Autor: FIR | 23. 10. 2023
In view of the military escalations in various parts of the world, FIR calls for broad civil society peace initiatives. We remind that 40 years ago, in October 1983, an international movement against nuclear armament and for concrete disarmament determined the public debate. It was directed against a militarization of Europe by the planned stationing of nuclear medium-range missiles of the type Cruise Missile and Pershing 2. With the claim that the USSR had increased the threat to the West by changing an existing missile type, NATO announced a “rearmament”. In effect, the planned deployment of new intermediate-range missiles meant the threat of nuclear war in Europe. This NATO announcement triggered peace movement actions in various European countries, the likes of which had not been seen before.
Together with other federations, in particular the World Veterans Federation (FMAC/ WVF), the FIR had brought on the way in the “world meeting of former war participants for disarmament” (1979) an “appeal of Rome” for a nuclear disarmament and elimination of the war danger, which found million-fold spreading. Social initiatives also emerged at the national level, with the “Krefeld Appeal” of November 1980 being of great significance in West Germany. Under the catchy slogan: “Nuclear war threatens us all - no nuclear missiles in Europe!” more than four million people signed this appeal. Parallel to this, there were already large peace actions in Bonn and other major cities in the early 1980s, but creative mass protest also developed in the Netherlands.
When the decisive political votes in the national parliaments and NATO came up in the fall of 1983, the voice of the peace movement was to be heard once again in a powerful way. One agreed upon over the world peace council and in agreement with the FIR and its connections to the national member federations to organize on weekend 22/23 October 1983 in many cities of the world mass actions of the peace movements. This became an overwhelming success. Large demonstrations took place in Brussels (400,000 participants), Helsinki, London (300,000), Madrid (200,000), Paris (150,000), Rome (500,000), Stockholm (80,000) and Vienna (80,000). Even in the U.S., demonstrations and other actions took place in 150 cities, and in Canada there were rallies in 50 cities that weekend, including Ottawa and Toronto. One focus of the actions was in West Germany and West Berlin. More than 1.5 million people demonstrated for peace here - 500,000 in Bonn, 400,000 in Hamburg, 300,000 in Stuttgart, 150,000 in West Berlin, and more than 200,000 as participants in a 108 km human chain from Stuttgart to Neu-Ulm. The “Assembly for Peace” in Bonn was not only attended by numerous international guests who brought greetings from the other peace actions. The SPD chairman Willy Brandt, the representative of the GREENS Petra Kelly, Ilse Brusis as representative of the trade unions and the Nobel Prize winner for literature Heinrich Böll spoke there. An emotional highlight was the speech of the anti-fascist Etty Gingold, who alone had collected 11,000 signatures for the “Krefeld Appeal”. She emphasized that the surviving resistance fighters had sworn in 1945 to do everything to ensure that war would never again start from German soil. Newspaper reports at the time emphasized the enormous social breadth of the demonstrations. The organizers included regional action committees, parties, trade unions, churches, youth and women’s associations. Communists, social democrats and members of bourgeois parties, Christians and non-believers, people from different strata of the population participated together.
These mass protests did not prevent the approval of national parliaments and NATO as a whole. However, the protests had the longer-term effect that, after intensive negotiations between the USA and the USSR, the INF Treaty came into force on June 1, 1988, which can be described as the beginning of nuclear disarmament (with a ban on production and destruction of existing weapons potentials) in the final phase of the Cold War. It is a sign of the tension between the great powers that a few years ago the USA terminated this agreement. In fact, the INF Treaty has been history since August 2019. Facing the threatening danger of a 3rd world war such a politically broad peace movement is more necessary than ever. For this the FIR with its member federations works active.
