Winners of the 2023 War Abolisher Awards
World BEYOND War
The 2023 Individual War Abolisher Award goes to Sultana Khaya.
The 2023 Organizational War Abolisher Award goes to Wage Peace Australia.
The 2023 David Hartsough Individual Lifetime War Abolisher Award goes to David Bradbury.
The 2023 Organizational Lifetime War Abolisher Award goes to Fundación Mil Milenios de Paz.
Individual War Abolisher Award of 2023
Goes to Sultana Khaya
David Swanson / Counterpunch
World BEYOND War has given its 2023 Individual War Abolisher award to Sultana Khaya, a Saharawi nonviolent human rights activist from Western Sahara. Khaya has been a phenomenally courageous leader in resisting the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara and in making the wider world aware of that ongoing occupation.
At the hands of Moroccan occupation agents, Khaya has had her eye bludgeoned out of its socket, has been hit in the head with rocks, has been injected with unknown substances, raped, beaten, and held under house arrest where she was terrorized for over 500 Days with her sister and mother. Surrounded by the Moroccan occupation forces, Khaya did not go silent. She staged protests on the roof of her house. She invited witnesses from around the world, snuck them into her house, and — together with them — spoke to the world’s media and anyone who would listen.
Sultana’s courage in speaking of her rape is rare, but she is the first to say that brutal attacks by the Moroccan occupation forces have not only happened to her, but are methodically practiced as sexual and other forms of torture on much of the population of the Saharawi people.
Sultana has maintained her nonviolent resistance and insists that Western Saharans be allowed to exercise their legal right to vote for independence or to live under the rule of another government, and that they be allowed to live in their own country with basic human rights, education of their own design, and access to public health care.
The Moroccan occupation is supported politically, economically, and militarily, by the US government and by the Israeli government, which is engaged in a similar occupation of Palestine.
Sultana has lived her entire life under the oppressive Moroccan regime, suffering and struggling to resolve this conflict with the use of nonviolence. She is now in Spain for medical treatment, where she continues to advocate relentlessly for an end to the occupation of Western Sahara.
World BEYOND War has just posted a video of an awards presentation conducted over Zoom. In it, Sultana Khaya says: “Thank you, and please accept my heartfelt gratitude to the World BEYOND War organization, as well as all international civil society that supports the Saharawi people in their just cause and belief in peace and justice for all.
“I accept this honor on behalf of all Saharawis, particularly Saharawi women who are continually targeted by Moroccan occupation forces! I also dedicate this prize to the oppressed Palestinian people. Tell them that we support them and that we share the same occupation.
“Finally, I urge you and all those who advocate for human rights and freedom to step up our efforts and demand the release of all Saharawi political detainees in Moroccan jails. I appreciate you once more for your efforts to create a better world free of oppression, injustice, and humankind’s devastating weapons.”
The award is presented to Khaya in the video by World BEYOND War’s Mohhamed Abunahel from Palestine. Khaya remarks: “We reject occupation. We stand in solidarity with all peoples seeking freedom, particularly the Palestinian and Saharawi peoples.”
Also in the video Salka Barca and World BEYOND War’s Tim Pluta, both of whom have worked with Sultana Khaya, express how much her work and influence has meant to them
Sultana Khaya is the second annual recipient of the Individual War Abolisher Award. The Individual War Abolisher of 2022 award went to New Zealand filmmaker William Watson in recognition of his film Soldiers Without Guns: An Untold Story of Unsung Kiwi Heroes. Watch it here. The 2021 awards, which were the first, did not include the individual award.
Thank you to Counterpunch for publishing this article and to Sahara Press Service for reporting on this story here. Thank you to Prensa Latina for covering this story here.
Organizational War Abolisher Award of 2023
Goes to Wage Peace Australia
David Swanson / The Progressive Hub
(August 28, 20230 —World BEYOND War has given its Organizational War Abolisher of 2023 award to Wage Peace Australia.
This organization is a leading global inspiration to many peace-related campaigns, including those working to close down giant arms fairs. Wage Peace Australia accurately describes its approach: “We jump on tanks, blockade weapons factories, occupy arms dealers’ offices and reclaim military bases as well as engaging in public discourse and other more conventional campaign methods.”
Wage Peace Australia’s campaign to disrupt the largest weapons bazaar in Australia, the Land Forces International Land Defence Exposition, has been so successful that the arms fair will no longer return to Brisbane. It will, of course, likely be held in a different city, but if people learn from the nonviolent, educational, disruptive activism used in Brisbane, then this arms fair and every other one could be chased out of every location on the planet, leaving those whom Wage Peace Australia refers to as “Harms Dealers” nowhere to do their harming.
