Week 17 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Treat other people as you would like them to treat you!’

            A couple of weeks ago I commented in this blog that this commandment, that Jesus said summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament, applies as much to the affairs of nations as it does to those of individual men and women.  I have often regretted that he didn’t add its corollary (perhaps he thought it was so obvious that there was no need to spell it out) ‘Do not do to others what you would hate them to do to you’.   My comment came in connection with the current crisis in the Ukraine and the Crimea.  It seems to me important that both sides involved in this matter should ask themselves how they would feel and what they would do if they were in the situation in which their opponents find themselves.  If both did that, I think there might be a chance of their coming to a compromise acceptable by both sides.  

            A lot has happened in the past fortnight.  Crimea has been ‘annexed’ by Russia.   I have heard no reports of protests from the inhabitants at their change of nationality; no reports of Crimean citizens seeking political asylum in ‘freedom loving’ Ukraine, or begging NATO to free them from the Russians. Surely most people in ‘the west’ now accept that annexation as a fact even if they continue to claim it was ‘illegal’.  It was, no doubt, this that has encouraged the mostly Russian-oriented residents of East Ukraine to assert themselves, raising Russian flags and seizing police stations and government buildings. Probably some of them would like to become Russian citizens.  It seems though that many, perhaps a majority, would prefer to remain an autonomous region of Ukraine but retain the right to have Russian as the region’s ‘first’ language and to conduct their own economic relationship with their Russian neighbour.  Surely this offers ground for a compromise that would involve no bloodshed and could be accepted by both sides without 'losing face’.

            The Foreign Ministers of NATO and of Russia and of the Ukraine are to meet shortly, but the meeting will be fruitless unless both sides are genuinely seeking peace.  Our Foreign Minister William Hague has told the world that he is quite certain that the present unrest in eastern Ukraine has been created and orchestrated by Russia. It is surely much more probable that Russia has simply exploited a situation that already existed.  Their efforts would have been in vain had they not known that a substantial majority of Eastern Ukrainians regarded themselves as being treated  as second class citizens, and would welcome any support that Russia could offer them.  I am equally sure that NATO would have been helpless to support (as I am certain they did) the demonstrators and rioters in the cities of Western Ukraine had they not known that a substantial majority of Western Ukrainians wanted to get rid of their pro-Russian President.

            Has anyone else noted the sinister similarities between the situation in Europe today and the one that existed just a century ago in the summer of 1914?   Bosnia-Herzegovina was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The ethnic Serb Bosnians deeply resented this, and one of their number – Gabriel Prinzip – assassinated the Austrian Grand-Duke Ferdinand and his wife while they were on an official visit to Sarajevo

            The Austrian Government was quite sure that the Serbian Government was responsible for this outrage (just as certain, I am sure, as William Hague is, of Russian responsibility for Eastern Ukrainian unrest today).   They presented the Serbs with a humiliating ultimatum that would have effectively robbed them of their independence. Surprisingly perhaps, the Serbs agreed to comply with every point but one of the ultimatum – but that one was sufficient for Austria to declare war on Serbia.

 Serbia had a powerful ally in Tsarist Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a powerful ally in Germany. Russia had a powerful ally in France.  France had a powerful (but perhaps a little hesitant) ally in Great Britain and, of course, Britain had its world-wide Empire. Immediately the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war in Serbia, Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary.  Then, like falling dominoes, Germany declared war on Russia, France declared war on Germany and, last of all, and only after the Germans had attacked France through Belgium whose neutrality had been guaranteed a century earlier, Great Britain declared war on German. The British Empire obediently followed its leader ……. and the senseless slaughter of ‘The Great War’ began.

            World War I could have been avoided had the governments concerned had the sense to meet together in a spirit of compromise, genuinely seeking a just peace rather than national advantage, before all those alliances were activated.

             It may be thought that the current situation is quite different.  There’s no thought of war – yet, and in any case, both Russia and NATO possess nuclear weapons ‘the ultimate deterrent’.  Surely no-one would be stupid and arrogant enough to start a world war with the nuclear threat hanging over all our heads.

