In a year marking the 75^th anniversary of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions, and amid unprecedented challenges to International Humanitarian Law, the work of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is as important as it has ever been.

The Peace Prize jury selected the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement from a field of strong and worthy candidates, recognising the impact and great significance of the humanitarian network of 16 million volunteers and staff spanning more than 191 countries. The prize will be awarded for “saving lives and preventing the suffering of people affected by armed conflict, for its advocacy for peace, and for its commitment to International Humanitarian Law”.

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement was officially announced as the recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize at an event held at Sydney Town Hall on Thursday, 18 June during a ceremony attended by Sydney Peace Foundation patron and Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore and Australian Red Cross Chief Executive Officer Penny Harrison.  

In accepting the award on behalf of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement Ms Harrison thanked the Sydney Peace Foundation for recognising the Movement’s longstanding commitment to alleviating human suffering during times of conflict and advancing international humanitarian law.

“There are currently more than 100 armed conflicts globally creating unprecedented humanitarian needs. Through our Humanitarian Principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement navigates where others cannot, providing vital protection and support to those most in need, including those in the world’s most volatile and complex humanitarian landscapes,” she said.

President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Kate Forbes said the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement was humbled to accept the 2024 Sydney Peace Prize.

 “This award pays tribute to the dedication and bravery of our volunteers and staff who work tirelessly in the most challenging and dangerous environments, often risking their lives to help others. 

“It also acknowledges the courageous work of our National Societies, particularly during the ongoing global conflicts where tragically we have lost many of our people including 20 members of the Palestinian Red Crescent, four members of Magen David Adom and four members of the Sudanese Red Crescent since October of last year,” she said. 

Melanie Morrison, Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation said: “Wherever civilians are threatened by conflict, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is steadfast and courageous in its support for their rights and dignity even when facing increasing risk to their own safety and security. This year the Sydney Peace Prize particularly acknowledges the brave members of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society working in Gaza under dangerous conditions.”

City of Sydney Lord Mayor and Sydney Peace Foundation Patron Clover Moore said: “Red Cross/Crescent teams are working tirelessly, in shockingly difficult and dangerous circumstances, to save lives and reduce suffering.

“Working in conditions unknown in modern times, 20 Palestinian Red Crescent Society volunteers have been killed, giving their lives while working to provide a lifeline to two million Palestinians. As the crisis in Gaza continues to worsen, the Sydney Peace Prize serves to recognise their selfless, brave and heroic service and repeat calls for leaders to put an end to this unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe and deliver peace and justice for all.”

The Sydney Peace Prize will be formally awarded to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement later in the year, when Kate Forbes, the President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, will travel to Australia to attend the Sydney Peace Foundation’s annual lecture on 18 November at Sydney Town Hall. 

The Sydney Peace Foundation, supported by the University of Sydney and the City of Sydney, is now in its 26th year of promoting peace with justice.  Past laureates include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein, Chair of The Elders Mary Robinson, Professor Noam Chomsky and The Black Lives Matter and Me-Too Movements.  We have also had the privilege of honouring Nelson Mandela, among others, with our Human Rights Award.

MEDIA ENQUIRIES:

To arrange an interview with Australian Red Cross Interim CEO, Ms Penny Harrison, please contact Australian Red Cross Media by calling 1800 733 443.

Melanie Morrison, Director, Sydney Peace Foundation 

E: melanie.morrison@sydney.edu.au 

M: 0401 996 451 

University of Sydney media office

E: media.office@sydney.edu.au

M:  +61 2 8627 0246 (diverts to mobile)

Australian Red Cross Media

E: media@redcross.org.au 

Ph: 1800 733 443

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For 26 years, the Sydney Peace Foundation has recognized and applauded movements for peace and justice. At this time of heightened protest against war crimes committed in Israel and Palestine, we remain committed to the advancement of non-violent solutions to conflict and adherence to international human rights law.

As a foundation of the University of Sydney, the Sydney Peace Foundation acknowledges and welcomes the institution’s long-standing commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and the right of staff and students to assemble and protest peacefully and safely.

We support the call by students and University of Sydney staff for the university to cut its ties with the weapons industry. And, for a ban on weapons exports from our nation to Israel, including any arms parts.

