Paul Oestreicher has had an extremely interesting career – from being a refugee in Dunedin from Germany in 1939 and a student at Otago, to co-founding and chairing Amnesty International, to pioneering the Centre for International Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral, to being both an Anglican priest and a Quaker chaplain – and this will be a rare opportunity to hear, not just about his current research, but about his past work and what has driven him to devote his whole life to the cause of peace-making, East-West reconciliation, human rights and disarmament. Paul was last year awarded a Doctorate of Divinity by Otago University where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.
This public conversation will take place in the Allen Hall (corner of Union and Leith Streets, near the Clocktower on campus) on Thursday 6 May from 5.30-6.45pm. Contact: Ann Hassan.
The other public conversation that Canon Oestreicher will engage in has been organised by the Otago University Amnesty International Group. It will take place in Archway Lecture Theatre 2, at 6pm on Monday 10th May. At this event, Paul will be speaking about his own experiences as a refugee from Germany to Dunedin in 1939, his work with Amnesty and why we should all care, and take action, on human rights abuses around the world. Enquiries for this event can be directed to Stefan Fairweather.
‘Since Rudd‘s apology, Aboriginal poverty indicators have gone backwards. His “Closing the Gap” programme is a grim joke, having produced not a single new housing project.
An undeclared agenda comes straight from Australia’s colonial past: a land-grab combined with an almost prurient need to control, harass and blame a people who have refused to die off, whose genius is their understanding of an ancient land that still perplexes and threatens white authority. Whenever Canberra’s politicians want to look “tough”, they give the Aborigines a good kicking: it is a ritual as sacred as Don Bradman worship or Anzac Day.
The indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has decreed that unless certain communities hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied basic services. The Northern Territory contains abundant mineral wealth, such as uranium, and has long been eyed by multinationals as a lucrative radioactive waste dump. The blacks are in the way, yet again: so it is time for the usual feigned innocence. Rudd has said his government “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia. What? The learned studies pour forth as if the sorcerer’s apprentice is loose.
One example: the rate of incarceration of black Australians is five times that of black South Africans during apartheid. Western Australia imprisons Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure, an Aussie world record.
On 16 November, a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy appeared in court charged with receiving a Freddo Frog chocolate bar from a friend who had allegedly taken it from a supermarket. Only the international headlines forced the police to drop the case. Two-thirds of Aboriginal children who have contact with the police are jailed; two-thirds of white children are cautioned. A young Aboriginal man was jailed for a year for stealing £12 worth of biscuits and soft drink’.
Those within cooee of Dunedin might like to diary that Amnesty International’s Human Rights Book Club (which is not really a book club at all) is meeting again on Monday 12th October, 5:30pm, at the Dunedin Public Library, 1st Floor, LearnIT Left room. The topic of this month’s meeting is ‘Online Activism & Human Rights in China’ and our guest speaker will be Paola Voci, Senior Lecturer in Chinese in the Department of Languages & Culture at Otago University.
This discussion is timely with the recent crackdown on human rights defenders, including media in China and Rebiya Kadeer’s just-announced visit to New Zealand.
Those within earshot of Dunedin might like to know that the next gathering of the Human Rights Book Group is Monday 14 September 5:30pm @ the Dunedin City Library, 1st floor, ITLeft Room (behind the room with the computers). We are very pleased to have as our guest speaker Dr Karen Brounéus, a post-doc fellow from the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies within the Humanities Deptartment at Otago University. Her work has focused on the psychological benefits of the reconciliation process in Rwanda and this will be the focus of our meeting this month. Her talk is titled ‘Rwanda – Are there psychological benefits to the reconciliation process?’
The Karen Human Rights Group has just released a 174-page report on the effects on children growing up in the context of violence – because of both ongoing armed conflict in Burma and Karen State (Kawthoolei; lit. ‘the land without evil’) and because of other more serious structural violence committed by the State. The report makes for sombre reading even while its very existence is a voice of hopeful protest; or, as Moltmann puts it, ‘There is already true life in the midst of the life that is false’. Here’s a blurb:
As the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the military junta currently ruling Burma, works to extend and consolidate its control over all areas of Karen State, local children, their families and communities confront regular, often violent, abuses at the hands of the regime’s officers, soldiers and civilian officials. While the increasing international media attention on the human rights situation in Burma has occasionally addressed the plight of children, such reporting has been almost entirely incident-based, and focused on specific, particularly emotive issues, such as child soldiers. Although incident-based reporting is relevant, it misses the far greater problems of structural violence, caused by the oppressive social, economic and political systems commensurate with militarisation, and the combined effects of a variety of abuses, which negatively affect a far larger number of children in Karen State. Furthermore, focusing on specific, emotive issues sensationalises the abuses committed against children and masks the complexities of the situation. In reports on children and armed conflict in Karen State and elsewhere, individual children’s agency, efforts to resist abuse and capacity to deal with the situations they live in, as well as the efforts made by their families and communities to provide for and protect them, tend to be marginalised and ignored. Drawing on over 160 interviews with local children, their families and communities, this report seeks to provide a forum for these people to explain in their own words the wider context of abuse and their own responses to attempts at denying children their rights. With additional background provided by official SPDC press statements and order documents, international media sources, reports by international aid agencies, as well as academic studies, this report argues that only by listening to local voices regarding the situation of abuse in which they live and taking as a starting point for advocacy and action local conceptions of rights and violations can external actors avoid the further marginalisation of children living in these areas and begin to build on villagers’ own strategies for resisting abuse and claiming their rights.
