Pin your NVZs - Non Violent Zones of Trinidad and Tobago

I've been plotting the violent crimes in Trinidad and Tobago in red to see what complexion our country will take on if we were to pin the violent crimes and murders and crimes against children, and women. The resulting image is too depressing so I am asking citizens to instead join me and pin your spaces as Zones of Non Violence on this NVZ map  to declare your spaces Non Violent Zones. welcome the Peace initiative of the Inter-Religious Organisation and Ms Ela Gandhi, holder of an international peace award, grandaughter of founder of the Satya Graha movement, Mohandas Gandhi  to Trinidad and Tobago.

I share the Prayer for All of the Trinidad and Tobago National Commission for UNESCO for use and adoption by any individual or agency who wishes to do so, an organisation devoted to "Building Peace in the Minds of Men and Women and urge you to create centres of peace in your communities.

Creating  Centres for a Culture of Peace in Trinidad and Tobago

Statement, Chair, National Commission for UNESCO and

Trinidad and Tobago Representative on the UNESCO National Commission on creating a Culture of Peace in Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Kris Rampersad

May 5, 2014

I invite the national community to reflect on actions that will help promote and advance the cultivation of a culture of peace and non violence in Trinidad and Tobago as it works to help the society strengthen its peace-driven defence mechanisms to counteract what seems to be an escalating culture of violence among  men, women and children in our society.

As the country tries to come to grips with the most recent of brutal actions on our citizens with the murder of Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal, we draw attention to the UNESCO programme of action for Culture of Peace and Non-Violence, and invite individuals, groups and agencies to work with us to devise positive actions to cultivate values and practices of peace and non violence in various spheres of daily national life.  The action plan recognises that legal provisions are necessary to creating the right conditions and environment for the harmonious development of women, men and children towards building a culture of peace.

We believe more than ever in the relevance of the principles of a new humanism and soft diplomacy towards creating a culture of peace and non violence begins with, and in, our daily lives, as espoused by this action plan.

It states that: “that peace is more than the absence of war, but living together with our differences – of sex, race, language, religion or culture – while furthering universal respect for justice and human rights on which such coexistence depends.”

As such, we also draw attention to the UNESCO Constitution and Charter to which Trinidad and Tobago is a signatory, and the commitment made to advance universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms contained in Article 1,  based on which the National Commission is developing its own Charter for Peace.

We see these as mechanisms that can be used to sustain hope for the new humanism that focuses not just on prevention, mediation, reconciliation and law, but also more proactive promote  preventative actions to cultivating values and culture of peace and non violence in our everyday lives.

The United Nations has mandated UNESCO as its line agency to promote a culture of peace. It defines such a culture of peace as comprising values, attitudes and behaviours that promote “freedom, justice and democracy, all human rights, tolerance and solidarity, that reject violence and endeavours to prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes.”

As the line agency of the United Nations charged with building a culture of peace, UNESCO acts on the declaration that “since wars begin in the minds of men and women it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”.

We look forward to the strengthening of national “culture of peace” programmes and creation of spaces for peace within communities, home, schools and other social institutions.

Meanwhile, on behalf of the President, Minister of Education, Dr Tim Gopeesingh, Commissioners and the Secretariat of the National Commission for UNESCO, I extend condolences to the family and friends and the Trinidad and Tobago national community so deeply affected by the violence in our society in general, and the loss of Ms Seetahal in particular. The principles of law and justice to which Ms Seetahal devoted her life’s work are reflected in

We note that Ms Seetahal has added, not only in actions but also in words, considerably to the intellectual stock of knowledge and efforts at transforming agencies of the judiciary and the society in generalin the Commonwealth, among them in her work for promoting prison reform which speak to the environment of a new humanism that UNESCO driven by its Director General of UNESCO, Ms Irina Bokova has been promoting. Ms Seetahal’s publication of Law in the Commonwealth Caribbean has become one of the standard legal texts in international legal practice.

