Kumi Naidoo: Warriors of the Rainbow
[Kumi Naidoo is the executive director of Greenpeace International.]
Twenty-five years ago Saturday, two bombs planted by secret agents working for the French government sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor, New Zealand, killing Fernando Pereira, a photographer and father of two. This was a desperate move by France to stop the activists onboard from bearing witness to its nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
I remember hearing about the attack over my father’s transistor radio in our township outside Durban, South Africa. The apartheid government had recently imposed a state of emergency and it was not often that international news made its way to us. What had happened with the Rainbow Warrior was so outrageous that even we heard about it....
While the threat of nuclear destruction is not over, a danger barely recognized at the time has taken its place as the No. 1 threat to our planet. Climate change has now become the biggest threat to security and peace in the future. Kofi Annan’s Global Forum estimates that in 2008 alone, 300,000 people died of the consequences of climate change.
Unlike nuclear testing, climate change is difficult to “bear witness” to because its causes (carbon emissions) lie in so many different factors and its resolution will require major, international cooperation of business leaders, politicians and other decision-makers. This does not mean civil society can or should stop trying to hold leaders accountable for changes they are unwilling to make....
Read entire article at IHT
Twenty-five years ago Saturday, two bombs planted by secret agents working for the French government sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor, New Zealand, killing Fernando Pereira, a photographer and father of two. This was a desperate move by France to stop the activists onboard from bearing witness to its nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
I remember hearing about the attack over my father’s transistor radio in our township outside Durban, South Africa. The apartheid government had recently imposed a state of emergency and it was not often that international news made its way to us. What had happened with the Rainbow Warrior was so outrageous that even we heard about it....
While the threat of nuclear destruction is not over, a danger barely recognized at the time has taken its place as the No. 1 threat to our planet. Climate change has now become the biggest threat to security and peace in the future. Kofi Annan’s Global Forum estimates that in 2008 alone, 300,000 people died of the consequences of climate change.
Unlike nuclear testing, climate change is difficult to “bear witness” to because its causes (carbon emissions) lie in so many different factors and its resolution will require major, international cooperation of business leaders, politicians and other decision-makers. This does not mean civil society can or should stop trying to hold leaders accountable for changes they are unwilling to make....