This year the IPB has chosen to award the following two winners with the prize:

Black Lives Matter (BLM)

and

International Signature Campaign in Support of the Appeal of the Hibakusha

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized human rights Black liberation movement with chapters in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Japan. The BLM Movement advocates for an end to police and other state sponsored violences, abolition of prisons, racial capitalism, and the interlocking social, cultural, and political harms of white supremacy and racism. BLM imagines a world where all Black peoples are free and flourishing in full dignity, self-determination, and power.

The BLM Global Network and its individual chapters have played leading roles in building resistance to and transforming local policies against systemic police violence and extrajudicial murders of Black people across the United States. It has shifted the national narrative, political landscape, and expanded the vision for true democratic possibilities within the United States. It’s mission is both specific and universal in that an end to devaluation of Black life everywhere affirms that all people are created as equal and worthy of liberty. Its voice, visibility, and power have commanded international influence, recognition, and solidarity. The BLM movement seeks reparations for willful and lasting harms caused to African Americans by slavery, and investment in communities—in healthcare, education, economic, housing, and mental health infrastructure and resources.

As a networked movement, BLM also recognizes the need to center the leadership of women, queer and trans people, the economically poor and working class. BLM has made the commitment to placing those historically dehumanized and excluded at the center of building a world in which all Black lives truly matter.

The International Signature Campaign in Support of the Appeal of the Hibakusha was launched in April 2016 in the name of prominent Hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since its launch, the signature campaign has been supported by a broad range of prominent individuals and organizations, enjoying great support from people across the world. The collected signatures, total 11,843,549 (as of March 31, 2020,) making it one of the largest signature campaigns ever carried out in the world and a powerful popular force manifesting global demands for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The signatures have been submitted and acknowledged by the U.N. and NPT PrepCom Chairs.

In addition to worldwide efforts, across Japan signature promotion committees have been established in each of Japan’s 47 prefectures, leading to the endorsement of the Appeal by 1263 mayors and governors. On the August 6-9 the 75th anniversary commemorations for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the “Peace Wave” of international joint actions by grassroots organizations will circle the globe with activities to press for the elimination of nuclear weapons with the Hibakusha Appeal signature campaign serving as the Peace Wave’s common action.

Information regarding the Prize Ceremony will be published soon.

In preparation for the 75th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as part of the worldwide “Peace Wave” that accompanies it, IPB is taking part in several different events and gatherings and we invite you to join us:

·         IPB-IPPNW Joint Statement on the 75^th Anniversary of the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

·         Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

·        IPB joins IPPNW, ICAN, and Hibakusha Stories on August 9^th to host a 24-hour screening of “The Vow from Hiroshima”, a documentary featuring Setsuko Thurlow.

o   Facebook event

o   Watch the preview

o   Support the film

The 2020 World Conference against A and H Bombs will also take place online during these days. For the full program, visit Gensuikyo’s website.

Other upcoming webinar: IPB Youth Network presents: Civil Disobedience Against State Sanctioned Violence and Police Brutality

Recent webinars:

·         The Colombian Peace Agreement: Where Are We Today?

·         The Gaeseong Industrial Comples and Peace on the Korean Peninsula

1.       Report: Workers’ Rights and Militarization: Arguments for Rethinking Security

Using data from ITUC’s Global Rights Index 2020 and SIPRI’s Military Expenditure Database, IPB Assistant Coordinator Sean Conner analyzes the common threads between workers’ rights and militarization.

2.       IPB Partner, USCM, Calls for Human-Centered Security in Times of Global Pandemic

In response to the current multi-faceted global crisis, “the United States Conference of Mayors calls on the President and Congress to support United Nations Secretary-General Guterres’ call for an immediate global ceasefire and international cooperation to address the COVID-19 pandemic.”

3.       IPB Youth statement on the COVID-19 pandemic

“I am determined to keep telling the reality of nuclear war as one of the living witnesses to realize a world without wars and nuclear weapons.” —Taniguchi Sumiteru

As a hibakusha (atomic bomb sufferer/survivor), Taniguchi Sumiteru knew the horror of nuclear weapons. The Nagasaki A-bomb is estimated to have killed 73,884 people by the end of 1945. Many were burned and others died of thirst. In this book, Taniguchi-san gives an account of his life living with “the atomic bomb on his back.” He dedicated his life to anti-nuclear weapons
development and its spread. He struggled against war and fought for peace until he died in his eighties. Seventy-five years have passed since that fateful August day and the agonies of
the past seem to be falling into oblivion. We cannot allow such a lapse of memory.

Rootstock Publishing releases “The Atomic Bomb on My Back” on August 9, 2020, but you can pre-order it now.

