2007 Nuclear-Free Future Solutions Award
Mayors for Peace and Tadatoshi Akiba
See also: Mayor Akiba's speech in Salzburg
Lists – especially long lists – are normally boring.
Sometimes, though, they can be delightful,
empowering – even prophetic. The list of activities
undertaken by the Mayors for Peace from mid-1982
to mid-2007 is of this second, rarer order. Our eyes
skim down a chronology listing no less than ninety
major events – actions and happenings ranging from
diverse memorial gatherings commemorating the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to
protests against French, Russian and US military
nuclear tests, to numerous entreaties submitted to the
United Nations in both New York and Geneva, as
well as a challenge submitted to the World Court in
The Hague, Netherlands.
In November of 2003 Mayors for Peace launched
its current cardinal project: the 2020 Vision
Campaign, an emergency crusade to rid the world of
the last ounce of weapons grade fissile material by the
year 2020. The Mayors for Peace wages its campaign
using a wide armory of weapons: appeals, declarations, petitions, visual graphics, exhibitions, and
scientific appraisals and studies
In 2005, the Mayors for Peace sent the largest
delegation to participate at the 2005 Non-
Proliferation Treaty Review Conference: over one hundred
cities from around the globe were
represented.
Why should mayors join hands across
borders to wrench the world back from the threat of
nuclear obliteration? »People rarely suffer alone,«
Hiroshima mayor Dr. Tadatoshi Akiba tells us. »The
suffering of any individual is actually the suffering of
at least a family, if not a neigh borhood or a wider
com munity, and a city is a vital, true and personally
relevant level of collective identity. That is why we
speak of Auschwitz, the My Lai massacre, the
Dresden bombing, for example, when we refer to
these sufferings. And this is why cities that suffer
massive destruction become cities that work for
peace. Suffering becomes an integral part of the
collective memory, and peace is the natural answer to
the question, how can we keep this from happening
again?«
The Mayors for Peace has recently enlarged its
2020 Vision Campaign with the Urban Centers Are
Not Targets or UCANT project. In his Message of
Hibakusha (hibakusha is a Japanese word that
translates literally to »explosion-affected people«,
and refers to the survivors of the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) delivered in
Rome on 17 November 2006, Dr. Aikba remarked:
»In the course of this project, we will be helping
cities to mutiny against the idea that nations can hold
them hostage. We are demanding positive assurance
from all nuclear weapon states that no city is targeted
for nuclear obliteration. In doing so, we are reminding mayors, citizens, and decision-makers at the
national level that cities ARE, in fact, targets of
nuclear weapons and, according to the International
Court of Justice, even this threat is a war crime«.
--by Claus-Peter Lieckfeld (English version Craig Reishus)
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