            In June 1914 there was no thought of war either, except perhaps in the minds of a few power-hungry rulers.   There was no ‘ultimate deterrent’ in those days, but had anyone had the least inkling that that the assassination in Sarajevo would trigger a world-war resulting in over Sixteen Million (armed forces and civilians) dead, I am quite sure that a compromise would have been found.  God forbid that there should be any thought of war today – but if there were to be an armed conflict, we shouldn’t imagine that those ‘ultimate deterrents’ would actually deter either side.  They haven’t deterred any act of aggression yet!  Both sides might well decide to be the first with a pre-emptive nuclear strike that – they would probably delude themselves – would make ‘the other side’ see reason!  

Later News

          The meeting of Foreign Ministers appears to have been much more useful than I (or the Foreign Ministers themselves!) expected.  The pro-Russian protesters are to lay down their arms and vacate the Ukrainian government buildings and other property and an amnesty is offered them.   The Ukrainian provisional Government has promised to grant autonomy to the eastern region retaining only defence and foreign policy over the whole country.

            The US and UK foreign ministers have voiced cautious optimism about the final outcome while threatening further ‘consequences’ for Russia if the pro-Russian protesters do not fulfil their side of the agreement.  The only people who weren't represented at the Geneva talks were the pro-Russian protesters!  How extraordinary that the people most concerned weren't represented while the USA, on the other side of the world and with no possible national interest in the Ukraine, dominated the proceedings!

            The agreement was reasonable enough – if the Russian Government does control those protesters or can exert sufficient pressure on them to persuade them to comply with it.  I am by no means sure of either.  I recall that a similar ‘reasonable’ compromise was agreed to end the mirror-image demonstrations and protests in Kiev and other cities in western Ukraine that began this whole crisis.  The protesters ignored the agreement and carried on with their by-then violent protests until they had obtained all their objectives and had formed a new government with a new ‘interim’ President. I am still cautiously optimistic as I write these words (on Good Friday).  I may need to alter them before I post this blog on Easter Monday!

            Well, Easter Monday is here.   Some of the militant pro-Russian activists are refusing to disarm and leave the buildings they have occupied. True to form, William Hague tells us that Russia will face dire consequences.  Penalising the Russian government for the stubbornness of the pro-Russian activists is directly comparable with, and would be just as daft as, penalising the Irish Government for the activities of dissident republican groups in Ulster!

‘Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.’

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom ……….

          ……the Trussell Trust, to which most food banks are affiliated, has declared that during the past financial year 913,000 people required emergency food parcels for at least three days.  This is an increase of 163 percent over its figure of 347,000 during the previous twelve months. It was also reported that 83 percent of its food banks had reported that government benefits sanctions were driving people to seek food aid.

            The Church Times reports that the publication of these figures coincides with the sending of an open letter signed by 42 Anglican bishops and 600 other clergy and ministers of other Christian traditions, to David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband asking them to work with the parliamentary inquiry into food poverty launched two weeks ago, and to implement its recommendations.

            The letter says, As we approach Easter the mind turns to the hope of spring, the promise of resurrection and renewal.  Hope drives us to act.  It drives us to tackle the growing hunger in our midst.  It calls on each of us, and the government too, to act to make sure that work pays, that food markets support sustainable and healthy diets, and that the welfare system provides a last line of defence against hunger.

            Among the signatories were the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, nineteen other diocesan bishops and representatives of other denominations, including the Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches.

            I very much hope that a representative of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) was also among the signatories.

         

           

Week 11 2012 15.3.2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘Some corner of a foreign field…………’

          Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Rupert Brooke wrote his best-known poem The Soldier, which begins with the lines;

If I should die, think only this of me

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

These assume that in that corner of a foreign field, the poet’s remains will at least be left in peace.

          By no means the worst or the most tragic image shown on tv last week, but the one that has remained most persistent in my memory, was that of the vandalised and broken tombstones of British war dead in Benghazi’s British military cemetery and the desecration of the stone crucifix that had been provided there.

            The spectacle filled me with deep sadness – not for those buried there (they are past caring about such things), nor because among those war dead are former comrades of mine who died in a PoW transit camp in Benghazi in the late summer and autumn of 1942.  Nor even was it because of the desecration of the image of Christ, the Prince of Peace, and of the cross on which he had been executed. It was a cross that a fellow-countryman of the vandals, Simon of Cyrene, had helped him carry to Golgotha, the place of execution.                 

