case studies

The Bees are a Tzotzil Maya group living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. They are committted to nonviolent resistance and first organised in 1993 in response to the jailing of five community members falsely accused of murder. They held demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins; and since the villages are Christian, they prayed for the release of their friends. Within a year the detainees were freed.

On 1 January 1994 another group calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in armed protest against unjust economic policies and hundreds of years of exploitation. While the Bees agree in principle to the Zapatistas objectives, they do not support their use of weapons. The Bees' commitment to nonviolence has literally landed them in the crossfire between the Zapatistas, Mexican military and government-aligned paramilitary forces.

At first the paramilitary forces only targeted Zapatista communities. The Bees however quickly fell out of favour for their refusal to join or make monetary contributions to the paramilitaries. On 22 December 1997 the paramilitaries' harrassment of the Bees culminated in the massacre of 45 women, children and men who had been fasting and praying for peace in a small make-shift church at the refugee camp, Acteal.

An outpouring of support for the Bees from local, national and international groups put pressure on the authorities to investigate and make some arrests. The Bees contend though that many of the perpetrators and all of the intellectual authors of the crime remain free and the massacre has been an excuse to further militarise the region. In fact in January 1998, women Bees joined arms and stood their ground to block the army from establishing a military camp near one of their villages, X'oyep.

The tragic 1997 massacre has brought increased attention and solidarity for a small pacifist group that until then had only been reserved for the Zapatistas. Representatives of the Bees have been invited abroad to address United Nations and on speaking tours to countries stretching from Denmark to Thailand.

Bolstered by this show of solidarity the Bees have become bolder in actively denouncing the violence around them. One year at planting time, they marched onto a military base, planted corn and then sat down to pray for peace. Another year they erected a 'tent for Lent' outside a military base and invited passing soldiers to join them in praying for peace.

Similarly the Bees invite all of us to join them on the 22 of each month to fast, pray and work for peace and justice in all corners of the world.

Irena Sendler, a Catholic Polish social worker, went to work as a plumbing/sewer specialist in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Using this cover and with a network of 25 others (almost all social workers, and of whom 24 were women and one, a man) Irena smuggled children out of the ghetto. This network saved these children from eventual death in the Nazi concentration camps. Infants she carried out in her tool box, larger children she put in a burlap sack. She made the journey into the ghetto with a dog which she had trained to bark at the Nazi soldiers. The barking was an ingenious cover for the children's noise and increased the probability of the soliders just waving Irena through the check-point.

Irena kept a list of all the children she smuggled out in a glass jar, which she had buried in a friend's garden.

Irena and her network rescued 2,500 children before Irena was discovered. The Nazis tortured her, broke her leg and arm and she was scheduled for execution when the Polish resistance  bribed a guard and helped her to escape.

Irena's story was brought to light by a group of US students working on a history project. More about the story can be read here at Life in a Jar: the Irena Sendler Project.

Lysistrata, loosely translated to "she who disbands armies", is a Greek comedy, written in 411 BC, though the central anti-war message of the play has proven timeless.

The play was first performed in the 12th year of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and the title character, Lysistrata convinces the women on both warring sides to withhold sex from their husbands and to barricade the public building funding war in order to obstruct the conflict.

As a contemporary campaigning tool the play has been adapted to address current conflicts, such as the Lysistrata Project protesting the 2003 invasion of Iraq and a 2006 ‘sex strike’ on the part of girlfriends and wives of gang members in Pereira, Colombia to force their partners into putting down their weapons.