Presentation given by Rafael de la Rubia at the launch of the “World March for Peace and Non-violence” at Punta de Vacas park, Mendoza, Argentina, 15.11.2008.

Friends. From this highly inspirational place, surrounded by tall mountains, from where the keys of “active non violence” and “universalist humanism” were given, we are launching the World March for Peace and Non-Violence.

During these last few weeks, we have presented the WM at the Humanist Forums of Europe in Milan and of Latin America in Buenos Aires . In a few weeks we will also do this in Nairobi, Kenya, where we will launch the March for the African continent. So far, these have been restricted actions. Today we begin a wider dissemination.

What has happened so far with the WM can be summarized in a few words. There have been two stages. In the first stage, almost one year long, we studied whether it was possible to carry out such an enterprise. There we decided that not only was it possible, but that it was also necessary and urgent to do it, given the indicators presented by world events.

In the second stage, of preparation, in which we are now, we decided to gather whatever was needed to carry the March forward and we began to make it known. Today, after just four months, we can do an initial and short evaluation.

I will speak about the initiatives that are arising from the people and the organizations that are joining this March.

They are initiatives which arise, in most cases, from the social base. Many of them have the profile of something rather new, innovative, out of the ordinary. With strong characteristics and a lot of imagination, they often carry a playful and festive tone....

I am just going to share a few “highlights”, since to mention it all would be too long.

There are many activities in educational centers: marches, living symbols of peace and non-violence, the introduction of the themes of Peace and especially of Non-violence as new academic subjects in the school curricula. In the province of Malaga, Spain, 800 schools will start working one year before the march and after the students want to join the passing of the WM through the capital city. In other schools, they are changing contents in order to study geography, fauna, flora, minerals and cultures of the countries the WM will pass through. In some universities, the creation of a post-graduate course with modules on Peace and Non-violence is at an advanced stage. In one country, from the Ministry of Education, they want to pass a decree for the whole state, so that on the day the march passes, all teaching activities will be developed around the themes of the WM.

Sports associations are joining: walkers, marathon runners, cyclists, along different routes and, in some cases, between different countries. There are cases of the highest representatives of those sports, winners of the Tour de France, famous football players, having endorsed the March. Football clubs have also joined, as is the case of San Lorenzo de Almagro in Argentina.

There will be many local marches: in Sardinia they will pass through all the towns of the island and, in Russia, they will walk through the cities where Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky lived and wrote.

Several mayors and municipalities have already joined. They are offering food, lodging and transportation for the WM, in some instances for hundreds and even thousands of people. We are working in several different ways with city authorities: some will declare the WM of interest to the city, others will organize marathons with the themes of Peace and Non-violence, yet others will name streets or parks after the WM when it passes by.

In several countries they will declare the WM of national interest. In Argentina, it seems the political decision to do this has already been made. The reception of presidents and prime ministers when the WM arrives are confirmed or to be confirmed.

We are receiving the support of many people: Nobel Prize Winners like Jose Saramago, Desmond Tutu, astronauts like Pedro Duque, scientists, intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Eduardo Galeano, members of parliament like Luisa Morgantini, vice-president of the European Parliament, highly recognized judges like Judge Guzman, who tried Pinochet, artists like Zubin Metha, Maximiliano Guerra, Ana Belen, Miguel Rios and Augusto Boal, who created the Theater of the Oppressed, designers like John Pasche, who worked for the Rolling Stones, or Antonio Fraguas “Forges”, the most famous creator of comics in Spain. We also have the support of Richard Stallman, father and promoter of the free software movement. These are just some of the more than 2000 supporters who are already on board.

We are working together with some 250 organizations all over the world. In some countries, Amnesty International, the Red Cross, Human rights associations, “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo”, “Mothers Against War”, the Organization for the Proscription of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean, the President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Several peasant organizations in Central American and India have shown interest in the WM and we have recently received an expression of support by a representative of the Polo Democrático de Colombia. We have received support from the International Committee of Civil Diplomats of Russia and also from the Russian association “Mir y Nie Nasila” – Peace and Non Violence -. We have also received support from the International Scientists Network for Civil Responsibility, representing about 200 organizations. We are working on a very interesting initiative arising from Mr. Kohanoff, an Engineer from the Argentine National Institute of Indust
rial Technology, to create a network of solidarity for the sharing of technology, within the framework of the WM.

We are also working on other support networks for the WM: Mayors, Parliamentarians and Universities.

Rappers, graffiti artists, classical musicians, ballet and theater associations are beginning to move. Monthly marches with marching bands are being organized, aiming at a big march with all the marching bands of the city. Russian skydivers want to make the symbol of peace at high altitude. Associations of fishermen want to cross the Strait of Gibraltar by boat. In Chile and other places they want to make an air formation with hundreds of small planes, to accompany the march. Also with hot air balloons.

