NSP Research - Updates

After spending time in Turkey this northern summer I’m pretty sympathetic to calls for the return of artifacts stolen by colonial powers and others.  So it has been exciting to read about the parliamentary debate in the France over the return of Maori remains to Aotearoa New Zealand. The upper house/Senate voted unanimously on 29 June in favour of a bill calling for France’s museums to return all Maori heads still in their possession to New Zealand. The bill now heads to the National Assembly for approval. France’s newly appointed ministry of culture, Frederic Mitterrand, has supported the legislation and said, “these mummified heads led to a particularly barbaric trade, fuelled by the sinister curiosity of travellers and European collectors.”  France has about 15 Maori heads, including eight at Paris’ Quai Branly museum of tribal arts, which opened in 2006.

The UN Secretary General has launched a cyber campaign to promote nuclear disarmament. Through Twitter and Facebook the 100-day “We Must Disarm” campaign features some lame celebrities (anyone under 50 years???) and a MySpace by a 27-year-old male and single, Virgo UN employee [not this guy!]. The campaign sounds out three reasons to promote nuclear disarmament, because: (more…)

This morning I had a “Forrest Gump” making history moment at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where we were launching our new Banning Cluster Munitions report. Before our press conference got underway, Thomas Nash and I decided to pop upstairs to see if the notice that the Conference on Disarmament (CD) was open to ther public was true. We walked into the viewing gallery of the grand room just as the CD chair was concluding a statement outlining a possible programme of work for the CD diplomats to negotiate a new treaty on fissile materials, which would ban production of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium used to make nuclear bombs. (more…)

Over the past month the situation in Fiji has deterioated dramatically. The past two years since the military took power in December 2006 were bad, but now the situation is untenable. According to my count, four people have died in or after being held in military and/or police custody and dozens more have been detained and assaulted.  It was not exactly a “bloodless” coup nor is the situation as “calm” now as some portray it. (more…)

My long-time colleague and friend Tun Channereth, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), greeted the opening and delivered the campaign’s statement to a regional meeting on the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty that I attended in Bangkok, Thailand on 2-3 April 2009.

Thailand’s Foreign Minister  Kasit Piromya also spoke at the Bangkok Workshop opening and made a point of acknowledging the Cambodian delegation to before he left. This was in part because the day before he had been quoted as calling Cambodian’s Prime Minister Hun Sen a ‘thug.’ The minister claimed he had been mistranslated. (more…)

The problem with taking photos is that you can’t take ‘em when you speak - that’s what happened at the London event to launch the Disarm DVD on 25 March 2009. It was fun evening though and thanks for Thomas for his photo!  About 60 guests attended the event at Portcullis House in the British parliament, which featured a panel comprised of Dogwoof’s Andy Whittaker member of parliament Frank Cook, former BBC journalist and parliamentarian Martin Bell, and Disarm director Mary Wareham. Co-director Brian Liu was unable to attend the London launch. (more…)

There was a march up Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC today by the campaign to free Tibet. You couldn’t miss their brightly coloured flags and clothing. The protesters headed up to the Chinese embassy where they held a rally in front of assorted police. No one came out from the embassy to greet them. March 10th marks the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising of 1959, when more than tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed by Chinese troops and the Dalai Lama fled over the mountains to India. It also marks one year since violent protests swept across Tibet.

Today the Dalai Lama issued a strong statement charging China with creating “hell on earth” in Tibet, describing the “untold suffering and destruction” that Tibet has borne oveer the past 50 years. This received media coverage, but competition is fierce. Afterall this week also marks the 50th birthday of the Barbie doll. A couple of days ago a Tibetan Barbie doll was even launched by Chinese entrepreneurs.

While I was in New York to launch the Disarm DVD, I stopped by a diplomatic meeting at the United Nations on the proposed Arms Trade Treaty. Governments had convened for the first meeting of a delightfully named “open-ended working group,” the latest phase in what has become a lengthy effort to create an international treaty to regulate government transfers of conventional weapons and small arms. (more…)

We released the DVD of our documentary feature film on landmines, Disarm, at at the beautiful Scandinavia House venue near the United Nations in New York Monday, 2 March. A massive snowfall the night before and throughout the day had us worried that the event would be a bust, but 150 people showed up to watch the film and listen to a panel discussion featuring diplomats, activists and the filmmakers. A full report on the event is available on Disarm’s website. The film can be purchased from Amazon, rented from Netflix, and purchased via digital download from IndiePix.

Next Step Productions is grateful to everyone involved in the production of the DVD (especially Disarm director Brian Liu, Guillaume Bernadeau, Amy O’Byrne, Nick Pimentel, Katy Wood, and our translators).  We are grateful to IndiePix for their taking Disarm on and for their phenomenal organising around the New York launch event - many thanks to  Bob Alexander, Danielle DiGiacomo, Ryan Harrington, Liz Ogilvie, and Matt Posorske. Finally, a big thanks to the speakers and participants at the New York event as well as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) for its support.

I stopped in Managua, Nicaragua this week to attend the first the first in a series of regional meetings planned in the lead-up to the Mine Ban Treaty’s Second Review Conference, which will take place in Cartagena, Colombia from 30 November-4 December 2009. Government representatives from 18 countries across the region attended the Managua Workshop as did campaigners from a dozen countries.  The campaign’s delegation included eight landmine survivors from Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Peru.

It was interesting to be back in Nicaragua; my first visit was eight years ago just after 9/11. The mine clearance work in the region is nearing completion. Nicaragua is the last country in Central America still complete its demining program. They are working hard to meet this goal by December, but it requires ongoing funding to complete. We had a disheartening discussion on $$$ with the U.S. embassy, as the U.S. demining programme had unilaterally decided that Nicaragua is “mine-impact free” and no longer requires support. Shame that the U.S. couldn’t have taken a joint decision together with other donors who are part of the Mine Ban Treaty as Nicaragua still requires continued support in order to be “mine-free.”