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We broadcast live from The Hague, where over 1,000 female peace activists gathered from around the world 100 years ago this week to call for an end to war. The extraordinary meeting, known as the International Congress of Women, took place as World War I raged across the globe. Today, as wars rage on in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries, women from around the world have gathered again in The Hague to call for peace and to mark the 100th anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak with three Nobel Peace Prize laureates. "Their agenda is to end militarism and war, and to build peace and international law and human rights and democracy," says our first guest, Mairead Maguire, who was awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 32 for her actions to help end the deep ethnic and political conflict in her native Northern Ireland. She shared the award with Betty Williams. They helped start Peace People, a movement committed to building a just and peaceful society in Northern Ireland. At the time, Maguire was the youngest recipient of the peace prize. She is the author of the book "The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: One hundred years ago this week, over a thousand women peace activists gathered from around the world to meet here at The Hague to call for an end to war. The extraordinary meeting, known as the International Congress of Women, took place as World War I raged across the globe. The gathering was organized by a Dutch suffragist named Dr. Aletta Jacobs. The event took place in The Netherlands because of its neutral position during World War I. At the event, Dr. Jacobs said, quote, "Those of us who have convened this Congress of Women assembled to protest against war and to suggest steps which may lead to warfare becoming an impossibility," she said. Two future Nobel Peace Prize winners took part in the U.S. delegation: Jane Addams, the co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, and the sociologist Emily Greene Balch. The event marked the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, known as WILPF. Well, today, as wars rage on in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries, women from around the world have gathered again here in The Hague to call for peace and to mark the 100th anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
In a Democracy Now! exclusive today at The Hague, we’re joined by three Nobel Peace laureates. Jody Williams is with us. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In 2003, she helped launch the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Her memoir is called My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Leymah Gbowee is also with us. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Gbowee shared the prize with fellow Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, now president, and Yemeni native Tawakkul Karman. Gbowee and Sirleaf became the second and third African women to win the prize, preceded by the late Wangari Maathai of Kenya. She is the founder and president of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa based in Liberia. She’s the author of the book, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War.
And Mairead Maguire is with us. She was awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 32 for her actions to help end the deep ethnic and political conflict in her native Northern Ireland. She shared the award with Betty Williams. They helped start Peace People, a movement committed to building a just and peaceful society in Northern Ireland. At the time, Mairead was the youngest recipient of the peace prize. She’s the author of the book, The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland.
Leymah, Jody and Mairead are also part of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which was formed in 2006 to support women’s groups around the world in campaigning for justice, peace and equality.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Mairead, you may have been the youngest recipient at the time of the Nobel Peace Prize, but you were the first to win the peace prize of the three of you here. Talk about the significance of this meeting today. Once again, about a thousand women have gathered here at The Hague—we’re broadcasting from the World Forum—to take on the issue of war, in these very violent times. What does this group—what can groups like this accomplish?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Well, I think first goal of groups like this, over a thousand women and many men from many countries, and their agenda is to end militarism and war, and to build peace and international law and human rights and democracy. And, you know, that’s not a new agenda, because 100 years ago, when they gathered here at The Hague and when Alfred Nobel was set up, and with Bertha von Suttner, way over a hundred years ago, their agenda was—
AMY GOODMAN: And her name isn’t very well known, let me say, Bertha von Suttner, who she was and how she inspired—how she inspired Alfred Nobel.
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: And isn’t that incredible? She was the first Nobel woman, and over a hundred years. And her agenda with Alfred Nobel was fraternity amongst the nations, building nations cooperating together to solve the problems. The second was abolish armies and militarism and war, because they’re not working. And the third one was to, through dialogue, through negotiation, through solving the problems, through listening to each other, and build international law and human rights. And, I mean, that’s the way forward for the world today.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you use this philosophy in Ireland?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Because in Northern Ireland, we had a very deep ethnic, political problem, and it was very complex. But at the base of it all was fear, inequality and injustice. But we tried to solve it through militarism, paramilitarism, and it was getting worse and worse. And in '76, my sister's three children were killed. The message that we came out—and thousands and thousands—
AMY GOODMAN: How were they killed?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: They were killed in an awful tragedy between the British army and an active service unit of the Irish Republican Army. And one of my younger sisters, Anne, she went walking with her four children, and three of them were killed. She was dangerously ill.