We are planning to organize 3 mega-concerts: Prague, Dakar and Santiago de Chile where O’Higgins Park (capacity 80,000 people) has already been booked. We are working on a mega-project to have concerts in all the cities where the WM will pass with the theme of “Welcome to the World March”.

We are working on a documentary about the WM for cinemas, composed of shorts prepared in each country. There are film directors from several countries who are interested in this project.

The WM can help in places of conflict or with closed borders. There are examples in Algeria-Morocco, Israel-Palestine (where we are working on two simultaneous concerts), India-Pakistan, the two Koreas and Mexico-USA. We are also working to establish a connection from the Falkland Islands to continental Argentina.

The initial route of the WM was from New Zealand to Argentina but many new routes have been added. The total length in kilometers is much longer than the initial march. We have just confirmed a route in Southern and Eastern African, passing through Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, and South Africa. Another “impossible” initiative is almost confirmed: the Antarctica-Punta Arenas-Puerto Montt-Santiago de Chile route. In this symposium (Ethics and Knowledge), the possibility of the inclusion of Indonesia has arisen. We are working with pacifist and non-violent groups operating in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. It is our aspiration that the WM also passes through those countries.

In June, the WM was planned to pass through 40 countries. At that time, this already looked enormous. Today we are in over 90 counties.

On October 2, the International Day Of Non-Violence, one year before the beginning of the WM, events in some 100 cities in about 50 countries were celebrated.

To end this quick review, the base team, which will go through the whole route of the WM, is being configured. We already have over 50 volunteers from different countries and continents. We have to note the wide participation of young people who are giving another dimension, another dynamics and a great creativity to the WM.

All that I am telling you has happened in a little over four months.

Friends, this is a living march which is being built. And we still have 321 days to go before October 2, 2009.

But the point is that this march has already begun. We are feeling it here.

Both the making and the result of this World March depend on what each one of us does during this year. These individual actions, these coordinated actions, like little drops of water, join together, converging until becoming a huge river which without stopping advances slowly towards its destiny.

Whether this WM becomes something very important depends on us. Perhaps History will remember it as the time in which good people stood up and, as a way of rejecting a violent and inhuman system, travelled all over the world in a peaceful but nonetheless strong protest. The need is strong, the environment is receptive, conditions could not be better. People are looking for a signal. Meanwhile, this system is showing clear symptoms of weakness with the threat of a nuclear disaster looming over the horizon.

We have the opportunity to become a great social force. Not the force of imposition, not the force of the harsh, not the force of arrogance, not the force of intransigence, not the force of differentiation. Rather, the force of the gentle, the force of the coherent, the force of necessity, the force of inclusion, the force of complementation, the force of the convergent, the force of the profound.

This WM can become the non-violent answer that the human being gives for the first time at a worldwide level, a rejection of this violent, unfair and ruthless world, trying to open new horizons of peace and coexistence for all humanity.

This world march that we publicly launch today has, as its basic objective, to create consciousness that Peace is only way and that today it is necessary to accompany that Peace with the methodology of non-violence, so that we can finally enter a new stage and leave behind human pre-history.

The WM may activate a multiplicative and simultaneous phenomenon all over the world.

To create consciousness we need to publicize, to make our proposals known, the actions we will carry out, the support of public figures that we have, the huge number of initiatives and the many more that will come up along the way.

For that, we need to create our own mechanisms, our own news agencies, our own alternative networks, so that we can make known this huge number of actions and proposals that begin to unfold.

We invite all of you, those present here and those who are with us in virtual space, to a great challenge: that all of us together can reach the more than 6 billion people inhabiting out planet so that they know that the WM exists, and so that they can decide whether or not to join.

We will do our part and be back in this beautiful place by January 2, 2010.

To end, I would like to read an anonymous text:

... looking for food and shelter those first  inhabitants got into unwelcoming and unknown lands, where they fought against animals, the elements and the forces of nature. So it was through millennia. By the end of that great age, they ended up inhabiting all the land.

In another age, looking for richness, possessions and adventures, some people subjected other people. They massacred and enslaved them, taking their goods, their resources, their bodies and also their minds. And so they have been moving through the world until this day, planting subjection, hunger, misery, illness and pain, much pain.

But times of renewal are reaching us today. Times in which the human being will once again go through this planet Earth. Not to quench his hunger, nor to enslave the other, nor to steal from the other. Rather, to put out his hand recognizing the brother and the sister, to reconcile, to help, to build the basis of a new culture, of a new civilization, one that never before stood on this earth. To decisively build the universal human nation.

Long live the Worldwide March for Peace and Non-Violence.

Rafael de la Rubia

15.11.2008