            What made me saddest was the thought that, anywhere in the world, there were people who harboured such a hatred of Britain, British values, and of the Christian faith, that they were prepared to vent it even on the dead and on the sacred symbols of their faith.  Such unreasoning and implacable hatred cannot be overcome by force of arms. Nor, I think, can it be defeated or brought to acceptable compromise by reasoned argument and discussion.

            It is for that reason that I see no possibility of an end, either by  military victory or agreed compromise, to the war in Afghanistan that continues to take a toll of our young men and, of course, of an unknown number of Afghan civilians. I have no doubt at all that exactly the same implacable hatred motivates our Taliban opponents there.  Last week six young British men died in just one incident, an event that brought renewed calls for an immediate withdrawal of British troops.

            It is a new experience for me to find myself on the same side as much of the popular press, but there really is no point in waiting a couple more years in the hope that by that time we’ll have had a miraculous victory or that the Taliban will have accepted a reasonable compromise.  Nor do I think that we can rely on the NATO trained and equipped Afghan Army to have either the ability or the inclination to step into the role currently held by our troops.   What is certain is that in that time there will be yet more pointless deaths of young men, more weeping widows and children, and more sorrowing parents.  I am sorry for the Afghans – and particularly for the Afghan women and girls – who have acquired western ways and embraced western values. I can only hope that they will be able to escape from their benighted country before the hate-fuelled  retribution of some of their fellow-countrymen catches up with them.

Later Developments

          Since I wrote the above there have been further disturbing developments, none of which encourage me to change my general view of the situation in Afghanistan.

            Last Saturday 10^th March I learned that the Afghanistan Religious Council, funded by the Afghan Government (and thus, indirectly, by us!) whose decrees had already resulted in Afghan women tv news readers having to wear a head scarf while working, has now decreed that Afghan women and men should not work or be educated together, and that women should not go out in public unless accompanied by a male member of their family.   This decree doesn’t yet have the force of law but it is certainly a straw in the wind, and an indication of the probable fate of Afghan women and girls when NATO forces depart.

            Then, on the following day I heard the appalling news that a United States soldier (a staff sergeant in fact) had gone alone into two Afghan villages in the dead of night and deliberately massacred at least sixteen people, including a number of women and children.   The perpetrator of this horrific crime must obviously have been either insanely drunk or simply insane at the time. This though is unlikely to be regarded as an excuse by those who will demand vengeance.

            Back in Essex, on the same day came news of the vandalising and desecration of a churchyard memorial to British troops who had died in Afghanistan.  Is this evidence of the same implacable hatred, now in England, that resulted in the violation of British war graves in Benghazi?

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‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters’

            Opening my newly delivered copy of The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last week, I was surprised to see a photograph that reminded me of a very happy period of my life.  The picture was of the old Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia; the ‘old bridge’ (or ‘stari most’) that gave the town its name.  I remembered it from the late summer of 1980 when my wife Heather and I had toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in our motor- caravan.

Here is a picture that I took at the time.  Young men were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the turbulent waters of the fast-flowing River Neretva beneath. It was a peaceful scene and, throughout our visit, we saw no sign of the suspicion, hatred and resentment that were so soon to lead to bitter civil war.

A casualty of that civil war was that beautiful old  bridge, destroyed in conflict between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims.  It was rebuilt with funding from the Turkish Government (sadly there is no way of similarly restoring the thousands of human lives lost in that conflict!)  The picture in The Friend on International Women’s Day, 8^th March, was published as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.

Did you, by the way, know that 8^th March was International Women’s Day and that women  were holding demonstrations on bridges round the world, hoping, says a spokesperson for Women for Women International, that they will represent ‘bridges of peace and hope for the future’?  The organisation declares that ‘Women are forced to bear the burden of war and are targeted for mass rape, mutilation and torture as a tool of war’ and that ‘Eighty percent of wartime refugees are women and children’.

