Women Building Peace
January 2011
Banner photo: Syria [© Bruno Morandi/Hemis/Corbis]
"Transforming the Human Spirit" in Vienna and London
At the Vienna International Centre [Larry Williams]
The exhibition "From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Transforming the Human Spirit" (THS) opened at the Vienna International Centre, home to leading UN agencies confronting the challenges of nuclear weapons, on October 4. The exhibition was cosponsored by the SGI and the NGO Committee on Peace, Vienna.
Following a performance of classical pieces and folksongs by a choir of junior high school students from the Musikgymnasium Wien, Maher Nasser, Director of the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) Vienna, shared welcoming remarks in which he reaffirmed the UN's commitment to the interrelated goals of human security and disarmament.
Hiromasa Ikeda, Vice President of the SGI, then introduced a message from SGI President Daisaku Ikeda in which he noted that the SGI has focused its efforts on "challenging those aspects of our collective mentality that, consciously or unconsciously, accept the continued existence of nuclear weapons" and repeated his call for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC) to legally ban these weapons of mass destruction.
Genxin Li, Director of the Division for External Relations and Legal Affairs for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Preparatory Commission, stressed that the CTBT had, since 1996, acted to prevent further nuclear weapons tests, more than 2,000 of which had been conducted to that point. Ana Maria Cetto, Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Technical Cooperation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), welcomed the exhibition's focus on tackling the "silent violence of apathy" and on building human security, saying, "In the IAEA, we are convinced that ensuring human security is key to ensuring global peace."
Ambassador Helmut Böck, Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations in Vienna, emphasized that "the ultimate beneficiaries of disarmament are the people," and expressed his support for the exhibition's message that a transformation of the human spirit was necessary in order to build a culture of peace. In his remarks, Klaus Renoldner, Chairperson of the NGO Committee on Peace, Vienna, noted that, as a physician, he was clearly conscious of nuclear weapons as a "disease" for which there is no treatment. "There is only prevention, and prevention in this case means abolition."
Meanwhile, in London, the THS exhibition was shown from October 25-26 at the Brunei Gallery at the University of London School of Asian and African Studies (SOAS) alongside the 5th London Conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone. Some 600 viewed the exhibition. As part of the exhibition and conference, Student Pugwash cohosted a youth forum with SGI-UK youth and students from across the country. Dr. Jason Hart, lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath and research associate at Oxford University, spoke on Mr. Ikeda's 2009 antinuclear proposal "Building Global Solidarity Toward Nuclear Abolition."