AMY GOODMAN: British soldiers shot them?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Yes, and the IRA. She wasn’t expected to live, and subsequently died of her injuries. But that brought out people in the thousands with a very message: No to violence, yes to peace, yes to dialogue. We can solve our problems without violence and killing each other. And that was a very important message.
Liberian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, one of the 1,000 female peace activists gathered to mark the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, recalls her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. "We were constantly trying to imagine strategies that would be effective," Gbowee says. "The men in our society were really not taking a stance. … We decided to do a sex strike to kind of propel these silent men into action." Gbowee notes the idea for the strike came from a Muslim woman and was inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States. Gbowee shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with fellow Liberian Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemeni native Tawakkul Karman. She is the founder and president of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa based in Liberia.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Leymah Gbowee, you helped to end the Second Civil War in Liberia and jailed the president, Charles Taylor. Talk about how you accomplished this. Here, of the three of you, you most recently won the Nobel Prize, in 2011. What did you do in Liberia?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, one of the things that we were able to accomplish in Liberia was bringing together groups that would not necessarily come together to build peace: Christian and Muslim. If you look at the world and the order of the world today, there is a lot of religious extremism and fundamentalism. We had those subtle kinds of issues in Liberia at the time, because whilst all of the different warring factions were from the different ethnic groups, where there were undertones, religious undertones, and we knew that if we had to build peace, we needed to bring not just the women together, but women from diverse background. We have 16 ethnic groups, and with the two major religious groups in Liberia, Christian and Muslims. So we were able to bring those women together to work together.
And I would say one of the strategies we used was the whole strategy of reconceptualizing religious spaces. A lot of the times, people use religion as a means of disempowering women. And if you go into the Qur’anic text and even in the Bible, you’ll find there were some great women. So we use the examples of those very great women to talk about how they helped to change their time. As a Christian and working with Christian women, we used Deborah, Esther. They were engaged in political issues in biblical times. And once the narrative of those women had been kind of reconceptualized, the women were able to resonate with it and were able to bring them together, but also not just bringing the groups together, but to protest nonviolently. Fourteen years of violent uprising. We started with two groups, the government and the warring faction, the rebel group. By 2003, we had gone through almost 12 or 13 different armed groups. And so, everyone’s response to the war was bringing in more violence or bringing in more guns. And we realized that if there were changes that should happen in Liberia, it had to be nonviolent. So we protested. We did sit-ins. We were just like invading spaces that women would not necessarily be in.
AMY GOODMAN: How did Charles Taylor, the president, respond to you?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, initially, when we started, we had done an invitation to get him to come and listen to us. And people said, "Well, if you send one invitation, he’s going to say he didn’t get it." And I remember us doing six invitations—one to him directly to his office, one through his religious council, one through his wife, one through the speaker of Parliament, one through the president of the Senate, and one through, I think, his national security person. So six letters of invitation for one event. There was no way that he could have said he didn’t receive the letters, because we had multiple people telling us they hand-delivered it. Of course he didn’t show up, because he didn’t know how to respond to us.
We sat, and we just decided we’re going to protest and demand three things: immediate unconditional ceasefire, dialogue and the intervention—international intervention force. Those were the three things that Taylor has specifically and explicitly said to the international community at the time he wasn’t going to do. Liberia was a sovereign nation, and he was not going to allow foreign troops on the ground. He was a legitimate president, and he wasn’t going to sit with illegitimate groups, and that talking with them was just—and that he would fight until the last soldier died. And so, going to him with the things that he was defying the world with, and saying, "We will protest until you give us," and so it’s more or less you’re defying the world, and we are defying you, that we will continue to invade your space until you give it to us. So, those—and finally, he had to give in. And finally, he had to say, "OK, I’ll go to the peace table." But then, going to the peace table did not end our protests. We continued until the pressure from us, the pressure from other African leaders and the rest of the world forced his arms to resign at the end of the day, so...