I am only sorry that International Women’s Day wasn’t more widely publicised beforehand.  The campaign reinforced my own idea (for which no-one else seems to have much enthusiasm!) that there should be an all-embracing ‘Civilian Victims Day’, a companion of Remembrance Day on which we remember the war dead of the armed forces.  On that day there would be special religious services of remembrance and of repentance and we would all be urged to wear white poppies as a symbol of our desire for peace.   The proceeds of the sale could be used to help civilian victims of conflict. in a similar way to that in which the proceeds of red poppies on Remembrance Day are used to help wounded and disabled members of the armed forces.

Perhaps the reason that this idea hasn’t caught on is the fact that while virtually every nation of the world has civilian war dead to mourn, very few indeed have no need to repent the suffering they have inflicted  on the civilian victims of other nations, other creeds or other ethnicities.

‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto even one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’, said the Prince of Peace.

A Boost to the Economy – and Solution to Britain’s Housing Problem?

            I am referring to the Government’s recently announced initiative to underwrite loans from Banks and Building Societies for purchases of new-built homes to enable those lenders to require a deposit of only 5 percent of the total purchase price.  This, it is claimed, will give a boost to the building trade, and thus to the country’s economic recovery. It would also make it possible for thousands of potential purchasers, who could afford the monthly repayments on their loan but were unable to find the all-important deposit, to get their feet on the first rung on the property ladder.

             Will give a boost to the building trade?   I think that it is the sort of idea that could only emanate only from a government of millionaires, remote from the world most of us live in! Even 5 percent of the price of a new home would be well beyond the reach of many would-be purchasers.  It was in 1956 that my wife and I bought the bungalow in which I am now writing these words.  We did – in those distant days – have the offer of a loan with a deposit of only 5 percent. We had been married for ten years.  I had an adequate salary, but   our two young sons, and a loan to repay on the cost of the car I needed for my job, ensured that we had very little money saved.  We had to sell some of our furniture – and my wife’s engagement ring (a transaction for which I have felt guilty ever since!) – to raise that deposit.

            We did manage to pay the monthly repayments unfailingly. I was a Public Heath Inspector employed by Clacton Council.  In those days local government salaries were lower than comparable ones in the private sector, but they were secure and part of that salary was contributing to a pension.  Nowadays salaries in the lower reaches of the local government service are still low but the jobs, like all jobs these days, are anything but secure.  What is more, pension contributions are going to be higher and today’s local government officers are going to have to wait (and work) longer for a lower pension.  Jobs in the private sector are scarce and certainly no more secure.  With all of this in mind prudent home seekers should surely think twice – and then again – before incurring a debt that, like the student loans, is going to be a burden for decades to come, and for which any change of circumstances could make it impossible to keep up the repayments.

            We are, thanks to those ‘brilliant brains’ in the banking and financial services sector, already a nation in debt.  The government seems determined to make us also a nation of debtors!

A Moment of Remembrance – and foreboding.

          I am an early riser.  Last Sunday (11^th March) I switched the tv on to BBC 1 at about 5.40 a.m.   Usually at that time there is a discussion about the European Union in progress.  Last Sunday was different. Unknowingly I had switched on just before the exact moment at which, on that same day a year earlier, the devastating earthquake and Tsunami, followed by a catastrophic nuclear energy emergency, had taken place in eastern Japan.  I was watching a memorial event, presided over by the grey-haired Japanese Emperor and Empress, in an enormous crowd-filled arena. There were recorded scenes of the earthquake, of the subsequent enormous ‘tidal wave’ engulfing all before it – and of the radiation polluted landscape that remains devastated to this day. Then, at the anniversary of the moment the earthquake struck, came a minute of silence As one, the enormous audience fell into silent mourning for the tens thousands of dead, many of whose bodies have never been recovered.

            We are fortunate in this country in that we rarely experience a damaging earthquake and never, so far, a tsunami.  We have had devastating tidal floods though (one on this coast as recently as 1953), and we too have nuclear plant in locations liable to flooding.  A recent survey predicted that within this century, there is a strong probability that both Bradwell and Sizewell nuclear plants, neither very far from us and one very near, will suffer dangerous flooding as a result of the inexorable progress of global warming. 

