Canadian Peace Congress


Canadian Peace Congress
The Canadian Peace Congress hosted the 2nd Tri-Lateral Conference with our fraternal intenational organizations in the US and Mexico which was held in Toronto ON October 2-4, 2009.

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Member of World Peace Council


Speech of Socorro Gomes, President of WPC

10/29/2009 9:39:18 PM - Socorro Gomes

 

Dear Companions
 
It is a great honor for us to pronounce these few words on behalf of World Peace Council, when we started the celebrations of 60th anniversary, to be completed in the year 2010, at this beautiful Syrian capital, the city of Damascus, the scene of glorious historical days, and in the present as well, a scenario of resistance and pride of a people who do not accept being enslaved by others.
 
In the Middle East we see the continued existence of an obstacle to peace, a factor of instability and concern. The State of Israel, strongly supported by US imperialism, it is an enemy of its neighbors, the source and the constant threat of war.
 
We denounce the oppression of the Palestinian people, in special the brutal and murderous siege against the Gaza Strip. We declare a strong support for the Syrian people in their struggle to recover the Golan Heights, territory that must be immediately returned to Syria without preconditions. The World Peace Council estimates the militancy of the Syrian people for peace and a peaceful coexistence with other peoples, in harmony and prosperity, the great goal of the peoples of the Middle East.
 
Companions,
 
The World Peace Council was founded six decades ago, in a context where the threat of war, few years after the Second World War, hung back on the people. Allow me to refer briefly to this rich history that is much related to the present days.
 
Shortly after the end of World War II, a time when the international situation had worsened as a result of the bellicose policy of US imperialism, voices were raised in many countries proclaiming the need to create a global movement to impede a new disaster.
 
Earlier, the Western powers, led by the United States, had created the North Atlantic Pact, the beginning of the infamous North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.
 
The idea of gathering intellectuals for peace was expressed by a group of Polish and French scholars to which Soviet and several other countries intellectuals jointed themselves.
 
It was decided to convene a Congress of peacekeepers in the city of Wroclaw, Poland. It was not by chance that Poland was chose as the Congress place - a country that suffered so much with the war - and the city of Wroclaw, half-destroyed. It was necessary to symbolize that the humanity was not yet free from the nightmare of war. By the end of August 1948 the Congress was held in Wroclaw, with the participation of more than 400 personalities from 46 countries. The result of the Congress of Wroclaw was the creation of a liaison committee, which maintained a coordinated network of friends of peace, from several countries.
 
The idea of a Congress of Intellectuals for Peace was greeted with enthusiasm everywhere where the call came from Poland was reached.
 
The initiative had adhesions of various personalities in that time. It is difficult to enumerate all the participants. Let speak for them, names as Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, Pablo Picasso, Ilia Erenburg, Martin Andersen-Nexo, Sir John Boyd-Orr, Andrei Fadeev, Julien Benda and others, many others among who were several prominent representatives of culture and science.
 
In Wroclaw were present three remarkable women: Mrs. Eugenie Cotton, physics and director of the National School of Sevres, Irene Joliot-Curie, Nobel Prize in Physics, and the great German writer Anna Seghers.
 
With the success of the initiative and deepening of the risk to world peace, a few months later, in February 1949, met in Paris, the Committee of Intellectuals for Peace, which had appeared months before Poland. The meeting decided to convene immediately a new and even more grandiose and representative World Congress for Peace to be held in few weeks in Paris.
 
The Congress was convened in the form of an appeal to democratic organizations and personalities from around the world, demanding that lined themselves to the call of a World Congress of Peace Partisans. This appeal was launched jointly by the International Committee of Intellectuals for Peace and International Democratic Federation of Women and it was translated into eight languages and traveled the world.
 
Everywhere, it was spreading initiatives such as organizing meetings and preparatory conferences, the collection of signatures of adhesions to the appeal, collect of funds for support the congress, several meetings, press conferences, subscriptions, materials, etc.
One morning in March, a poster appeared on the walls of Paris and major French cities. It was announcing the date and place of the World Congress of Peace and displayed a dove as an emblem, which has become famous and to this day symbolizes the Movement for Peace in the world. It was the dove of Pablo Picasso. A few days later, the poster appeared simultaneously in Warsaw and Rio de Janeiro and later in other capitals. Whether in Tokyo or London, Rome or Buenos Aires, posters with the dove of peace Picasso were posted on walls. Soon, reproduced throughout the world, the dove has become the universal symbol of the forces of peace.
 
Before the opening of the World Congress of Peace, were counted as adhesions: 18 international organizations, more than a thousand national organizations of all kinds, more than 10 thousand provincial and/or regional organizations. Among the endless lists of individual members, stand out the names of more than 3,000 personalities around the world. In total, that corresponded to the support of more than 600 million men and women.
 