We support, too, the call for the University of Sydney to ensure that it is not accepting funding from companies that profit from the violence in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel.

Universities have a role to play in the protection of freedom of speech, especially when such speech or protest calls for an end to oppression and mass murder. 

The Sydney Peace Foundation reiterates our call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and an end to the siege on Gaza. This latest assault is part of a decades-long crisis that can only be brought to a just outcome through dialogue and respect for international humanitarian law.

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At a time of mounting geopolitical conflicts, increasing poverty levels and the escalating impacts of climate change, it is women who bear the greatest burden.

The United Nations reminds us that more than 600 million women and girls currently live in war zones. We cannot ignore the dire and disproportionate toll of conflict on women and girls from Sudan to the Ukraine and Myanmar to Palestine – where UN Women estimates that two mothers have been killed by Israeli forces every hour in Gaza in the past five months.

It is widely acknowledged that the involvement of women in peace making processes contributes to a more sustainable, lasting peace – yet so often women do not get a seat at the negotiating table. Not only that, all forms of gender apartheid must be called out, underscored by the Sydney Peace Foundation’s 2023 peace prize recognition of the Woman Life Freedom movement and its stance against oppression of women in Iran and worldwide.

On this International Women’s Day, while conflict rages across the globe, we must recommit to peace with women’s voices at the centre. Let us come together to build a more equitable, just & inclusive world for all.

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The UN and other aid organisations have united to warn of “catastrophic consequences for the people of Gaza” if donor countries do not resume funding to UNRWA.

In the past four months, more than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza with over 65,000 injured and over 1.7 million Palestinians internally displaced. Over 152 UNRWA staff have been killed and 145 UNRWA facilities damaged by Israeli military strikes.

Australia paused funding following allegations that up to 12 of the agency’s 13,000 staff were involved in the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. UNRWA is conducting an investigation into the allegations and has stood down several employees who were alleged to have engaged in misconduct.

The Sydney Peace Foundation recognises UNRWA’s vital role in supporting Palestinians in desperate need as the only entity with the capacity to deliver humanitarian aid to more than two million people in the besieged territory. The Australian Government also recognised this role when it announced an additional $6 million in funding to UNRWA on 16 January, just two weeks ago.

Australia announced its freeze in funding to the UN agency on 27 January, immediately following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order that Israel abide by six provisional measures. Among these, the court ordered Israel to take all possible measures to prevent genocidal acts, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to take immediate and effective steps to ensure the provision of basic services and humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.

The Sydney Peace Foundation joins with others in calling for the Australian Government to ensure the historic ICJ ruling, focussing on serious breaches of international law under the Genocide Convention by the State of Israel, is respected and upheld.

The Sydney Peace Foundation acknowledges the conflict has been driven by extremists on both sides, but we are of the firm belief that ordinary Israeli and Palestinian peoples have the same dream: living in peace and security.

Any solution to this conflict starts with an immediate and sustainable ceasefire, the release of hostages held by Hamas and an end to the siege on Gaza.

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John Howard’s reflections on the war in Iraq have made news lately, with objections dismissed as anti-democratic. We need an inquiry into why Australia supported a disastrous and illegal invasion, writes Stuart Rees

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We make this statement in terms of our commitment to the needs of a common humanity, in particular regarding the suffering of citizens within Syria and regarding those who have become refugees.

In terms of the Syrian people’s legitimate demands for democratic reform, we encourage everyone to aim at celebrating those differences which would nurture a flourishing democracy. Those differences would include religious beliefs and loyalties, ethnic origin and culture. But they might also be differences in terms of traditions of hospitality, dress, food, music, great art and poetry.

We also encourage celebration of a common ground in terms of universal human rights, the sovereignty of a nation and responsibilities for the preservation of Syria’s unique heritage and for stewardship of the environment.

Our thoughts are dominated by a commitment to non violence, ‘ the law for Life’ as defined by Mahatma Gandhi. Such non violence includes not only a cease fire in the present conflict but also an end to the smuggling of arms inside and outside the country.

Non violence also means an end to authoritarianism of any kind, whether in dictatorship, hatred for minority groups or domestic violence. Only dialogue and commitment to non violence can start a process of peacebuilding and healing within Syria.

