adapting to your circumstances.

• News source:
• speech delivered 3 April 1968 (23 minutes)
• Great Speeches, volume 6th, published by EVG (Educational Video Group)
• Dr. King was assassinated the next day, on April 4, 1968
• By Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr: “Mountaintop” speech full length from Filip Goc on Vimeo.

• News source:
• 21 January 2013
• MSNBC
• By Ned Resnikoff

February 1, 1968. Echol Cole and Robert Walker, two black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. were collecting garbage in the midst of a pounding Southern monsoon. As their crew chief ferried them from house to house, they took shelter from the downpour in the trash compactor of their truck, a decrepit city vehicle. At some point that afternoon, the compactor malfunctioned, and Cole and Walker were chewed up by its rusted machinery. The Memphis government paid Cole and Walker’s families a small bereavement fee—not even enough to cover the cost of the funerals.

The Memphis sanitation workers went on strike, demanding union recognition against impossible odds. And a month and a half later, Dr. King came to town.

Nearly every product of the American education system knows about Selma, Alabama and the Birmingham campaign. But the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike plays, at best, a tertiary role in the popular narrative of King’s legacy—this despite the fact that it was his last campaign, the battle which cost him his life. When Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, he was staying in a Memphis motel. The last speech of his life, the famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, had been delivered the night before to an audience of striking workers and their supporters.

• News source:
• 2012
• Dartmouth | YouTube
• By Erica Chenoweth

• News source:
• 8 January 2012
• CBC
• By Duncan McCue

Ryan McMahon is hunkered over his laptop in his home office in Winnipeg, a self-proclaimed “chubby Ojibway comic” with a soft spot for bacon — and a hunger for some sort of indigenous resurgence.

He tests his microphone levels, ready to record the latest show for his podcast “Red Man Laughing.”

Of course, the day’s subject is Idle No More. He’s got jokes all lined up, including a top 10 list entitled “Things you might have heard a mall Santa say during the round-dance revolution over Christmas.”

His trademark humour, though, quickly shifts to more serious discussion when he brings on two guests: a pair of university students involved in Idle No More, the aboriginal protest movement that has swept across Canada and is now popping up in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• News source:
• 7 January 2013
• Waging Nonviolence
• By Mary Elizabeth King

As 2012 came to a close, massive nonviolent demonstrations took place in Iraq, with thousands of Sunni demonstrators in Anbar province marching in protest of the allegedly sectarian policies of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Al Jazeera English (AJE) has carried live reports this past week showing tens of thousands of Iraqis, mostly self-declared Sunnis, as they demonstrated along a main highway leading to Syria and Jordan. Local councils called for civil disobedience because, they said, Sunnis are being sidelined in Iraqi politics, and pronouncements asserted that sit-ins would not end until protesters’ demands were met. AJE’s reporter commented that the challengers had a stated commitment to nonviolent action, and that local clergy had joined in the call to such action.