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, I want to ask you about the sex strikes that you engaged in in Liberia that made an enormous difference. We are joined right now by Leymah Gbowee—she is the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner; Mairead Maguire, who won the prize in 1976; and you will also be hearing from Jody Williams, who won in 1997. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’re broadcasting live from The Hague, from the World Forum of The Hague. It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting live from The Hague, from the World Forum at The Hague in The Netherlands. It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. One hundred years ago, a thousand women, in the midst of World War I, gathered here. A thousand years later, they have—rather, 100 years later, they have gathered again, calling for peace in very violent times. Among those who are here are four Nobel Peace Prize winners. Later in the week, we will speak to Dr. Shirin Ebadi of Iran. Right now we’re joined by the three other Nobel laureates. Tawakkul Karman was supposed to come from Yemen; she wasn’t able to, given the strife there. But we are joined by Mairead Maguire, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, by Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, and by Leymah Gbowee, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
So, we’re at The Hague, Leymah, and here is where Charles Taylor was tried, the first head of state in the world to be tried before an international court modeled on the Nuremberg trials, and got 50 years, not for atrocities committed in your country, Liberia, where he was head of state, but in Sierra Leone. Fifty years, he was sentenced to. He’s in prison now in London. But I want to go back to this issue of the sex strikes, one of the strategies you used to bring in end to war in Liberia.
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, when we started, I must say, we weren’t as sophisticated as the Dr. Kings and the Mandelas of the world. We were few women. A few of us had read some of the stories of these great men, and women—Rosa Parks and other people, women who had done great work, including the celebration that we find ourselves in in The Hague. But we were constantly thinking on our feet, constantly trying to imagine strategies that will be effective. When we started our protest, we barely got the media’s attention, not local media and definitely not the international media. Once we put out there, and it was a real strategy that—we felt like the men in our society were really not taking a stand. They were either fighters or they were very silent and accepting all of the violence that was being thrown at us as a nation. So we decided we’ll do this sex strike to kind of propel the silent men into action. So if you had a beer buddy who was a warlord, you needed to encourage him to lay down his arms. And the way we were trying to do that was to pressurize the partners that we had, husbands and partners who were also sometimes silent in the entire scheme of the war.
AMY GOODMAN: Who came up with this idea?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: A Muslim woman, my colleague, well, very good friend of mine, Asatu Bah Kenneth. She’s like, "We’re going to do a sex strike." And it was like, "Whoa!" for me, because usually the stereotypes we have about Muslim women is that they are quiet, obedient, and that they do not have those kinds of, you know, mind. But she was the one who came up with the idea.
And once we put it out there, it became a huge issue, first not in our—in our community, it wasn’t because sex is exotic, even though it is, but people wanted to know who were these women to even dare their husbands or the men, who are supposed to be in power, to say they won’t give sex because of the war. The international media wanted to know: How can you refuse sex, when rape is the order of the day in your culture, in your society? So, all of these lingering questions made it a very good strategy for talking about, because every time we went to do press and they wanted to know about this sex strike, we had to go about every other reason why we were doing it before this, so it became a very good media strategy for the work that we were doing at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, how did the war end?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, when we had pressured the government, Taylor, for the first time when we met him, over 2,000 women turned out on that day. And it was one of really those amazing days where you have dictator who would say, "You can come and see me," and it’s probably a test, because people were afraid of this man, afraid of the huge amount of guns that were in the town. And we get there, but the women, they’re standing somewhere else, and get to his palace, and they say, "We have instruction that if you’re less than 20, you shouldn’t come in," because they had underestimated us. They thought women would not show up, because we were going to see Taylor. So my question to the guards were: "If we are more than 20?" And he was like, "You can come." So, standing there, one phone call formed a line and just a sea of white coming down the hill. And it was like, these women are really serious. And then, all of a sudden, we get a call from in his office that he’s not feeling well and that he will see only 10 of us. And I was really furious. I said, "No, if he can’t come to see all of us, we will leave." And his guards were like, "Who is this woman, who is just really too militant for her own good?"
