HEIGHTS OF ARROGANCE: HELP SAVE MOUNT SINJAJEVINA FROM NATO ATTACK!
Peace Quest Cape Breton Campaign Appeal, January 2023
This month, Peace Quest Cape Breton (PQCB) is joining the fight to stop Mount Sinjajevina in Montenegro from being turned into a military playground by NATO. In May this year, the world’s mightiest and only nuclear-armed military alliance plans to conduct large-scale exercises – defeaning and destructive war games – on the mountain, the traditional homeland of eight rural tribal communities prepared to risk life, limb, and liberty to stop the sacrilegious assault. “The mountain gave us life,” in the words of Milan Sekulović, President of Save Sinjajevina, a campaign of peaceful civil disobedience supported by the global World Beyond War network, to which PQCB belongs.
Soon after Montenegro joined NATO in 2017 – without seeking the consent of the people in a referendum – plans were drawn up to turn Sinjajevina, nestled in the country’s supposedly protected Tara Canyon Biosphere Reserve, into a test-firing and exercise site. Popular protest, drawing widespread support, began almost immediately and have already prevented numerous military incursions. For example, in the of 2020, as World Beyond War’s David Swanson documented, “the people of the mountain set up a camp and stayed in the way for months as human shields. They formed a human chain in the grasslands and risked attack with live ammunition until the military and government backed down.”
To get NATO to back down this spring, World Beyond War and Save Sinjajevina need help now to spread the word about the campaign and increase pressure on all NATO governments complicit in the intended desecration of the mountain.
To sign a World Beyond petition to Save Sinjajevina, and for a wealth of campaign information and material, please see Save Sinjajevina - World BEYOND War.
For a short video on the campaign, giving a sense of the extraordinary beauty of the mountain, see Save Sinjajevina’s Nature and Local Communities! - YouTube
For its part, PQCB will soon be writing to Canada’s Minister of National Defence, Anita Anand, Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Ambassador to Montenegro, Giles Norman, and Montenegro’s Honorary Consul in Canada, Roy Elliott, asking them to urgently raise the issue within NATO and at a minimum request a delay and review of existing plans to militarize the mountain.
PQCB Campaign Coordinator Sean Howard notes: “Canada has a dark, shameful history of inflicting cultural and environment harm through military training, for example low-level flying by NATO warplanes in the Arctic, and Ottawa is currently increasing the intensity and frequency of military training and exercises in that colonized region. Asking Ottawa to help Save Sinjajevina may also open space for a much-needed, much broader discussion about the environmental impacts and ethics of Canadian military training in the 21st century.”
For more information, please contact Sean Howard at sean@peacequestcapebreton.ca.
