Peace Quest Cape Breton One of 62 Endorsers of World BEYOND War Annual Conference
Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) is proud to be one of sixty two groups endorsing and promoting World BEYOND War’s upcoming annual conference, #No War 2023: Nonviolent Resistance to Militarism. Held virtually over three days – September 22-24 – the conference will bring together “peace and anti-war individuals and organizations from around the world to reflect, strategize, and organize toward the abolition of war.”
The other endorsing organizations include Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, and Learn Peace Canada, and the Canadian chapter of the World Federalist Movement. From war-torn Ukraine, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement is both endorsing the conference and contributing to a panel on ‘Nonviolent Resistance to War in Ukraine’ and a debate on ‘Is War in Ukraine Justified?’
On August 3, the International Peace Bureau – the world’s oldest global peace coalition, to which PQCB belongs – nominated the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, together with the Russian Movement of Conscientious Objectors and the Belarusian ‘Our House’ anti-conscription movement, for the Nobel Peace Prize; the very same day, in Kyiv, Yurii Sheliazhenko, the Executive Secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, was absurdly charged with ‘justifying Russian aggression,’ despite frequent explicit denunciations of what he calls “the Russian criminal war against Ukraine”.
On August 9, PQCB wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, demanding that the government intervene on behalf of Sheliazhenko, and take “a more proactive and high-profile stand…on behalf of conscientious objectors in Ukraine, in Russia, and around our war-torn world.” “Sheliazhenko’s Orwellian prosecution,” commented PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard, “graphically illustrates why humanity needs to build a world of care and compassion beyond war, to stop wasting trillions on ‘weapons, weapons, weapons’ and start saving ‘lives, lives, lives.’ Our ruinous addiction to militarism is destroying societies, lands, and waters around the globe, and may well end in the ultimate disaster of nuclear war. We need to silence the guns, not the pacifists.”
For more information on the conference, please see World BEYOND War, please see https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2023/