Finally, he agreed to come out to see all of us. We challenged him. He offered us seats. We refused to sit. We sat on the floor. "Given the rationale that your war has taken all of our furniture," said we, "why should we sit in a chair when we come to see you?" So, afterwards, he said, "Well, if any group of people can get me to commit to going to do peace, it’s the women. And I’m promising you that I will go to the peace table." For us, that was the challenge. We will keep the pressure on in country, but we also have to go find the warlords in the bushes, give them a position statement, then go to the peace talks and be present. And so, we were there keeping the pressure up for many months. And one day we got tired, and we seized the entire hall, locked the men in and said they would not come out until we had a peace agreement signed. We were going to almost a third month of a peace process that should have lasted three weeks. After we did our locking in of the men and giving our own position to them that this is what we want, two weeks later we got a peace agreement signed. But signing the agreement was good. We went back. Women decided just to follow through the entire process.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Leymah Gbowee, how does it feel today for you to be here at The Hague, where President Charles Taylor was tried, now in prison for 50 years—he’s imprisoned in Britain, just lost his latest appeal—and your co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, one of the things that I—when I look at the life and legacy of President Taylor, it tells a lot about ordinary people and their ability to forgive. When Liberians elected Taylor, it wasn’t because they were so afraid of him. They wanted to give him the opportunity to redeem himself. Instead of pursuing a policy of reconciliatory democracy, he decided to rule instead of leading, came to The Hague, was tried, found guilty.
There are two things. I was happy because the people of Sierra Leone—their war in Sierra Leone, just like the war in Liberia, wars in everywhere, was horrifying, horrific on the lives of women and children, and that someone, finally, some big guy, was answering to the rest of the world. It just—Taylor was the example for the world that we will no longer sit and allow people to come and treat their citizens or their next-door neighbors as if they were people on their plantation. So, this is—even if other leaders are not paying or pretend not to be paying attention, some of the leaders that we have today that are choosing the path of gangster ruling, they’re worried, because if it could happen to a Charles Taylor, it could happen to us, too. So I was happy that justice, in that form, was served.
My sadness on that verdict is that when I was growing up, we constantly saw the scale of justice—at our Ministry of Justice in Liberia, in the Temple of Justice, they had this big scale, where it was balanced. And they had this thing: "Let justice be done to all men." In my mind and during my entire socialization, I understand justice to be balanced. Taylor’s trial, his conviction is well and good, but I feel like the scale was tilted in his favor. Those who were amputated in Sierra Leone, who is giving them food? He’s in a prison in the U.K., and he has the luxury of three meals a day, a warm bed during winter, a cool bed during summer. Some of these people have two arms or both arms hacked. Who is providing meals for them? Who is taking care of their children? Taylor, I feel, for that scale to be balanced, all of his loots—or part of his loot should be given to Liberia, and the rest of it given to the victims of the Sierra Leonean war. Then the scale will be balanced. That’s my take.
AMY GOODMAN: Leymah Gbowee, I was walking down 125th Street, Harlem, the other day, and I was passing the Apollo Theater, and your name was up in lights, coming to the Apollo on June 12th, I think they said.
In 1997 Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In 2013 she helped launch the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. "Who is accountable? Is it the man who programmed it? Is it Lockheed Martin, who built it?" Williams asks in an interview at The Hague, where she has joined 1,000 female peace activists gathered to mark the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Williams notes how some "spider-like" robots that spray tear gas are now used for crowd control, but could be stopped before they become widespread. She recalls how she was previously able to "force the governments of the world to come together and discuss [landmines]. They thought they would fly under the radar … A small group of people can and do change the world."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: But we’re here right now at The Hague, where women have gathered, about a thousand women from around the world. The Africa contingent here is large. A hundred years ago, there weren’t women from Africa as they were protesting World War I. So, about a thousand women are here. And among those are these women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. They had a gathering this weekend, not far from here, of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Jody Williams, you’re the chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. What is the idea of this, why all you Nobel laureates, female Nobel laureates, have come?
JODY WILLIAMS: Why did we form the initiative? We recognized very quickly—it was an idea, actually, of Shirin Ebadi—that, you know, in the now 114-year history of the peace prize, after all of these years, we actually had like a handful of women alive who could, you know, maybe do something different. We—
AMY GOODMAN: There have been 16 women Nobel Peace Prize winners, something like that?
JODY WILLIAMS: There are 16. Now 16, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Nine now are—
JODY WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. But we thought that we would use whatever prestige and influence and power we have by virtue of the prize to shine the spotlight on women around the world who are working for sustainable peace with justice and equality, which is a very different vision from just peace as the absence of armed conflict. And for me, personally—and I am sure for my Nobel sisters—I became joyous at having the peace prize, when we came together and recognized that we could use it, you know, to uplift the women who always carry the weight of conflict as men are out conducting it.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a shirt that says "unarmed civilian."