We have been warned!

           

                       

           

           

                                                 

Week 47.09

Tendring Topics……..on line

In Defence of the Government!

I’m by no means a blind supporter of the government. However, I’m not a blind and unthinking opponent either. I think that during the past week or two, the government, and the Prime Minister in particular, have twice been subject to quite unjustifiable criticism.

First, there was ex-chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, who resigned in a well-publicised huff when his advice wasn’t followed to the letter. Cannabis, he insisted, was less dangerous than either tobacco or alcohol and its use, if not exactly encouraged, should be regarded tolerantly. If either tobacco or alcohol were newly invented I have little doubt that they would be treated as dangerous drugs…..but they’re not. Alcohol has been with us from the beginning of time. I am told that there is no human society so primitive as to have failed to find a way of producing it!

Tobacco has been in use in Europe since it was brought back from America in the 16th Century. It is only relatively recently that we have realized quite how dangerous it is. Since then successive governments have done their very best, short of actually banning it, to discourage its use.

The function of a scientific adviser is to advise. It is the elected politicians who have to make the decisions and they are, quite rightly, guided by other considerations than purely scientific ones. Politics, it has been said, is the art of the possible. A columnist in the East Anglian Daily Times recently wrote that he had three friends ‘with adult sons with schizophrenia after teenage kicks with cannabis. One has been in a psychiatric hospital for twenty years, another is periodically sectioned (once after having set fire to the family home) and the third lives with his parents on a strict regime of medication’. Try telling those parents that cannabis is less dangerous than this that or the other substance that is freely available!

The other occasion has been the vilification that Gordon Brown has received because of a couple of human errors in a letter of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. I was amazed and rather touched to learn that the Prime Minister sends individual hand-written letters to the next-of-kin of such victims of the war. Did Tony Blair? Did Margaret Thatcher?

The mother in question was a Mrs Janes. I’d be very surprised if this lady’s name isn’t fairly frequently misspelled, either because it has been misheard or, with typed correspondence, because the ‘m’ key has been tapped by accident instead of the ‘n’. As for the letter having a hand-written correction – I’d have taken that as evidence that it was actually hand-written by the Prime Minister, and not some clever facsimile produced by the wonders of modern technology!

I certainly wouldn’t criticise Mrs Janes for complaining. Had I been in her position I’d have been so full of grief and anger that I’d have raged at anyone who had the misfortune to cross my path. What was beneath contempt was the Sun’s exploitation of Mrs Janes’ grief and anger for its own miserable propaganda purposes!

A Correspondent in Mexico

Many regular readers of this blog will already know that I have a Flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which there are over 300 of my photographs, many family pictures but others of general and historical interest. This has brought me some interesting correspondents, including two Canadian distant cousins whom I hadn’t known existed, and a fundamentalist and ‘far-right’ Baptist truck-driver from America’s ‘deep south’ with whom I have had interesting (if inconclusive!) theological and political discussions.

The latest, and among the most interesting, of my email correspondents has been a lady from Mexico City, seeking permission to use one of my Flickr photos. She is Giulianna Laurent and is obviously deeply involved with the museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City. This is what she wrote:

‘Memoria y Tolerancia (Memory and Tolerance) is a non-profit organisation with the mission to promote tolerance through the historical remembrance of genocides (Holocaust, Armenia, Guatemala, Former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur).

From its inception, Memoria y Tolerancia projected a museum and educational center in Mexico City, keeping in mind that the best tools for the creation of awareness are learning and education.

I am working in the Yugoslavia permanent exhibition of the museum and I saw a picture of Bosnia posted on your page that we’ll like to expose.

The picture is the following:
http//www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea/418109226/

I want to ask your permission to use the picture only inside the museum. If you agree please let me know. Thanks, Giulianna Laurent, Memoria y Tolerancia A.C.

Below is the picture that Giulianna wanted to use:

It is of the old Turkish pack-horse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, and was taken during Heather’s and my visit there with our motor-caravan in 1980. It was the year of Marshal Tito’s death and Yugoslavia was still one country, to all appearances a happily multi-ethnic and multifaith one. When we took the picture, young Bosnians were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the fast-flowing water of the river below!