Jayantha Dhanapala is a retired Sri Lankan diplomat who for several years was IPB's Honorary President. He held several important UN positions in the disarmament field. Many of his papers, talks and writings have now been published in a lovely volume, Sri Lankan son : Global Diplomat, the writings and statements of former Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, edited by Randy Rydell and Neluni Tillekeratne. It is an excellent teaching resource. He is both brilliant and a moral authority, much needed these days.

Have a look at his book-launch speech

The democratic struggle for peace and justice in Nicaragua

Mario José Gutiérrez Morales (Fiat Pax Nicaragua)
Hector Mairena

 Nicaragua is a poor and impoverished country. And above all it has been impoverished by the management of the Ortega government over the last thirteen years. When Ortega returned to government in 2007, he did basically two things. On the one hand, he maintained, and even deepened, in alliance with big capital, his money-making policies. He did so, he does so, despite his pro-poor discourse. The social costs of those policies increased poverty and made the informal sector of the economy grow, which today is close to 70%.

At the same time, as soon as he came to power, he began a process of exercising personal-family control over all state institutions. The weights and counterweights disappeared and the head of the Executive (Ortega) and his wife, the vice-president (Rosario Murillo), have shattered the institutionality. A confusion between state, family and party (what is left of the FLSN), is what exercises all the power in the country. They do so with the passive complicity of the army and the active support - as a repressive force - of the police, whose chief is the father-in-law of the Ortega-Murillo couple.

This framework made it easier for the benefits of Venezuelan oil cooperation with Nicaragua to be privatized for the benefit of the family in power, which became a new economic group that uses State institutions for its own benefit. There is no sphere of business in which the Ortega Murillo family is not present, directly or through front men: exploitation and export of wood, media, tourism, private surveillance, distribution of gasoline and derivatives, flower shops. In short, anyone.

It could not be done with less than 3 billion dollars which meant, according to conservative calculations, the amount of cooperation from the government of Hugo Chavez first and Maduro later, for ten years. And that amount, for the size of Nicaragua's economy, is quite a lot. Cooperation only diminished after the crisis in Venezuela.

Nicaragua has many natural resources. But the use of those resources, during the last decades, and that has not changed since Ortega came to power, has only been for the benefit of minorities. That is true of forest, mining and fishing resources.

In any of those sectors, there are now interests of the presidential family.

A part, the smallest part, of the benefits of Venezuelan cooperation was destined to cliente list assistance, but nothing substantive that would diminish the poverty of the majority.

In 2018, the alliance between big capital and the regime was broken. The corporatist system entered into an irreversible crisis, the result of two things: the authoritarianism of the regime, which, going beyond the agreements with big business, imposed a social security reform, hitting the employers, but above all the workers, and the outbreak of the citizen's rebellion in April, which exposed the illegitimacy of the regime and its authoritarian nature.

The citizen's civic rebellion was brutally repressed. More than 300 Nicaraguans were murdered, more than 3,500 people have passed through the dictatorship's prisons as political prisoners, and more than 100,000 have been forced to seek refuge abroad, including in Spain.

The International Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), formed by agreement of the OAS, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the government itself, ruled, in a detailed and comprehensive report, that the government committed crimes against humanity. The regime expelled the GIEI from the country and still does not allow the IACHR and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to enter the country.

The regime's repression has plunged the country into an already long political crisis, which has resulted -as it could not be otherwise- in a deep economic and social crisis. At the beginning of this year, it was already estimated that the Gross Domestic Product would fall by 7-8%.

It is under these conditions that the COVID 19 pandemic arrives in Nicaragua in March.

And, contrary to what could reasonably be expected, the Ortega Murillo regime has reacted irrationally and maliciously. Not only has it failed to implement and enforce any of the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommendations, it has done the opposite.

It has not declared quarantine of any kind. It has not suspended classes. It has embargoed the application of the tests and prohibited them from being carried out by private hospitals. The fate of 26,000 test kits received from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) remains unknown. It has prohibited health personnel from using protective equipment, in their accounts, so as not to "alarm the population". It hides information and there is no consistency in the sporadic appearances of health authorities on the subject.

In the midst of these conditions, the Nicaraguan citizenry resists and continues to demand free, inclusive, transparent and observed elections. The Nicaraguan opposition is united in the National Coalition, which brings together political and social movements and parties, including the Blue and White National Unity, which brings together dozens of organizations, most of which were formed as a result of the citizen rebellion.

All the opposition forces agree that the way to free the country from orteguismo is peaceful. That is why they are demanding electoral reforms and respect for constitutional freedoms.

We Nicaraguans are convinced that only in this way can a democratic government be established in the country, one that rebuilds institutions and meets the demands of justice.

A citizen survey conducted between May 15 and June 8 by the prestigious company Cid Gallup, and another more recent one by the Inter-American Dialogue in June, reveal that most Nicaraguans believe the country is on the wrong track and do not believe Daniel Ortega can change it. They themselves identify the pandemic and the Ortega government as Nicaragua's main problems. And they are right.