On 10 December, members of Protest in Harmony gathered outside the Scottish parliament at an event organised by the Scottish International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, to celebrate the award of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo.
Terumi Tanaka, survivor of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki when he was only 13 years old and co-chair of the grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, accepted the prize in Oslo on 10 December. He said: “It is the heartfelt desire of the Hibakusha that, rather than depending on the theory of nuclear deterrence, which assumes the possession and use of nuclear weapons, we must not allow the possession of a single nuclear weapon.”
Janet Fenton, of ICAN and Secure Scotland, spoke outside the parliament, with the torch given by Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon to ICAN in 2017, when it, too, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Jane Lewis then led PiH in singing Burning for Peace and Another World, based on words by Indian activist and writer Arundhat Roy, set to music by Jane.
We then walked up to the Queen Elizabeth building, to symbolically take the message about nuclear disarmament to the UK government, singing Ain’t Gonna Study War. At the QE building, Scottish CND chair Lynn Jamieson spoke of the bravery of the Hibakusha members, who took on the task of being witness to the inhumanity of nuclear weapons and whose work, after decades and decades, has now been recognised. The event closed with a rousing rendition of the Freedom Come All Ye.