Within a year or two of our visit the bridge had been destroyed by artillery bombardment during Yugoslavia’s bloody civil war. The Serbs are usually depicted as the villains in that conflict, but the destruction of the bridge, and the violent deaths of hundreds of men, women and children in the Mostar area was the result of conflict between Croats and Muslims (Serbs and/or Croats whose ancestors had converted to Islam during the many years of Turkish occupation).

The museum of Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City is furthering a cause that I would wish to support. I willingly gave permission for the picture to be used in any way that Giulianna wished, and told her that I would like to hear more about the museum’s progress. In expressing her thanks she attached a photo of it. Here it is. It is certainly impressive!

In a further email I drew her attention to this blog-spot. I felt that last week’s blog, in which I suggested a world-wide ‘White Poppy Day’ in which the millions of civilian victims of conflict could be remembered, and funds raised for the support of survivors, might be of interest to her and her colleagues

It’s not what you say…..it’s the way that you say it,

That’s what causes offence. This thought, hardly a new one, came back to me with extra force recently.

Have you been watching Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain? In the first episode, dealing with the Edwardian age and Edwardian moral values, Andrew Marr recounted the occasion on which Marie Lloyd, a very popular Music Hall performer, was questioned by MPs about the bawdiness and explicit sexual content of some of the songs for which she was well-known.

Marie Lloyd gave a little demonstration. With a straight face and the demeanour of a vicar’s daughter singing at an evening gathering of her father’s parishioners, she sang to the committee a couple of her most popular songs full of outrageous double entendre. Not an eyebrow was raised.

She then sang ‘Come into the garden, Maud’, a romantic poem by eminent Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson that had been set to music. It was a song with which members of the committee would all have been familiar. They may well have heard their own daughters or wives sing it to their guests after dinner. Marie Lloyd though, sang it with winks, gestures and knowing smiles that had the worthy MPs writhing with embarrassment. It’s not what she sang but the way that she sang it!

It made me think of once-harmless words that are now banned because they might possibly cause offence. Newcomers to Essex Police, for instance, have recently been advised that they should never use ‘black’ in a negative context such as ‘black mark’, ‘black sheep’, ‘blacken’ someone’s character, for instance, though ‘blackboard’ and ‘black and white’ referring to newsprint, are OK.

I would ask the (I feel fairly confident) white people who make these rules if they take offence when a government report is said to be a ‘whitewash’, when someone is described as ‘showing the white flag’ or of being ‘white with fear’, or indeed with the Biblical reference to hypocrites as 'whited sepulcres' If not, isn’t it patronising and insulting, racist even, to assume that someone with a skin colour different from their own must necessarily be more ready to take offence?

What the world of 2009 badly needs is courtesy (it used to be called ‘common politeness’) in our dealings with one another, whatever may be our skin colour. Political correctness is a very, very poor substitute.

A well-deserved honour

I was very pleased to learn that Clacton’s seafront gardens and west greensward have been awarded the Green Flag of excellence by the Keep Britain Tidy organisation. The gardens had been demonstrated to be welcoming, healthy, safe, secure and well-managed. It took me back to the days when Tendring had its own direct labour gardening department that regularly displayed, and won the top prizes, at county and district agricultural and horticultural shows.
Clacton-on-Sea's clifftop Memorial Garden

Late News – from Mexico City!

As I was about to post this blog I received a further email from my new friend in Mexico City who is deeply involved with the nearing-completion Museum of Memoria y Tolerancia there. Here is what she writes:

Hello Ernest,

I have read your blog and your proposal about the white poppy. I think it is a great idea and it will make an awareness in all civilian people about the innocence of the victims. Through which organisation do you propose that the money will be given to civilian victims??

The museum includes a part called ‘Tolerance’ where we invite the visitor to question the value of tolerance and diversity. I think it will be a good idea to promote your white poppy project there. I will let you know when the museum opens, it will be around June 2010 to see what we can do.

Kind regards,

Giulianna

I have to confess that I hadn’t even thought of the distribution of the proceeds. I suppose probably the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Then there is Christian Aid – if they could get together with equivalent organisations of other world faiths.