The plight of Syrian refugees must be high on the agenda of any peace proposals. Turkey’s welcoming and caring for refugees illustrates the commitment to a common humanity which prompts this statement. We urge affluent developed countries to consult and support Turkey and any other host countries for Syrian refugees as to the short term resources required to make the numerous tent cities livable.

As for the long term prospects for refugees, that depends on an end to the violence and persecution within Syria; and a commitment by all parties not only to peace but also to peace with justice?

December 6th, 2012

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Weasel words have invaded the world, with pernicious consequences. The purpose of weasel words (from the belief that weasels suck the yolk from bird’s eggs, leaving an empty shell) is to deprive a word or phrase of meaning and load it with deliberately misleading implications. Their use is well illustrated in Don Watson’s masterly Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language(2003), his Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Clichés, Cant and Management Jargon (2004) and the weaselwords.com.au website.

For daily samples, try the daily media; the strong of stomach might look up the ‘Mission Statement’ of their employer. Not even universities are immune from re-branding, hyper-marketing, managerialism, bureaucratese and other such forms of gobbledygook. It is hardly surprising that weasel words are proliferating in the marketing of war.

War and propaganda have always had a symbiotic relationship. A good slogan was itself a powerful weapon. One of the oldest is the Latin saying taken from an Ode by Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, usually translated as: ‘ It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.’ Used widely by the Roman Legions, and on standards during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), it was refurbished and heavily used in Britain during the First World War (1914-1918).

It had been inscribed on the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1913. So widely was it preached and propagated that Wilfred Owen, in his powerful ant-war poem, Dulce et Decorum Est,written just months before he was killed (one week before the war ended) in 1918, referred to it bitterly as ‘The Old Lie’.

A constant and striking component of war propaganda was ‘atrocity stories’, alleging abominable behaviour by opponents. During the First World War (also called the Great War), Britain excelled not only at patriotic and religious propaganda, but at the invention of atrocity stories, the most infamous being the story of the German Corpse Factory.

This war highlighted the truism: ‘In war, truth is the first casualty’. Often attributed to Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist who fought at the Battle of Marathon, and to various other sources, its first recorded use was by Arthur Ponsonby, in his Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War (1928). In reality, truth about war is rare, before, during and after.

In the twentieth century, the marketing of war expanded well beyond wars themselves to the political campaigns justifying the deliberate use of military violence against chosen enemies. The Nazis and Fascists made war central to their identity. The Cold War saw plenty of violent interventions, both overt and covert, around the world, invariably justified as defending core values.

Probably the most sophisticated and systematic recent war marketing campaign was that leading up to the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, well analysed by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, in their Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq(2003). Similarly, the role of war reporting, by correspondents specifically and the media in general, has been co-opted into the marketing strategy.

The Gulf War of 1991, as well as being the first war in history televised in real time from start to finish, also reached new heights for electronic deception and audience manipulation. With the Iraq War came the ’embedding’ of journalists and photographers with active units. As Lt. Col. Rick Long of the U.S. Marine Corps commented, ‘Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.’

A growing part of this ‘information warfare’, often waged primarily against domestic targets, is the careful naming of military operations. Towards the end of the First War, offensives on both sides were named from religious, medieval, and mythical sources. Occasional Second World War campaigns were given evocative names, such as Germany’s Operation Barbarossa and the Allied Operation Overlord, for publicity purposes. These contrasted with the code names meant to be kept secret or mislead, such as ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the two atomic bombs dropped in Japan.

After the war, according to Lieutenant Colonel Gregory C. Sieminski, in a short piece on The Art of Naming Operations (1995), the US War Department created a new category of unclassified operation names, known as ‘nicknames’, for ‘administrative, morale, and public information purposes’, in relation to atomic bomb testing. During both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, some American commanders invented aggressive and inspirational operation names, primarily for the purposes of boosting morale among their own troops.

Somewhere along this path, the decision was made that single-word names were code, meant to be kept secret, while double-barrelled adjective/noun combinations were for propaganda purposes. Starting in the 1970s, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) implemented naming guidelines and a computer software system called the ‘Code Word, Nickname, and Exercise System’, shortened to NICKA. In Sieminski’s view, calling the US invasion of Panama in 1989 ‘Operation Just Cause’ was ‘the first US combat operation since the Korean War whose nickname was designed to shape domestic and international perceptions about the mission it designated.’