Wage Peace is also involved with a campaign to resist the involvement of weapons companies in Australian education. Currently underway is a Wage Peace podcast: “Get Your Armies Off Our Bodies.” Written by Matt Abud with Zelda Grimshaw, the podcast offers an accessible and fresh look a the weapons industry in Australia, presenting militarism through the eyes of Wage Peace people and their friends.
Wage Peace Australia works with peace groups in West Papua, and has helped World BEYOND War to do the same. Wage Peace Australia created the War on West Papua website. Wage Peace Australia is known for its selfless work in collaboration with other organizations. It needs to be known to a broader world.
Wage Peace Australia’s educational and activist endeavors are explicitly aimed at abolishing war, and its members do outstanding work on demilitarizing security and building a culture of peace, two pillars of World BEYOND War’s strategy for creating a global security system free of the scourge of war.
World BEYOND War has just published a video of an awards presentation conducted over Zoom. On the video, which includes numerous images of colorful activism, Wage Peace Australia’s Margie Pestorius, in accepting this award, said “We view people-powered disruptive action as being key to shifting the value base and bringing ordinary people into engagement on militarism, defense, war, international relations, and foreign affairs discourses.”
“We recognise and commemorate the Frontier Wars,” Pestorius added, “which rolled out across Australia from 1800 to 1930. This involves organizing and promoting people-to-people events and ceremonies that respond to the horrific violence inflicted by the British military with settler communities over 140 years — and we acknowledge the strong, organised resistance of First Nations peoples in this Land.”
Pestorius and other members of Wage Peace Australia take time in the video to credit their influences and to provide activist strategies that they have found successful. Pestorius describes their work as bringing ordinary people into fields they are typically excluded from. Miriam Torzillo describes their activities as maintaining a culture of learning in which they are all gaining knowledge from each other. Lilli Barto explains the importance in organizing activism of leaving elements undone and undecided so as to allow others something to do. She labels one strategy “festival organizing,” which involves creating a space in which to be creative in multiple ways.
Wage Peace Australia is the second recipient of an Organizational War Abolisher award. The 2022 Organizational War Abolisher award went to the Whidbey Environmental Action Network (WEAN), based on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. The 2021 awards, which were the first, did not include the Organizational award.
Thank you to Progressive Hub for publishing this article.
Organizational Lifetime War Abolisher Award of 2023 Goes to Fundación Mil Milenios de Paz
World BEYOND War
World BEYOND War is very pleased to present the Organizational Lifetime War Abolisher Award of 2023 to Fundación Mil Milenios de Paz. This nonprofit organization, based in Argentina, was founded in 1995 and has for 28 years through creativity and hard work helped to develop a culture of peace in Argentina, in Latin America, and around the world.
The presentation video is here.
Mil Milenios has developed the position of Ambassador of Peace and has appointed more than 1,800 ambassadors, including such well-known individuals as Pope Francis, the singers León Gieco, Alejandro Lerner, and Sandra Mihanovich; the dancer Julio Bocca; the cartoonist (and creator of the comic strip Mafalda) Carlitos Quino; the television host Juan Alberto Ramón Badía; the musician Jaime Torres; the journalist and politician Fanny Mandelbaum; and the artist Juan Carlos Pallarols.
Mil Milenios successfully promoted the legal establishment in Argentina of the International Day of Peace every September 21st, and has worked with 30 city governments to establish them as Cities of Peace dedicated to promoting a culture of peace. Mil Milenios has advanced awareness of a peace flag and carried out a campaign that placed a thousand peace flags at a thousand schools. The foundation has also created a dictionary of peace that serves to guide the ways in which we use language everyday in service to a culture of peace rather than war.
For World BEYOND War, this work is a model that people around the world could benefit from studying and emulating. Our hope is that this award can bring the outstanding accomplishments of Fundación Mil Milenios de Paz to the awareness of more people.
Mil Milenios de Paz comments:
“Thank you very much to those who chose us to receive this award that honors us and entails greater commitment and responsibility. It gives us hope and inspires us to continue participating, collaborating and enthusiastically sharing peaceful actions that help build a more just, inclusive and supportive world.
“Our mission is to sow peace and unity in individual and collective human consciousness, and we do so by proposing projects and actions that allow us to live and coexist in peace with oneself, with others and with the planet.
