UN offers real partnership for peace
A Chara,
``Reclaiming and Rebuilding our Communities'', the title of Sinn Féin's new drugs policy document, is an apt and concise reflection of the republican project in Ireland's most disadvantaged communities.
Our conviction is that through the consolidation of communal and nation solidarity we can build a fairer and more generous way of living for our people. This, however, is not an insular or parochial nationalism. Our view that `Partnership for Peace' is wrong does not derive from a desire to exclude ourselves from the harrowing realities of global injustice and strife, but to disassociate ourselves from those whose avarice causes that injustice.
`Partnership for Peace' is designed to evolve as a direct appendage of NATO. The countries who would potentially control it; Britain, France and Germany, account for the expenditure of billions of pounds on nuclear weapons while many children in third world countriers still die due to dirty water. More money is spent in continental Europe on ice cream than on women's reproductive health in the whole world. This conveys the imbalance of priorities that exists - and we can not acquiesce with that. We cannot support military alliances with British troops while they remain on our land.
The UN, of which we are a part, is an institution which can offer a real partnership for peace. The sooner the nuclear countries of the world channel their energies through the UN, the sooner we can achieve a semblance of global peace.
Is mise, le meas,
Councillor Christy Burke.
Alternative healing
A Chairde,
Even ``preventative healing'' is now a cause of concern for the medical world and more regulations are to be brought in. If the dangerous side effects of medical drugs were compared with the side effects of complementary medicine, we would get a more honest picture and be able to make up our own minds.
As far back as 1951 the low cancer rate in Ssolikamsk and Beresniki in the Urals was traced to the fact that the inhabitants had continued throughout the war to make Kombucha. Although the expanding industrial pollution affected the earth, water, fauna and flora, the people were unusually healthy because they drank their tea based health drink (ref. Kombucha, Gunther W. Frank).
I have been making Kombucha for two years and have passed it on to others. There have been no complaints of bad side effects, though some people do not persevere with making it.
Let us get this madness into balance and appreciate what is good in nature. Then we can give the medical world its honoured, but subordinate place.
Noelle Ryan
Belfast.
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