Not everyone was impressed. A New York Times editorial called it ‘Operation High Hokum’, and an ‘overreach of sentiment’. Several years later one critic called this attempt to portray a ‘blatantly unjust invasion’ as a ‘morally righteous cause’ a case of ‘blatant propaganda’ and ‘an extremely cynical gambit’. Nonetheless, the marketing of war by the calculated nicknaming of operations has become standard American military and political operating procedure. In 2011 ‘Operation Odyssey Dawn’, the mission in Libya, set new standards in obfuscation.

Such marketing is not confined to America, and has a long history in some countries. In a very impressive study of 239 names of Israeli military operations (76) and weaponry (163) used between 1948 and 2007, Israeli lecturer on culture and communication, Dalia Gavriely-Nuri concluded that ‘perhaps the main purpose of militarynaming’ is ‘the subtle inculcation ofpositive attitudes toward the use of violence’. Writing in the journal Armed Forces and Society in 2009, she analysed the phenomenon of ‘annihilative naming strategies’, whereby the use of military violence was sanitised, normalised and shielded from scrutiny.

In the naming of Israeli military operations, 38% used names and concepts from the Bible, and 27% used names and concepts from nature. Using names from the Bible, which most Israelis study for at least ten years, implied that these operations continued Biblical leadership, promises and commands. Operation‘Homat Magen‘ (Defense Wall), for example, was the massive attack in West Bank cities in 2002. Many names from nature (such as Operation Snow, the 1982-5 invasion of Lebanon) framed the use of force as ‘a common, normal phenomenon, as if it were an integral part of the natural chain of events’. In general, these naming practices both tapped into and perpetuated a supportive Israeli ‘cultural ethos regarding the use of military violence.’ They also disavowed agency and responsibility by the Government and IDF.

Tis method of marketing war has become prominent in the West. Operation Desert Storm has become synonymous with the First Gulf War of 1991, while Operation Enduring Freedom (originally called Operation Infinite Justice, but changed for P.R. purposes) was the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The invasion of Iraq was nearly called Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), but became simply ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. In September 2010 the war in Iraq was renamed ‘Operation New Dawn’. Announcing the news the previous February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in brilliant Orwellian Newspeak:

Aligning the name change with the change of mission sends a strong signal that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended and our forces are operating under a new mission.

Even the word ‘mission’ reeks of self-justification and self-righteousness. But the fashion is ubiquitous, although the results aren’t always propitious. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was called Operation Allied Force (OAF). The Russian military campaign repelling Georgia from South Ossetia in 2008 was called ‘Operation Forcing Georgia to Peace’.

Closer to home is Exercise Talisman Sabre, the biennial joint Australia-United States military exercises carried out since 2005 in Northern Australia. The military claim there is no symbolic significance in the name; Australia provided the first word, the US provided the second. Obviously, however, since a talisman is ‘an object supposedly endowed with magic powers’ and a sabre is ‘a heavy cavalry sword with a one-edged, slightly curved blade’, the exercise name embodies the national military ethos of the participants.

The point of all these operational names is that they are marketing exercises. They are simply part of the armoury of weapons of mass deception deployed against the public. They imply that war and violence are normal, legitimate, necessary and praiseworthy, when in most cases none of these claims is true.

This article was first published on Opinion Online, 27th February 2012.

Dr Ken Macnab, BA (Hons) (UNE) D.Phil. (Sussex), retired in 2001 from the Department of History, University of Sydney, where for 36 years he taught courses ranging from broad Modern European history, through Imperialism, Nationalism and Racism and English Class and Culture to the histories of Crime and Punishment, Deviance and Violence.

His research interests include the history of warfare and peacemaking, and capital punishment and interpersonal conflict (such as duelling). He also concentrates on the nature and history of terrorism, and the implications of the post-September 11 “war on terrorism”.

He has been for some years President of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, where he also teaches a postgraduate unit on “Cultures of Violence” and supervises postgraduate research.

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