“One of our projects has resulted in the creation of a national law in Argentina, a law that appeals to conscience because it does not punish or force, but authorizes, promotes and invites the inclusion of peace studies in the national universities and schools, public or private, of any educational level, and authorizes the hoisting of the Flag of Peace in public buildings belonging to the threepowers of the national state, of the provinces, and of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires — and in public and private schools throughout the national territory. Twenty-one of the 24 provinces of Argentina have acted on the new law.
“Peace is possible, it is the foundation of humanity, it is within each one of us. It is a state of consciousness that we have to cultivate and develop every day with positive thoughts, harmonious words and constructive actions.
“We thank the organizers and promoters of this distinction that ennobles all of Latin America and especially the Peace Ambassadors who are in 21 countries and are the vital energy of our foundation.”
World BEYOND War is a global nonviolent movement, founded in 2014, to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. The purpose of the awards is to honor and encourage support for those working to abolish the institution of war itself. With the Nobel Peace Prize and other nominally peace-focused institutions so frequently honoring other good causes or, in fact, wagers of war, World BEYOND War intends its awards to go to educators or activists intentionally and effectively advancing the cause of war abolition, accomplishing reductions in war-making, war preparations, or war culture. World BEYOND War received hundreds of impressive nominations. The World BEYOND War Board, with assistance from its Advisory Board, made the selections.
The awardees are honored for their body of work directly supporting one or more of the three segments of World BEYOND War’s strategy for reducing and eliminating war as outlined in the book A Global Security System, An Alternative to War. They are: Demilitarizing Security, Managing Conflict Without Violence, and Building a Culture of Peace.
David Hartsough
World BEYOND War Presents the David Hartsough
Individual Lifetime War Abolisher of 2023 Award to David Bradbury
World BEYOND War
World BEYOND War is thrilled to present the 2023 David Hartsough Individual Lifetime War Abolisher Award to Australian filmmaker David Bradbury.
The presentation video is here.
David Bradbury is the creator of 28 documentary films that advance our understanding of war, peace, international relations, and peace activism. Bradbury’s films have been broadcast around the world on the BBC, PBS, ZDF (Germany),and TF1-France, as well as ABC, SBS, and commercial television networks in Australia.
Bradbury worked as a journalist at ABC, covering the Spring Revolution in Portugal and the overthrow of the Greek military junta in Athens, prior to making the first of his powerful films in which individuals confront war, uprising, injustice, and exploitation — as well as the aftermath of war and the impacts of the war industry, including the destruction wrought by weapons development and testing.
Bradbury’s groundbreaking 1979 film, Frontline, told the story of Neil Davis, an Australian war cinematographer and correspondent who covered the Vietnam war for 11 years. Bradbury’s Public Enemy Number One (1981) told the story of another journalist, Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to report on the impacts of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima.
Acting on the advice of Graham Greene, Bradbury traveled to Central America in 1983 and stumbled onto the CIA’s secret war arming the Contras, resulting in the film Nicaragua No Pasaran (1984). Having fallen in love with Central and South American grassroots movements for social justice, Bradbury smuggled himself and his film crew into Pinochet’s Chile, where they filmed Chile Hasta Cuando? (1985). Bradbury’s South of the Border (1986) was inspired by the grassroots music of peasants and workers desperate to break free of their oppressive imperial master to the North, the US government.
Back in Australia in 1988, Bradbury filmed State of Shock, a film about an Aborigenese family removed from their home at gunpoint, their home burned in front of them, and themselves shipped off to a “native reserve” so that a mining company could access bauxite.
Later came A Hard Rain (2007), an exploration of the impact of depleted uranium (DU) in the Gulf war of 1990-1991. The local effects of DU at Shoalwater Bay naval training facility were the focus of Bradbury’s films Shoalwater: Up for Grabs and Blowin’ in the Wind.
In The Crater (2015), Bradbury returned to Vietnam, following Australian conscript Brian Cleaver’s redemptive journey to locate the missing bodies of 42 enemy soldiers whom Cleaver’s company had killed in one night during the war.
Bradbury shoots his own footage, traveling widely, and seeking out people with uncomfortable truths to tell — sometimes at great risk. Bradbury has filmed in Iran during the final days of the Shah, in Nicaragua during the CIA-Contra war, and in El Salvador during the days of death squads during the early 1980s. His film on Pinochet’s Chile, Chile Hasta Quando? (1985) was nominated for an Academy Award. He has filmed independence struggles in East Timor and West Papua, and in India, China, and Nepal.
