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GA9 Conference Report GLOBAL ARTICLE NINE CONFERENCE TO ABOLISH WAR May 4-6, 2008, Makuhari Messe, Chiba, Japan Franziska Seraphim, Boston College Timothy S. George, University of Rhode Island Why Not 9? Throughout the world, wars are still being waged and weapons are still being produced, with no end in sight. Drastic changes in the earth’s environment threaten the lives of millions, and poverty is rampant. Faced with such a world, global citizens have started to realize the importance of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. “To build peace without force” This is the concept of Article 9 that we want to ring throughout the world. —Program for Plenary Session, Global Article Nine Conference to Abolish War, p. 2 Background to the Conference The Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War (called more simply the 9 Jō Sekai Kaigi in Japanese, or Global Conference on Article 9) was held in the massive Makuhari Messe convention complex near Tokyo May 4-6, 2008. The conference was organized by two Japanese NGOs. Peace Boat, founded in 1983 by students protesting government censorship of history textbooks, is a Japan-based international organization that works to promote peace, human rights, and sustainable development. The Japan Lawyers International Solidarity Association (JALISA, Nihon Kokusai Hōritsuka Kyōkai), founded in 1957, is a leading organization of democratic lawyers in Japan and a member of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). The roots of the conference go back to the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), formed in 2003 after the start of the war on Iraq. In 2005, at the suggestion of its Northeast Asia Regional Meeting, GPPAC began a “Global Article 9 Campaign” using Global Article 9 Conference, May 2008 page 2 newspaper advertisements and conferences to spread the idea that Article 9 is a useful model for efforts to achieve peace. This background in the antiwar movement helps explain the nature and goals of the May 2008 conference. It was huge, international, and attended by members of a wide range of citizens’ groups and NGOs. It aimed not so much to protect Article 9 from revision as to globalize it as a vision and a tool for worldwide peace efforts. Moreover, it defined war and peace in more than just military terms to include human rights, development, and environmental issues. Because of this focus on a wide range of issues beyond Article 9 itself, the largest and most prominent citizens’ group, the Article 9 Association (9 Jō no Kai), which has over 7,000 local affiliated groups nationwide, did not formally participate, since its policy is not to take up any issues other than Article 9 itself. Nevertheless, many local Article 9 Association groups and members were among the thousands who attended. General Impressions of the First Day By the time Tokyo’s largest convention grounds at Makuhari Messe in Chiba opened its gates to kick off the three-day conference at 12:30 on May 4, enormous masses of people of all ages and nationalities—yet overwhelmingly older folks—had crowded the entire area, banners flying, advertisement boards held high, lines forming and snaking their way towards the entrance of the main convention hall. The atmosphere was festive and full of anticipation, as everyone began to realize just what a huge event this conference was becoming. Staff members were readily available for directions and information in various languages; once inside the main hall, tables with books, flyers, music CDs, T-shirts, and theme-wrapped tea bottles stretched almost everywhere. The front left section on the ground floor near the stage was reserved for foreign visitors, the press, and simultaneous translators, with multi-lingual receivers readily available to all who requested them. The event hall filled beyond its limit—12,000—while an estimated Global Article 9 Conference, May 2008 page 3 3,000 people, having failed to get in, formed their own rally in a nearby park, where the keynote speakers joined them after their scheduled appearances. The sheer scope of attendance seemed to signal to everyone: “Article 9 is important, and together we can make a difference.” The Plenary Session on the first day was divided into two parts. Part I, “Article 9 as a hope for the world” featured two prominent keynote speakers, both foreign women, and two Japanese speakers, followed by first-rate orchestra and choir performances. Part II, “Creating a world without war,” highlighted four guest speakers from Ghana, the United States, South Korea, and Costa Rica respectively, set off by six visually and musically stunning performances by highly accomplished artists as well as new groups. Large-screen projections throughout the event, interspersed by videos, brought the action on stage close to all and powerfully reinforced its meanings. It was a festival indeed. The event opened with a black-and-white video of a clock running while footage