JODY WILLIAMS: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about it.
JODY WILLIAMS: I think its origin was around the Ferguson murder in the United States, the black man murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Brown, yes.
JODY WILLIAMS: Yeah. And that was the genesis. But I was at an international conference on humanitarian disarmament, which grew out of our Campaign to Ban Landmines, and I was given a gift. And this was the gift. And humanitarian disarmament is a whole different way of looking at getting rid of weapons, that it’s not just the military and the politicians can decide what should and shouldn’t be used, it’s that they have to actually follow the laws of war, which they don’t like, really, and look at weapons and look at the humanitarian impact, meaning how many people are you killing with these weapons over time, especially, compared to this so-called military game. And so, it was all of those things together.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk strategy for a minute, Jody.
JODY WILLIAMS: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1997, you won the Nobel Peace Prize for your work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ICBL. Talk about how you started, how you formed this global fight against landmines, and now, almost 20 years later, you’re taking on what you call killer robots. Take us on that trajectory.
JODY WILLIAMS: Sure. To me, it was very logical. First of all, I was hired by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, who had seen the carnage of landmines during Vietnam, and a sister organization in Germany. And they asked if I could try to put together a political coalition of nongovernmental organizations to put pressure on governments to ban anti-personnel landmines. So we started out with the two and staff of one—me—and we called it the International Campaign, because it was Germany and the U.S. But logic said to me, go to the organizations that in one way or another have, you know, something to do with landmines. Human Rights Watch had written the first reports on the humanitarian impact of landmines over time, compared to their use. Physicians for Human Rights had been involved in those reports, as well. Handicap International from France, that was doing massive amounts of work with amputees and prosthetics, not
AMY GOODMAN: Where were most of the landmines?
JODY WILLIAMS: In the world? Oh, God, Africa was the most mined continent. There were some in Central America, some in South America. But—
AMY GOODMAN: Many in Vietnam, in Asia?
JODY WILLIAMS: Many in Vietnam and Asia, Cambodia. Angola was a horrible one, Bosnia. I mean, anywhere that conflict—internal conflict, in particular, is where those weapons were used. They’re cheap. They’re easy to use. You plant them in the ground, you walk away, you don’t care who they kill.
But our strategy was to, you know, include organizations from the producer states, from the states where people were being killed, and bring them all together with a common cause. Even though we were working on many other issues individually, the common goal was getting rid of the landmines, getting countries to donate resources for victim assistance and to get the mines out of the ground. And we found a core group of governments that shared the same goal, because as much as we could protest—and I think it’s similar for what Leymah’s example—we could protest 'til, you know, the cows come in, as we would say in Vermont, but if the governments don't write the treaty, if the governments and the rebels don’t negotiate the peace accords, nothing happens. So we found governments that cared, and we—you know, we changed how people thought about weapons. We really made it not seem like an esoteric thing in the U.N., you know, on the conference on disarmament. This is stuff that affects people in their blood, in their bones, every single—
AMY GOODMAN: And unbelievably powerful PSAs that you put out.
JODY WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. This affects everyone. And we all—
AMY GOODMAN: You blow up people, children in a playground.
JODY WILLIAMS: Mm-hmm, yeah. But we brought the bombs to the U.N. One day I was so frustrated with them negotiating. You know, they’d spend a whole day on the—you know, talking about changing the treaty, and they’d change a comma to a semicolon, call it work. And I was so furious. I said, "I want to pick up your negotiating table and put it in the biggest minefield in Cambodia and not let you men out"—it’s similar—"not show you the safe lane out until you negotiate a treaty banning these weapons."
It didn’t happen, so we had the most massive, creative—you know, everybody brought their own skills. We had people who came very shortly with a simulated minefield, and we put it in front of the door to the negotiating room so they had to walk through it. We had landmine survivors give them one million signatures from people around the world calling for a ban. We had a clock on the wall counting the number of victims as they droned away at negotiations that did nothing. And it’s all that refusal, except you and your diplomats who, in Geneva, looking at the beautiful Alps over the beautiful lake and pretending that your conversation means something
AMY GOODMAN: So when did the treaty get signed?
