22. August 2012 - betr. Gangjeong

Mittwoch, 22. August

Message aus Gangjeong Village auf Cheju-do

22. August 2012

• National and international support for Jeju Island is growing dramatically. Today, thanks to David Swanson, a team of groups is putting out an email appeal that will reach tens of thousands of people around the world. We are asking folks to click here and send a message to Samsung Corporation (the lead contractor building the Navy base in Gangjeong village) and the World Conservation Congress (WCC). The WCC will be held next week on Jeju Island and will bring 7,000 environmental activists to that event. Korean environmental and peace groups have implored the WCC to take a strong stand against the destruction to nature that the Navy base will bring. The WCC, in part funded by Samsung and other corporate giants, officially has taken a dive on the issue.

• The groups sponsoring this email event today are: Save Jeju Island; Gangjeong village, Jeju Island, South Korea; Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space; Veterans For Peace; Voices for Creative Nonviolence; Fellowship of Reconciliation; and Environmentalists Against War.

• In recent months an international team of organizers have been working hard to secure the ability to reach as many of those 7,000 WCC delegates as possible. The process has been bearing fruit. One group of bio-ethicists has volunteered to draft a powerful resolution and to bring it to the entire WCC body calling for an end to the Navy base. It will be fascinating to see how Samsung and the South Korean right-wing government try to kill this expression of international will.

• The villagers will be working hard during the WCC (Sept 6-15) to pass literature to the environmental delegates and to hire buses to take many of those delegates to see the desecration of the village and nature for themselves.

• The peace community globally is increasingly on the ball when it comes to the Jeju issue. But the environmental community has been slow to engage. This current international effort to bring the Jeju issue to WCC activists could bear positive results. Please click once for Jeju.

Mit Grüßen aus Qingdao.