of war after war since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared in the background, each devastating picture crumbling into the next one. Slowing down in 2003, it finally came to a stop on May 4, 2008 against an image of the Iraq war. Indeed, this video anticipated correctly the overall aims of the conference: to invoke and build upon global citizen solidarity to oppose war as a means of conflict resolution, and to discuss ways to use the law to effect change. The conference thus explicitly aligned itself with the goals of two prominent international organizations, which had in fact provided the intellectual leadership of the event from its inception: the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in 1946 in Paris to make the violation of human rights and threats to international peace and security legal issues under international law; and the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), a world-wide civil society-led network established in 2003 to build a new international consensus on peace-building and the prevention of violent conflict. Accordingly, Japan’s Article 9 was omnipresent as vision, value, principle, or legal norm, with only occasional nods to its specific historical context. Global Article 9 Conference, May 2008 page 4 The organizational leadership of the event fell to the international NGO Peace Boat, whose co-director Yoshioka Tatsuya delivered the opening remarks emphasizing the large-scale misery created by wars all over the world and especially in Iraq today. Recalling Japan’s history of not only suffering in war but itself waging an aggressive war in Asia, he said, “We are gathered here today to preserve Article 9 and make it global property.” Indeed, three overarching themes framed this conference as a whole: (1) a critique of U.S. global policies, whether in Iraq, American military bases in Japan and elsewhere, or environmental policies; (2) the global applicability of Article 9 to different circumstances around the world; and (3) the power of citizen activism to make, or at least influence, more humane and responsible global policy. The first keynote speaker—1976 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire from Northern Ireland—clarified the immediate contemporary context for this endeavor: the Bush administration’s redefinition of war in terms of “preemptive war” and “regime change” ostensibly to prevent conflict, in gross defiance of international cooperation and international law. She called for an immediate end to the “immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq” and the establishment of a Marshall Plan to rebuild Iraq in ways that do not serve America’s imperial aims. Pointing to the 1998 Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland (also known as the Belfast Agreement) that ended thirty years of violence, she identified poverty, illiteracy, ethnic conflict, the marginalization of social groups, human rights violations, and climate change as the real sources of conflict. The second keynote speaker—the president of the Hague Appeal for Peace Cora Weiss—criticized in particular U.S. pressure on Japan to revise its constitution in order to better serve American global strategies. “It is important to preserve the original intention behind Article 9 along the lines of the UN charter…We must not stretch the intentions of Article 9 to suit our national fantasies,” she insisted. Instead, Weiss suggested the applicability of Article 9 to the many different ramifications of war: as an environmental issue, a gender issue, an economic and developmental issue, a legal issue, and a youth issue. Following the keynote speakers, Tsuchiya Kōken, former chair of the Japan Federation of Bar Association, called explicit attention to the historical context in which Article 9 of the constitution was conceived: Japan’s aggressive war in Asia and the American occupation’s democratization efforts in its wake. Together, these speeches thereby outlined the most Global Article 9 Conference, May 2008 page 5 prominent themes that were to guide the symposia and discussions on the following day. The four guest speakers appearing in the second half of the plenary session substantiated the ideals voiced by the earlier speakers from their respective vantage points. Emmanuel Bombande from Ghana found Article 9 to be an inspiration for his underdeveloped continent; Beate Sirota Gordon retold her engagement in including specific women’s rights as part of the gender equality clause in the constitution (Article 24); Lee Suk Tae from South Korea underscored the need to prevent a repetition of the wartime past in Asia by making Article 9 the property of all of Asia and the bedrock of reconciliation; Carlos Vargas Pizarro from Costa Rica explained the anti-war clause similar to Article 9 in Costa Rica’s constitution. Together, the speakers in this plenary session set the stage for the more substantive discussions of the following day.
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