Wales Peace Festival 2008

Preparations are going ahead for the Wales Peace Festival 2008,  and this year’s venue is Bangor. The conference takes place over the weekend of 18th -19th October and offers a rare chance for people from all over Wales to take stock, exchange information, participate in lively debate and  look to the future. The local organisers are the Bangor and Ynys Môn Peace and Justice Group. Sponsors include Cymdeithas y Cymod, Cynefin y Werin and CND Cymru.

To see George Bush and Gordon Brown stand side by side in London in June 2008, one might think that little has changed in the last, long, seven years. More troops are to be sent to Afghanistan, fewer troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq, sanctions are to be stepped up against Iran while the Palestinians are, as ever, to be left  in a wretched limbo.   International politics are still based on double standards, disinformation, violence, fear, ignorance of history, state terror, greed and profiteering. The seeds of future conflict are still being sown.

However  this is not  the same world as 2001. The neocon dream is dead and widely derided, and  it is looking as if the torturers of  Guantanamo Bay have no future.  Politicians of the old regime are packing their bags and it could just be that  international law and concern for the most basic human rights are slowly reclaiming the high ground, despite the British government's recidivist desire to detain people without charge for longer and longer periods.

Let us hope that the tide is on the turn. International law will be more important than ever in the coming decades, to deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to deal with global conflict exacerbated by climate change and dwindling resources, to deal with the resultant movement of displaced persons.  As new technologies allow government to step up surveillance and control of the citizen,  and create a growing sub-class of non-citizens,  human rights will need defending right down the line. A priority  has to be engaging with the next generation who will have to deal with these problems.

In this year''s Wales Peace Festival, we hope to look at ways in which these complex political and cultural issues interconnect and to discuss ways in which  imagination and reason might be applied in the interests of conflict resolution and peace building. That is our aim, not 'preaching to the converted' or engaging in mere rhetoric.

Our main speakers will be heard in plenary session. Moazzam Begg returns to Wales this year. Many will recall his visit to Social Forum Cymru two years ago, and before that the moving speech made to the Aberystwyth peace festival by his father Azmat Begg, when Moazzam was still incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Moazzam is now an author and  a human rights campaigner working with the Cageprisoners organisation. Jill Evans  MEP, Chair of CND Cymru, will be speaking in the 50th anniversary year of CND, at a time when nuclear proliferation is running out of control and the government is pouring money into the development of new weapons of mass destruction, in breach of its treaty commitments. She may also wish to comment on her recent experiences in Palestine, along with another of our speakers, Mary Compton from Powys. Mary is a leading light of  the National Union of Teachers, with a long and active record of involvement in Palestine. Dr Bianca Ambrose-Oji  is an academic from Bangor University's Centre for Arid Zone Studies and will investigate the impact of climate change  on  Africa's resources, and the global implications of this. Leading author Mark Curtis is an expert at unpicking the hidden history of the British government  policies, from colonial  exploitation through to the so-called War on Terror. In his latest book he examines how Britain helped to create and collude with the very institutions it now attacks and demonises in the Middle East.  Stephen Thomas of the Welsh Centre for International Affairs will consider questions of peace building and the United Nations.

Workshop sessions will include discussions on religion and the causes of war, on the St Athan's campaign and the PAWB campaign against nuclear new-build on Anglesey, on the changing politics of Central and South America, on themes war and peace in cinema and many other topics besides. A wide and diverse range of themes –­ but they do all join up.

Oh and there will be exhibitions, too, choral music. and on Saturday evening a benefit gig at the Anglesey Arms, just across the Straits in Porthaethwy. The main events will be held in Dean Street, in central Bangor, at the University's School of Lifelong Learning.  Which might  also be an appropriate title for the peace movement in Wales!

Gwyl Heddwch Cymru 2008
Ysgol Dysgu Gydol Oes
Stryd y Deon
Bangor
Gwynedd
LL57 1UT

10.00 Dydd Sadwrn Hydref 18 - 16.00 Dydd Sul Hydref 19 2008

Wales Peace Festival 2008

School of Lifelong Learning