JODY WILLIAMS: It was in 1997.
AMY GOODMAN: A few months before you won the prize, you were awarded the prize.
JODY WILLIAMS: Yes, yes. But—
AMY GOODMAN: So did you feel like on that day you had accomplished a tremendous amount, and it was done, you could move on?
JODY WILLIAMS: No. Just like Leymah was talking about earlier, that was just the beginning. You know, but words on paper, terrific, especially if you’re a writer. But a treaty, a law, a U.N. resolution non-implemented is fundamentally irrelevant. And I think the governments were cheering that the negotiations were done. We had the treaty. They thought we’d call victory and go home. Instead, we had part of our campaign planning out a strategy for the next year, saying, OK, this is what this—you know, this requirement of the treaty requires you to do this and this and this and this. And we wrote out a strategy for what this campaign was committed to doing to make sure this thing was implemented. And we handed it out as the negotiations were ending. So they had no doubt that we were in it for the long haul. And I think that’s one thing that real, you know, hardcore activists understands. It’s not like, oh, for six months we’re going to do a new campaign to make poverty history or any of the things that are, you know, a flash in the pan. You have to stay committed to the goal.
AMY GOODMAN: So take that to killer robots. Half the people who are listening right now are not even going to know what you’re talking about.
JODY WILLIAMS: Immediately, you think drones, right? A drone is not a killer robot, even though they’re—can challenge your conception of ethical and moral, just war, if such a thing exists—I don’t happen to think so; however, the drone flies semi-autonomously. You know, it can go for thousands of miles by itself. But there’s still a human being somewhere on the drone base looking at a computer. It looks at—the he or she looks at you, and they go, "Hmm, Amy Goodman, she’s not an appropriate messenger in the media. She doesn’t talk about war as a glorious thing. She’s therefore the enemy." Pow! And a human being has to push the buttons to release the Hellfire missiles to blast you into eternity.
They are making weapons now that will take that human being out of the system. Imagine a drone that has now been programmed so that once it takes off, that drone, by itself, flies around, decides that this whole room is a target and blows it up, all by itself. Who is accountable? Who is accountable? Is it the man who programmed it? Is it Lockheed Martin, who built it? You certainly can’t bring the drone to trial. And to make us even more concerned, they are starting to use those weapons for crowd control. I recently saw a picture of a medium-size, spider-like drone, and it has been equipped with tear gas for crowd control.
AMY GOODMAN: Walking on the ground?
JODY WILLIAMS: No, flying, drone, fly. So we have launched a campaign to stop that. You know, and the U.S., of course, is in the lead of making them and thinks that we should keep the door open to them. We don’t—you know, there’s nothing wrong with drones, they say. There’s a human involved in real-time killing.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you also talking about robots that actually walk and kill?
JODY WILLIAMS: On the air—in the air, on the land and in the sea, yeah, absolutely, and swarms. Swarms. They have a vision of swarms of killer robot planes—we won’t call them drones, to be—swarms that can attack the opposition.
AMY GOODMAN: And who’s controlling them? For our radio audience, you’re—
JODY WILLIAMS: Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t lift my arms to the radio. Sorry, radio. It would be, you know, the commander who decided to use the swarm and push the buttons to release the swarm.
AMY GOODMAN: To begin with, but not now, once it’s flying.
JODY WILLIAMS: Not once it’s flying. They don’t want men in the middle, if you will.
AMY GOODMAN: So what are you doing about this?
JODY WILLIAMS: We launched a campaign in April of 2013 in London with our friendly killer robot, who we brought in front of Parliament. And within nine months, we were able to force the governments of the world to come together in Geneva and start discussing these weapons. And they thought they would fly under the radar and they would be out there before we knew what hit us. A small group of people can and do change the world.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion with three Nobel winners, three Nobel Peace Prize winners: Jody Williams, Leymah Gbowee and Mairead Maguire. This is Democracy Now! We’re broadcasting live from the World Forum at The Hague in The Netherlands. Stay with us.