We Own the World is the name of a new DVD out by Noam Chomsky in which he looks (surprise, surprise) at the US government and corporate elite policies over the years. These policies, he argues, ‘violate international and domestic laws, and involve imperialist designs that depend on targeted assassinations and the killing of innocent civilians on a mass scale. Yet, US elites still lay claim to being just, democratic, and humane. How can they do this? As Chomsky refrains over and over … they can do it only if we accept the basic assumption that “We own the world” – and therefore have the right to do whatever we want.’ More information here.
A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. And [he who really owns the world] said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors.But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. (Luke 22:24–27)
It seems to me that those who find any encouragement from being associated with the One who really owns the world, any comfort from his love, any participation in his Spirit, any affection and sympathy, ought to be at one with him in mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Surely they are those who do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than themselves. Surely they are those who look not to their own interests, but to the interests of others.
The University of Sheffield is organizing a Conference on Bible and Justice for 29 May – 1 June, 2008. The Conference promises to bring together scholars from around the world to explore how the ancient texts of the Bible can play an active role in addressing twenty-first century social concerns. The purpose of the conference is to foster discussion about the relevance of the Bible to modern social issues, and promote bridges between the academic field of biblical studies and the various endeavours for a just world.
Areas of focus include Human Rights, Economic Justice and Environmental Justice.
Keynote Speakers are Stanley Hauerwas (Duke University), Timothy Gorringe (University of Exeter) and John Rogerson (University of Sheffield, Emeritus). Other speakers include James Crossley, Philip Davies, Daid Horrell, Louise Lawrence, Mary Mills, Hugh Pyper, Christpher Rowland, Gerald West, and Keith Whitelam.
Faculty members and research students are invited to submit abstracts, which will be accepted until 24 January 2008, and participate in this conference. For more information visit the website or contact conference organizer, Matthew Coomber.
‘Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings’. So begins the recent title, NOT for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone. [Reviewed here]
In today’s TimesOnline, Ruth Gledhill draws our attention to a video shot in Zanzibar during the Primates’ Meeting earlier this year in Tanzania. The film was made to promote the Church of England’s Walk of Witness which took place to mark the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Today it won the IPTV award, a £2,000 award for internet television, at the Jerusalem Awards ceremony in London. I’ve embedded it here:
Watching this film, I was reminded of some words from Theissen’s investigator regarding the Essene community:
‘The first thing that I heard about the Essenes was that they reject slavery. They reject it because it is an offence against human equality: they argue that it goes against the law of nature, which bore and brought up all men. All are children of nature. All men are brothers. Riches led them astray, turned trust into mistrust, friendship into enmity. I was fascinated. Where else is there a community which rejects slavery? Nowhere’. – Gerd Theissen, The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 2001), 47.
While I do not believe that the Church – as the Church – should ever identify itself wholly which any social programme (individual believers are free to so do), the Church is impelled – by the Gospel itself – to be at the forefront of practicing, equipping and celebrating all acts of liberation, compassion, sanity, hope, and justice, of naming all that demeans and devalues life, and to lead the way in repentance when it fails to do so. I think here of such statements made not only by official bodies such as the WCC that ‘all forms of slavery … constitute crimes against humanity’, but also of those made by individual believers, such as PT Forsyth’s 3 moving letters to the Editor of The Times in January 1906 protesting against the British Government’s trafficking of Chinese human beings in South Africa. Another example, he suggests, of the ethical giving way to an economic rationalism gone mad.
Following the UN Protocol on Trafficking, countries have been enacting their own legislation and policies to prevent human trafficking. But at what cost? A new report commissioned by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, has found that many of the strategies to eradicate trafficking are having an adverse affect on the human rights of the very people they are trying to protect. For more, listen to this recent podcast.
“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets; A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope.” This is what God the LORD says – he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness’. (Isaiah 42:1-7)
‘Hundreds of demonstrators have defied the military junta in Burma to stage a rare protest march, despite the arrests of 13 leading pro-democracy activists.
Witnesses said 300 people staged an hour-long march then were dispersed by gangs of unidentified men, believed to be members of the regime-created Union Solidarity and Development Association (Usda).
There has been a series of midnight raids aimed at confronting the growing protests over rising fuel prices. Among those arrested were some of the country’s most important dissidents.’ Read on here.
Also, there’s a wee interview with Pat Dodson, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Long and Bishop John Selby Sponghere and, more interestingly, Clive James here. Also, there’s an interview here with an Iraq veteran speaking out against the war and media coverage of Iraq.
The University of Sheffield is organizing a 
‘Twenty-seven million slaves exist in our world today. Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa. Go behind the façade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings’. So begins the recent title, 
