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Seeds of Hope (shorted from Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares Group, [1] but also referred to as the Ploughshares Four [2] or the Warton Four [3] ) was a plowshares group of women who damaged a BAE Hawk warplane at the British Aerospace Warton Aerodrome site near Preston, England, in 1996. [4] The four were part of a larger group of 10 who that planned the action. [5] Their aim was to stop the aircraft being exported to the Indonesian military, for use in the illegally occupied country of East Timor. They left a video and booklet in the cockpit of the aircraft in order to explain their motivation. [6]
On the 29 January 1996, Andrea Needham, Joanna Wilson and Lotta Kronlid broke into BAE's Warton Aerodrome at Warton, and caused somewhere in the range of £1.4m, [7] £1.5m, [8] £1.7m, [9] £2m, [5] £2.4, [10] and £2.5m [8] worth of damage to Hawk tail number ZH955. Damage was focused on components and sections related to weapons and targeting. [11] A warplane that was to have been supplied, along with 23 others, to the New Order regime of Indonesia [6] as part of a £500 million deal. [12] In the tradition of plowshares actions, they stayed at the site intending to wait until they were found by security, however instead they had to call security using a phone in the hanger due to their presence remaining unnoticed. They were arrested for criminal damage and conspiracy to commit criminal damage. A week later, a fourth woman, Angie Zelter, was also arrested and charged with conspiracy after stating she planned to do the same. [13] The four spent six months on Remand in HMP Risley before coming to a seven day trial in Liverpool Crown Court in July 1996. [14] The action was the 56th ploughshares action and the third ever in Britain, [15] the group called it "Seeds of Hope - East Timor Ploughshares - Women Disarming for Life and Justice". [8]
Accused of causing, and conspiring to cause, criminal damage, with a maximum ten-year sentence, they plead not guilty arguing that what they did was not a crime but that they "were acting to prevent British Aerospace and the British Government from aiding and abetting genocide", [6] [16] referring to the one taking place in East Timor. They were found not guilty of criminal damage at Liverpool Crown Court, after a jury deemed their action was reasonable under the Genocide Act 1969. [17] This made it the first Ploughshares actions to result in a not guilty verdict. [18]
In recognition of the group's action they were award the Seán MacBride Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau in 1997. [19]
Angie Zelter was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 by Mairead Maguire a former Nobel winner and peace activist, for Zelter's (at the time) 30 years of peace activism. [20]
As well as being awarded the Order of Timor-Leste by the government of Timor-Leste in August 2019. [21]
In 1998 a 26 minute documentary called "Seeds of Hope" directed by Neil Goodwin was released including interview of women involved in the action. [22] [23]
Additionally two songs were written with the action and group as inspiration; "Four Strong Women" released in 1996 by Maurie Mulheron [24] and "With my Hammer" by Seize the Day and Shannon Smy. [25]
A book called "The Hammer Blow: How 10 Women Disarmed a Warplane" recounting the action was written by Andrea Needham and published by Peace News in 2016. [26]
In 1997 Angie Zelter went on to be one of the original six core members of the Trident Ploughshares. [27]
The 29 January 2017 attempt to disarm Typhoon fighter jets thought to be destined for the Royal Saudi Air Force and therefore to be used in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen [28] by Sam Walton and Methodist minister Dan Woodhouse was "a contination" of the Seeds of Hope action, with a direct parallel in the action, its goal and its reasoning, the pleading of not guilty at the trail and the actual use of one of the hammers used by a member of the Seeds of Hope group. [29]
José Manuel Ramos-Horta GCL GColIH is an East Timorese politician. He has been the president of East Timor since 2022, having previously also held the position from 20 May 2007 to 20 May 2012. Previously he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2006 and Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, for working "towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor".
Philip Francis Berrigan was an American peace activist and Catholic priest with the Josephites. He engaged in nonviolent, civil disobedience in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament and was often arrested.
The Gandhi Peace Award is an award and cash prize presented annually since 1960 by Promoting Enduring Peace to individuals for "contributions made in the promotion of international peace and good will." It is named in honor of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi but has no personal connection to Mohandas Gandhi or any member of his family.
Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons[1996] ICJ 3 is a landmark international law case, where the International Court of Justice gave an advisory opinion stating that while the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to international humanitarian law, it cannot be concluded whether or not such a threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful in extreme circumstances where the very survival of a state would be at stake. The Court held that there is no source of international law that explicitly authorises or prohibits the threat or use of nuclear weapons but such threat or use must be in conformity with the UN Charter and principles of international humanitarian law. The Court also concluded that there was a general obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament.
Trident Ploughshares is an activist anti-nuclear weapons group, founded in 1998 with the aim of "beating swords into ploughshares". This is specifically by attempting to disarm the UK Trident nuclear weapons system, in a non-violent manner. The original group consisted of six core activists, including Angie Zelter, founder of the non-violent Snowball Campaign.
The Plowshares movement is an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist movement that advocates active resistance to war. The group often practices a form of protest that involves the damaging of weapons and military property. The movement gained notoriety in the early 1980s when several members damaged nuclear warhead nose cones and were subsequently convicted. The name refers to the text of prophet Isaiah who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares.
Swords to ploughshares is a concept in which military weapons or technologies are converted for peaceful civilian applications.
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Ciaron O'Reilly is an Australian anti-war campaigner, peace protester, social justice campaigner and Catholic Worker, having been "engaged in ... protests, acts of civil disobedience and trials in England, Ireland, and his native Australia." He has also become one of the most visible and active practical and theoretical exponents of the ideas of Christian anarchism, arguing that this "'is not an attempt to synthesise two systems of thought' that are hopelessly incompatible, but rather 'a realisation that the premise of anarchism is inherent in Christianity and the message of the Gospels.'"
Warton Aerodrome is located in Warton village on the Fylde in Lancashire, England. The aerodrome is 6 NM west of Preston, Lancashire, UK.
Clare Grady is an American peace activist and a member of the Catholic Worker and the Plowshares movements. She advocated against use of cruise missiles for first-strike capability in the 1983 Griffiss Plowshares action. In the process of the protest, military equipment was damaged and splattered with blood. In 2003, she and three others made up The Saint Patrick's Day Four, who conducted a protest action at a military recruiting center in Lansing, New York against the impending Iraq War. She participated in the Kings Bay Plowshares action on April 4, 2018, which resulted in a conviction and sentence of one year and a day.
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Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman is a Yemeni Nobel Laureate, journalist, politician, and human rights activist. She leads the group "Women Journalists Without Chains," which she co-founded in 2005. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that was part of the Arab Spring uprisings. In 2011, she was reportedly called the "Iron Woman" and "Mother of the Revolution" by some Yemenis. She is a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize.
Stellan Vinthagen is a professor of sociology, a scholar-activist, and the Inaugural Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he directs the Resistance Studies Initiative. He is also Co-Leader of the Resistance Studies Group at University of Gothenburg and co-founder of the Resistance Studies Network, as well as Editor of the Journal of Resistance Studies, and a Council Member of War Resisters International (WRI), and academic advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). His research is focused on resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action, conflict transformation and social change. He has since 1980 been an educator, organizer and activist in several countries, and has participated in more than 30 nonviolent civil disobedience actions, for which he has served in total more than one year in prison.
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