As we broadcast from the World Forum at The Hague, a statue has just been dedicated to Dutch suffragist Dr. Aletta Jacobs, who 100 years ago organized an extraordinary meeting known as the International Congress of Women that took place as World War I raged across the globe. We are joined by three women who have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are gathered to mark the anniversary and discuss how to build peace in the future. Mairead Maguire was awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her actions to help end the deep ethnic and political conflict in her native Northern Ireland. Leymah Gbowee received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. And Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Williams notes President Barack Obama has authorized more drone strikes during his first three months in office than President Bush did during his entire administration.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting live from The Hague, from the World Forum at The Hague. Actually, right nearby is the Peace Palace, and this past week the second female statue was dedicated. It was dedicated to Dr. Aletta [Jacobs], who was one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, called that session 100 years ago where a thousand women came in the midst of World War I, 1915, to say no to war. Now we’re joined by three Nobel Peace laureates. Jody Williams won it in 1997 for her campaign against landmines. Leymah Gbowee is with us from Liberia. She won in 2011. She was fighting the Liberian Civil War nonviolently, organizing throughout Liberia. And Mairead Maguire is with us. She won in 1976, along with Betty Williams, in Northern Ireland as they fought against the violence there.
Now, none of your activism has stopped. You didn’t go out, you laureates, on your laurels. Mairead Maguire, I remember visiting Phil Berrigan in jail. You were the next person to visit him. I left. You came in. But you didn’t leave. I think you were arrested on the spot. Why did you refuse to leave at that time? Phil Berrigan, the well-known Plowshares activist who, you know, based on the philosophy of turning swords into plowshares, had done yet another nonviolent action against nuclear weapons in the United States.
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Yeah, well, I’ve always been inspired by the American peace activists from when I was a very young woman, because I think that it took tremendous courage. And Phil Berrigan was one of my heroes. But I had also been to Iraq and met with the Iraqi government and people like that, and we knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq, and they were crying out for dialogue. And they hadn’t been approached by American diplomats to actually find the path of peace.
AMY GOODMAN: This is before the Iraq War, you were saying talk to them.
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Before the Iraq War, yes. So, what we were coming to America to say to the diplomats and to the government—and to walk with the American people—these problems can be solved without bombing each other, through dialogue, through negotiation. So I came then to America to be part of that process. But, you know, we can campaign against war, against militarism, but until we change our consciousness and our mindsets that we really have to stop killing each other, because we are technological giants, we have a great deal of knowledge—we know how to kill each other, and we can’t undo that knowledge. So what we have to do is really in our own minds decide that we are not going to kill each other.
AMY GOODMAN: You also went to Syria?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: We went to Syria, and we went to Syria twice. And we went into Syria with a delegation of 40 Iranian peace activists. And the whole message coming out of these countries is: Don’t invade us, don’t occupy us; we can solve our problems through dialogue, through negotiation. Again, it comes back to the thing, if you listen to the news, people would almost despair: "Oh, my god! The world is coming apart. What can we do?" But, you know, we have a wonderful world, and there’s a great deal happening. And the vast majority, 99 percent of people in the world, do not want to kill each other. They have never killed each other. They care for the fact that children are dying in all these countries. But tragically, we seem to be caught in this trajectory that our governments take us to war, and we don’t want to go to war.
AMY GOODMAN: Mairead Maguire—
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: We want to do it through peace.
AMY GOODMAN: You also were on one of the Gaza flotillas challenging the Israeli blockade against Gaza?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Yes, I was, because I passionately believe that there could be peace between Israel and Palestine, if you had the political will to sit down the political leaders and say, "There is a solution to this. Find it." Because going out and bombing women and, increasingly, children on the ground, it is horrific. It’s not acceptable. But I would challenge the American government, because I think the American government’s policies are totally wrong. Their approach of going out to militarism and war and bombing countries is uncivilized, illegal and absolutely dreadful in the 21st century. So I do believe that America has a moral and ethical responsibility to the world to listen, that the people in the world want peace. Everybody has a right to peace. They can do it through dialogue and through negotiation. And let’s give peace a chance.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there a chance? I mean, you have the Obama administration now. Under the Obama administration, more weapons have been sold in the world than under any previous administration. And the highest number, amount of the weapons have been sold to Saudi Arabia. Jody Williams, you’re from the U.S.
