March-April 2001:
Pacifica Strife Spreads
WRI: Global Activism
Kurds Call for Freedom
Journey to a War Zone
7 Ways to Resist War Taxes
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‘Bribery!’ Says ‘Granny D’

Doris “Granny D” Haddock, who in 1999-2000 marched across the country for campaign reform (“No ‘Clean Money,’ No Peace,” NVA, May-June 2000), is at it again. This time she’s focusing on the place where the corruption comes to a boil—Washington itself.

Early in March, inviting U.S. voters to join her, she said, “At age 90, I ignored my arthritis, emphysema and bad back and trekked 3,200 miles across America to protest the system of billion-dollar bribery we refer to as campaign financing—bribery that stymies serious environmental, social justice, healthcare and other reforms.

“Beginning March 19, while Congress debates the McCain-Feingold campaign reform bill, I’m conducting a $441 million walk—the amount of soft money spent in the 2000 federal elections—around the U.S. Capitol. Citizens, come to Washington and walk with me!”

For more information, get in touch with the Alliance for Democracy, which is sponsoring her walk, at (202)232-8997; fax, (202)232-8340; e-mail, appledc@hotmail.com.

For Human Rights in Indonesia

The newly formed Indonesia Human Rights Network is working to involve a broad cross-section of people in the U.S. in a campaign to support the archipelago’s pro-democracy movement and oppose U.S. complicity with Indonesian military repression. The new network made its first public appearance at a conference held in Washington, DC, February 23-25.

An important initial focus will be maintaining the current suspension of U.S. military ties with Indonesia. “Before there can be any resumption of military ties between Washington and Jakarta, the Indonesian armed forces must undergo significant reform. The U.S. government should accept nothing short of civilian control of the military as well as human rights trials conducted under international standards of justice as preconditions for any re-engagement with the Indonesian military,” said IHRN co-chair Agatha Schmaedick.

IHRN’s formation is especially timely as political and ethnic unrest continue to escalate in Indonesia. The new U.S. administration has yet to fully articulate its policy, but some officials are believed to be advocating renewed support for the Indonesian military, elements of which are deeply involved in much of the violence across the archipelago. The suspension of military ties was first put in place after Indonesian troops and their militia proxies devastated East Timor following its overwhelming vote for independence in late 1999. Current law bans much of this assistance until Indonesia has met conditions pertaining to East Timor and Indonesia.

West Papuan journalist Octovianus Mote, who spoke at the conference, called on the Indonesian military and government to “respect international law in their actions.” He added, “The U.S. government should work to guarantee the safety of, and assistance to, the nearly one million refugees and displaced persons who have fled violence across the archipelago.”

The sister of slain human rights lawyer Jafar Siddiq Hamzah dedicated the conference to her brother’s memory. Jafar, a permanent U.S. resident, was kidnaped and murdered in Indonesia in August 2000. He was working to end human rights abuses in his native Aceh and throughout Indonesia.

For more information, contact IHRN at ihrn@etan.org or www.indonesia network.org.

Sam Day, Peace Activist

Longtime reporter, editor and antinuclear activist Samuel H. Day Jr. died January 26 of a stroke in Madison, WI. He was 74. Day’s exposures of governmental wrong-doing brought him many journalism awards—and months of imprisonment.

Day began his career in 1949 as a copy boy at the Washington (DC) Evening Star. He went on to become an Associated Press writer and then a reporter and editor in Idaho. In the mid-1970s, he became the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; his tenure at the Bulletin shaped his later career as a writer and activist focusing on the need for greater public awareness of nuclear dangers.

In 1978, he became Managing Editor of the Madison, WI-based monthly, The Progressive. A year later, the U.S. Department of Energy sued The Progressive to prevent publication of an article about secrecy in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Day was one of the defendants, along with with editor Erwin Knoll, free-lance writer Howard Morland and the magazine itself, in what became a historic First Amendment case.

The Department of Energy secured a federal court injunction based on its claim that Morland’s article, “The H-Bomb Secret,” contained classified information restricted by the Atomic Energy Act. The magazine insisted that all the information came from public sources. After six months the government dropped the case, and the article was published intact.

In 1980 he left The Progressive’s staff to work with the American Friends Service Committee and the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation organizing resistance to U.S. nuclear weapons production. He also continued to write for The Progressive and other publications.

In 1982, Day reported in The Progressive that South Africa had secretly built a small quantity of atomic weapons as a bulwark to protect apartheid. Eleven years later, on the eve of Democratic elections in that country, his “scoop” was confirmed by the South African government.

Through the 1980s, as a director of the Wisconsin-based antinuclear group Nukewatch, he organized nationally to raise the visibility of the transportation and deployment of nuclear weapons. One Nukewatch program, the “H-Bomb Truck Watch,” enabled anti-nuclear activists to track and follow the unmarked convoys that transport nuclear warheads on the nation’s highways; another targeted the 1,000 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles in unmarked underground launch sites scattered over the Middle West and Great Plains, each capable of raining nuclear destruction around the world. Volunteers mapped the missile fields and organized vigils and demonstrations at the fences of the underground missile silos.

As an outgrowth of the missile silo campaign, Day and others occasionally risked arrest by entering the silo enclosures and standing on the concrete silo lids in symbolic opposition to the launching of weapons of mass destruction. In 1988 Day joined 13 other Midwesterners in the simultaneous occupation of ten missile launch sites in Missouri. For his part in the “Missouri Peace Planting” he served six months in federal prisons. He was imprisoned again for four months in 1991 for entering the Fort McCoy army base in Wisconsin to distribute war crimes literature to the troops the day after the start of the U.S. bombing of the Persian Gulf. In 1993, he was jailed for six weeks for pulling up stakes at the construction site of an Air Force communications tower near Medford, WI.

Day suffered a series of strokes in prison that left him partially blind and unable to read or drive. But he remained an activist with the help of his family and friends.

In 1992, Day helped form—and then acted as national coordinator for—the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu. (Vanunu is a former Israeli nuclear technician serving 18 years in solitary confinement for telling a British newspaper about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.) In 1994 Day was arrested seven times for taking part in sit-ins in support of Vanunu at Israeli diplomatic posts in the United States.

Day edited two books published by Nukewatch, Nuclear Heartland, 1988, detailing the Air Force’s missile silo program, and Prisoners On Purpose, 1989, incorporating the prison writings of anti-nuclear activists. His autobiography, Crossing the Line: From Editor to Activist to Inmate—a Writer’s Journey, was published by Fortkamp in 1990.

Day is survived by his wife of 43 years, Kathleen (née Hammond), a teacher and Democratic Party activist; a brother and sister; and three sons and six granddaughters. At a February 3 memorial service in Madison, Day’s family suggested that in lieu of flowers friends and admirers make contributions to The Progressive, Nukewatch or the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu.

—Nukewatch