In Bradbury’s latest documentary The Road to War (2023) Australian experts deplore the Albanese Government’s commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to new weaponry, nuclear propelled submarines, stealth bombers, and missiles, all aimed at China. The film shows why it is not in Australia’s, or the world’s, interests to be dragged into another US-led war.
This film draws on Bradbury’s decades of experience and footage to highlight each argument with the record from history: of each US war that Australia has joined in before, of each US ally that the US has sacrificed before, of what US bombers now being given access to Australia have done to their victims before.
The film even includes footage of another 2023 War Abolisher award winner, Wage Peace Australia, among others speaking truth to power. While Australians were told the war on Vietnam was to prevent the Vietnamese from attacking Australia, the Vietnamese, after winning the war, have still never shown any sign of wanting to invade Australia. Neither has Australia’s top trading partner, China. And yet the push for war with China recycles familiar propaganda, and we desperately need independent films like The Road to War to counter it.
David Bradbury’s films have received prizes at many international festivals, as well as five Australian Film Industry awards, and two Academy Award nominations. The films include:
1979: Frontline
1981: Public Enemy Number One
1984: Nicaragua No Pasaran
1985: Chile Hasta Cuando?
1986: South of the Border
1988: State of Shock
1990: Polska
1992: Shoalwater Up for Grabs
1993: Nazi Supergrass
1996: The Battle for Byron
1997: Loggerheads
1997: Jabiluka
1999: The Battle for Byron 2
2000: Wmsley’s War
2002: Fond Memories of Cuba
2005: Blowin’ in the Wind
2006: Raul The Terrible
2007: A Hard Rain
2007: All that Glitters is Not Gold
2007: Survival School
2009: My Asian Heart
2010: When the Dust Settles
2012: On Borrowed Time
2015: The Crater
2016: War on Trial
2018: America & Me
2019: The Act of No Choice
2023: The Road to War
Since 2007, Bradbury has worked closely with film producer and peace activist Treena Lenthall, who had engaged in ploughshares protests since the 1990s. In 2005 and 2007, Lenthall was one of the main organizers for the nonviolent actions against the US and Australian military rehearsals for war at Shoalwater Bay and Rockhampton, in Central Queensland. It was there that Bradbury and Lenthall met and formed a lasting relationship. Lenthall has worked with Bradbury on the films since then.
The making of his second film, Public Enemy Number One, which involved traveling with Wilfred Burchett back to Hiroshima in 1981, had a major impact on Bradbury, who recalls:
“Wilfred was the first western journalist to reach Hiroshima just weeks after the world’s first A-bomb was dropped. He took an incredible risk in making that journey to find out and report to the world what ‘that new Bomb’ was all about. He was devastated when he got to Hiroshima. The horror and magnitude of what splitting the atom could do. And that the Americans knowingly dropped not one but TWO bombs on non-military targets. Most of those civilians were instantly burnt alive, vaporized. Those who survived went on to live very painful lives from the radiation fallout leading to cancer and their premature deaths.”
Bradbury’s films can be viewed at https://frontlinefilms.vhx.tv/products
A brand new 27-minute film by Bradbury, accepting the award and including clips from some of his many films, is here.
War Abolisher awardees are honored for their body of work directly supporting one or more of the three segments of World BEYOND War’s strategy for reducing and eliminating war as outlined in the book A Global Security System, An Alternative to War. They are: Demilitarizing Security, Managing Conflict Without Violence, and Building a Culture of Peace.
The David Hartsough Individual Lifetime War Abolisher award is named for David Hartsough, cofounder of World BEYOND War. Executive Director of PeaceWorkers and Co-Founder of the Non-Violent Peaceforce, Hartsough has also worked for peace as an author and filmmaker. The Individual Lifetime War Abolisher award to an individual or organization is not made every year. In 2023 it appropriately recognizes more than four decades of wide-ranging work by another documentary-film-maker.
World BEYOND War is a global nonviolent movement, founded in 2014, to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. The purpose of the awards is to honor and encourage support for those working to abolish the institution of war itself. With the Nobel Peace Prize and other nominally peace-focused institutions so frequently honoring other good causes or, in fact, wagers of war, World BEYOND War intends its awards to go to educators or activists intentionally and effectively advancing the cause of war abolition, accomplishing reductions in war-making, war preparations, or war culture. World BEYOND War received hundreds of impressive nominations. The World BEYOND War Board, with assistance from its Advisory Board, made the selections.