Never in the peoples’ history had such meeting been made.
 
The French government, with many delegates from more distant areas such as Latin America, China and Australia already on the way, decided to restrict the entry into the country of various participants. Thus, it was necessary to arrange a session of Congress in a different European city for the delegates who were denied from entering France. This parallel conference was organized in Prague within 24 hours and the links have been established to make it synchrony with the work of Paris.
 
At the end of this huge effort, on 20 April 1948, the First World Congress of Partisans of Peace was opened as foreseen in the Pleyel room, Paris. From 72 countries, 2198 delegates, guests and observers representing a fourth of the earth's population. On the same day the doors of the Parliament of Czechoslovakia to receive the 281 congress persons who made up the Prague session of Congress, banned from entering France.
 
The I Congress was held under the slogan: "From now on, peace is a matter of people".
 
Comrades,

The global movement for peace, already in his birthplace encountered the need to say clearly that peace meant.
 
I tell you here a story remembered by a founder of WPC, Ivor Montagu, who in a testimony about those days in Paris, noted that:
 
         (open quote) "The most impressive of these was the moment when the news announcing the crossing of the Yang-tze by Chinese armies came to Congress. The whole assembly stood up, but not only. We climbed on chairs and clapped without stopping. Opponents of the peace movement have tried to make fun, highlighting the incompatibility between our faith in peace and our joy for a victory by arms (...) Our attitude demonstrated the maturity of our beliefs "(unquote).
 
I tell this short story to reaffirm that the peace movement both in the past as now, deeply associated the struggle against wars with the struggle for peoples emancipation and liberation. There will not be a just and lasting peace in the world, while US imperialism or any other imperialist power, insist on subduing peoples and nations, constrain national sovereignty, promote the war as an instrument of neo-colonialism and degradation of self-determination.
 
In this sense, I take this opportunity to denounce the coup occurred in Honduras, which deposed President Zelaya by the forces of right that many, perhaps naively, thought to be over in Latin America. Some years earlier, in 2002, this device had already tried to dismount the power of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Along with the coup d’état, the reaction to anti-imperialist and progressive governments in Latin America also involve the siege and the threat of a military nature. I refer specifically to the restoration of the Fourth Fleet of the US Navy and the expansion of military bases in South American territory.

Companions,

I would also remember this moment the historic Stockholm Appeal, launched by the WPC in March 1950. At that time, it have been reopened to the arms race by the United States, which is nuclear-arming and endangering the peace. In that context, the Movement for Peace which origins I have referred, was able to mobilize a broad campaign around the Stockholm Appeal.

This appeal basically incorporated three basic themes proposed by Nobel Prize in Physics, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, president of the World Peace Council:

The requirement of "absolute prohibition of nuclear weapon, the weapon of aggression and extermination of populations", the requirement of the "establishment of a strict international control to ensure implementation of the ban" and the consideration of the fact that "the government used the weapon atom for the first time, no matter from which country, would commit a crime against humanity and should be treated as a war criminal..."

To these ideas it was added: the call "to all men of good will in the world to sign this appeal".

In a few weeks the Stockholm Appeal has spread in all countries. It was took by an innumerable clouds to collect signatures in the towns and villages, factories and schools, shops and markets, public squares, ships, stations, airports ... and even in remote villages of the African jungle. It were arrived signatures of famous people, like Philip Morrison, one of the scientists who built the first atomic bomb, the writer Thomas Mann and actor Maurice Chevalier.

By the end of 1950, more than 450 million people have subscribed the Stockholm Appeal.

I give this example because, in terms of tasks and their amplitude, nowadays similar challenge it is presented to the people of the world: to build and develop a powerful, broad and massive movement for peace in the world.

For the WPC the central point of our attention are struggles and campaigns, the issue of the abolition of nuclear weapons and mass destruction. We support the disarmament, eradication of these weapons. And this destruction of nuclear weapons must begin by the great powers, because today there is a deadly and dominant select club in the world. This club, which is headed by the United States, with other countries, among them Israel, prevents any developing country or any country that is independent from the policy of the United States, of great powers to develop nuclear technology even if for civil and peaceful goals.

This is a huge hypocrisy to condemn Iran, Korea, or any other country because it is developing nuclear technology, while the major powers do not destroy their large arsenals, which have the capacity to destroy the earth hundreds of times.

Companions,

On behalf of World Peace Council, I would like to reaffirm the cause of peace and solidarity among peoples as a major cause of free men and women, conscious of the Earth. These major points join themselves to the cause of development, social progress, cooperation, and anti-imperialist
struggle and a new world order, as major causes of humanity in the current historical period.

Thank you very much.

Socorro Gomes.
Damascus, Syria, October 25, 2009.