Dr Kris Rampersad

Chair, Trinidad and Tobago National Commission for UNESCO and Trinidad and Tobago Representative on the UNESCO Executive Board

Related Links: LiTTscapes at Greeenpeace: http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2014/05/littscapes-at-greenpeace.html

Murder She Wrote: Death Written in Stone in Dana Seetahal Assassination

Creating UNESCO Centres of Peace in Trinidad and Tobago

The Price of Independence:#DanaSeetahalAssassination

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The Madiba conscience - rest in peace NelsonMandela

FOR MY FRIEND  MICHAEL ALS...who embodied the MADIBA CONSCIENCE. You too RIP and thank you for the support, cheering me on and lending your spirit and courage in times of despondence 

One less conscience to the world has gone at a time when we need more men and women of conscience. May his thoughts and actions that swayed our consciousness to recognise our humanism live on. Rest in Peace Madiba. I had met Nelson Mandela at a peace rally in Hyde Park in London, a concert for his 90th birthday, a few years ago with my friend, a leader of a global civil society empowerment movement whose social conscience was nurtured in the bowels of the civil rights movement when he was growing up in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela, already a legend, the material of myth, in the flesh and so much humility and so much warmth that there was nothing overtly discernible, though much unfathomable, that suggested that this was a man who brought all the world to reexamine its conscience and its humanism. The dismantling of apathied was just one element of his impact; He swayed the world.
Today his conscience drives our global movement for social justice and transformation; the one that had us pulling the threads of global consciousness through the holiday mood burning the midnight oil on the eve of one Christmas eve to stir public opinion for the release of prisoners of conscience of Ethiopia, wrongfully imprisoned for working for social justice. We worked round the clock hoping to have them released so that they could spend Christmas with their families and not in a jail cell as they had for the previous three years; as Mandela himself had.
Sitting in a small island in the Caribbean, in Trinidad behind a phone and email, waking up friends in the global media and global civil society organisations and institutions, to stir their populations to move their governments to pressure the Ethiopian regime, posting on social networks and the sites of those who could move conscience into action .. the work goes on...
My friend, one of Mandela's proteges has not been able to keep himself out of jail not then in the aparthied struggle as a civil rights activist for oppressed people and not now for people threatened by all the economic and political and social injustices we see transferred into threats to the environment and livelihoods of people still living in poverty and squalor in the face of wastage of the world's wealth. In demanding social justice for those who do not have a voice, many regimes - corporations, governments, those who believe they hold the reigns of power - still try to snuff out the Madiba conscience in so many intrusive and inobstrusive ways - As I recounted experiences like these to a ministry seminar earlier this year- invited to talk about social justice - and identifying how misguided, illconceived and ill advised some of our bureaucratic focus were for, presumably, advancing equity and social justice (coincidentally it was Nelson Mandela (birth)Day), I was virtually hustled away from the podium and the room by the organisers.... the quest for social justice can be muted but it would not die.

Aparthied as a political construct in South Africa has been dismantled but not demolished. It is still vibrant in the class divisions and in many of the social practices if not systems - in the now class- based disparities evident in the slums of Johannesburg and Delhi and the Beetham and Marabella too...
Mandela's was a quest for personal peace through finding freedom for his people that became a part of the global movement for world peace too. I had found some of that peace and awe of the freedom fighters spawned on South African soil at the hero's park in Cape Town.... awe, peace and reverence that contrasted with the place I came from - where the sense of reverence has been ridiculed to oblivion by centuries of conditioning of inferiority and dependence and unfreedom ...and where, with yet unfree consciousness, of our peoples and politicians devote unconditional time and energies in tearing up, pulling down and destroying each other and often in the name of social justice .... a place where we have no heroes, or at best, want to believe they are all dead....

There is so much we can learn, so much we can do to keep the conscience alive just by being better humans.
The Madiba conscience lives on and so he may rest in peace....