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Letter from Cora Weiss, President of Hague Appeal for Peace, to Betty Reardon on her Sean MacBride Peace Prize
Dear Betty,
What an enormous pleasure to bestow the Sean MacBride Peace Prize on you today. Praise messages are pouring in. This must have been the right decision.
Sean MacBride was not only a leader of the International Peace Bureau, he was an Irish statesman and fierce human rights defender. He believed that the International Court of Justice should declare nuclear weapons illegal years before the famous 1995 decision which he didn’t live to see. For his work for disarmament he was named a Nobel Peace laureate.
What a perfect moment to congratulate this year’s Nobel peace laureate, President Barack Obama, who joins not only Sean Mac Bride, but also Jodie Williams for her team work in banning landmines; Wangari Maathai for her work in linking sustainable development to peace; Shirin Ebadi who understood that without all human rights for all people there could be no peace and many others.
President Obama has stood up to the military lobby and canceled expensive weapons systems; he has declared a vision for a future free of nuclear bombs; and as the world’s biggest arms supplier he has supported a treaty at the UN that will regulate the $55Billion arms trade. And he has declared his readiness to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The International Peace Bureau is also a Nobel laureate and should welcome President Obama to the club of peace laureates and challenge him to make good on his Prague promise for a nuclear weapon free future; make good on ending the status of sacred cow for the so called defense budget and make, in the words of the NY Times editorial, “future cuts that need to be far more ambitious”. (NYT editorial 11/4/09). And, as he has started to change the defense procurement culture, the Nobel Prize should help him restrain the rapid movement to the privatization of war. It would be a Nobel moment if he announced not one more soldier to kill or be killed in Afghanistan. It would be very Nobel if he ordered the closure of the helicopter base in Futenma, Okinawa where US military have a terrible record of raping and killing Japanese women and girls. Wouldn’t it also be a Nobel moment if the President instructed his Secretary of Education to promulgate peace education for all teacher training colleges, and all education systems?
So we congratulate the President and hope that the Nobel Peace Prize will provide the wind in the sails he will need to make all these things happen.
Just as, dear Betty, this little silver medal should serve not only as an award for being the mother of peace education, but also to encourage you not to stop, never give up, as long as you can continue to educate educators and keep planting the perennial seeds of peace education all over this world.
You knew Sean MacBride and succeeded in integrating his passion for disarmament with your passion for peace and women’s rights by bringing him to the 1st world women’s conference in Mexico in 1975 where he spoke following his becoming a Nobel Peace laureate. He gave his Nobel money to disarmament organizations which led to the development of disarmament education; and together with his commitment to human rights which led to his co-founding of Amnesty International, he epitomized the definition of peace education that you have made famous: Peace Education, for which we honor you, is teaching for and about human rights, disarmament, gender equality, non violence, social and economic justice, sustainable development, international law and traditional peace practices. And your methodology is based on participation, critical thinking, reflection and inquiry. There is much that can be said about your life’s dedication to peace, gender equality, justice, general and complete disarmament, education and exercise. I asked you what three things you would most like to have said about you.
1. You were the co founder of two initiatives that will continue to be significant parts of Peace Education: the International Institute of Peace Education, IIPE and the Global Campaign for Peace Education founded at the Hague Appeal for Peace conference in May 1999.
2. You asked that people understand that your professional life did not stem from Teachers College at Columbia University, where you were an unpaid Adjunct professor. You were in and out of TC since 1978, you had an office, taught students, hosted conferences, conspired, but you had to go out to earn a living and became a visiting professor at universities around the world and developed the conceptual formation of peace education as an academic field distinct from peace studies.
3. Lastly, you said, you survived and learned a lot along the way. You have in fact spent 60 years at peace learning. Somehow you found time to write books, so many books. My favorite is the three volume Time to Abolish War: Teaching toward a culture of peace which she worte with Alicia Cabezudo and the students at the Peace Education Center of Teachers College.
We sat together on the advisory board of the peace studies program at Manhattan College where I was amazed at the enormity/grandeur of the suggestions you made, why not, you said. And we are together among the 1000 women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize where you say, in your biography, that your mother was a feminist but didn’t know it, and a premature anti racist. And one of your teachers took you to meetings of the General Assembly when it was at Lake Success, encouraging internationalism. And we sat together at the table drafting what became Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, now international law, which calls for the full participation of women at all levels of governance and at all decision making tables, especially for peace agreements, and we’re still working for its full implementation. We share an admiration for Bertha von Suttner who is completely responsible for persuading Alfred Nobel to create a prize for peace with the profits from his invention of dynamite. You have carried on the legacy of Sean MacBride who embraced the idea of General and Complete Disarmament, believing that it would be the women’s peace movement who would “attend to the politics of achieving it.”
You have been properly recognized by UNESCO, as a pioneer and founder of peace education; and now the University of Toledo is home to your papers and life’s work for anyone to research and be inspired. The ultimate goal of peace education is the formation of responsible, committed, and caring citizens who carry the values of non violence, democracy, peace and justice into everyday life and acquire the skills to advocate for them.
I asked a few of your colleagues what they would say here. This one comes from South Africa:
“When gentleness, humility and determination come together, it is a formidable force with potent essence. That is you, Betty Reardon. In African parlance, you are a true ‘daughter of the soil’ who will walk that extra dozen miles for the cause of peace. You are the best that is in our hearts…
By your life, you have taught us that it is power based on love that is the supreme one…You have invoked in us the call to service in rain and sunshine. You have challenged doubts with actions that immediately steady any boat in our hearts that might be feeling the rocking of uncertainty.
Beloved Betty, the seeds you have sown so far and so wide will not perish. I am your daughter, your sister, and your spirit, even from across the many miles.
—Prof. Catherine Odora Hoppers, South African Research Chair in Development Education, University of South Africa
Betty, you have educated, inspired and activated teachers, students, and women to prevent violence, find alternatives to war, cultivate reconciliation and become engaged citizens and peacemakers. Your work on gender and conflict is unmatched and should be required reading by all political leaders. And may your numbers multiply in our effort to abolish war.
Thus it is totally appropriate that the International Peace Bureau, once led by Sean MacBride, co-founded by Bertha von Suttner, and engaged in a campaign to achieve, www, a world without war, bestow upon you, Professor Betty A. Reardon, the Sean MacBride Prize for Peace for 2009.
Congratulations.
Cora Weiss
President, Hague Appeal for Peace
Former President, International Peace Bureau
IPB Representative to the UN
Georgetown University, Washington, DC
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