JODY WILLIAMS: Of course we can change the world. Sometimes, as Mairead says, when we look at that—when I look at my own country, I’ve been fighting the U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam, my first protest, 1970, University of Vermont. But change is possible. And because I believe, like Mairead, the majority of people of the world are sick to death of this, and we are starting to stand up and say no. We’re starting to challenge and not accept, you know, words out of one side of the face and the actions which are different. You know, I never thought, unfortunately—I didn’t drink the Obama Kool-Aid. That man fired or authorized more drone strikes in the first three months of his administration than George W. Bush did in eight years in office. We have to, as Americans—I agree with her—accept the responsibility that we have the most militaristic nation in the world, and take responsibility to stop it.
AMY GOODMAN: Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, you have also taken on the issue of Ebola. Talk about how you dealt with Ebola and what your government was doing.
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, the government was totally unresponsive to the needs of the people. I remember when we had the—
AMY GOODMAN: This is your sister Nobel laureate—
LEYMAH GBOWEE: You know, Amy, I’m not—
AMY GOODMAN: —President Johnson Sirleaf.
LEYMAH GBOWEE: —even going to allow you to end. I get so sick and tired when people say, "You won the prize along with President Sirleaf." First thing first, President Sirleaf is a politician, I’m an activist. No one expected that we’ll be having Sunday brunch together every day. We were bound to disagree on issues, because that’s what happens between politicians and activists. That’s one. Two, I did not win the prize because I’m a wimp. I won the prize because I’ve always stood up and spoke truth to power. So if speaking truth to power will cause me to disagree with Jody in this civilized world, I believe that if we disagree, we should be able to come back together to agree on a more cordial line. Having said that
AMY GOODMAN: Now, we only have a minute, so tell us this ingenious strategy in the communities.
LEYMAH GBOWEE: We decided—since our government was unresponsive, the death was going on, because we believe in community and the power of the people, my foundation decided to put money into the hands of community people to find their own strategy, find their own solution for the Ebola crisis. We did that through 150 local organizations, from prayer groups to soccer groups, to youth groups, to women’s groups, and 26 local radio stations. Today, the U.N. has said this is an effective strategy. And I like to claim it as setting a trend.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about the cinemas, the video clubs?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: One of the beautiful things that happens in community, when people understand what they need to do. We gave this group of women some money to think through. They went on YouTube, got some of the young people—we had nothing to do with it—downloaded some of the videos from past Ebola cases in East Africa, other parts of the world, and they made their own short documentary, went into their community, used the money that we had given them to hire a cinema, or we call it local video clubs. And once the hiring had been done, they asked the video clubs to show blockbuster movies.
AMY GOODMAN: Blockbuster movies, like the biggest—
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Blockbuster, like the biggest movie we have in our space and time—and told community people it was free to go and watch the movie. These clubs were filled with people. In the middle of the movie, they would do an intermission and put on a little clip about Ebola. And that’s how the community, that particular community of almost 20,000 inhabitants, were really able to see that this disease is real, and we need to start taking all the necessary action.
AMY GOODMAN: So, they’d stop the film in the middle, show the little documentary, then go back to the blockbuster?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Then go back to the film. And then people will leave, not talking about the film, but just talking about that short clip. And these women had put in hand-washing stations, all of the different things, so people then begin to start washing their hands and taking all the necessary precaution.
AMY GOODMAN: And what number are you at now of Ebola victims in Liberia?
LEYMAH GBOWEE: Well, we are at zero. And hopefully, in five or six days, we’re supposed to be counting down to Liberia being Ebola-free by the World Health Organization. And I think the success is not government. It’s not flying in the U.S. military. It’s community. Engage, engage, engage communities.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it at that. Five seconds for each of you to wrap up this, with you women of wisdom in this time of war. Mairead Maguire?
MAIREAD MAGUIRE: Well, you know, America is a great country. And Eleanor Roosevelt was one of
the contributors to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And you have a wonderful Constitution. But revive your Constitution, rededicate yourselves to international law, and be a peacemaker, not a warmaker.
AMY GOODMAN: Jody Williams? You have two seconds.
JODY WILLIAMS: Nothing about us without us: Women need to be involved in all aspects of peace and security.
AMY GOODMAN: Leymah Gbowee? Three seconds.
LEYMAH GBOWEE: In The Hague, do one good thing every day that everyone else is scared to do.
AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it at that. Leymah Gbowee and Mairead Maguire and Jody Williams, thanks so much.
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