Summary of Meeting
Friday, May 30, 2008
SEIU

Present: Minji Choe, John Feffer, Ruth Flower, Bruce Gagnon (phone), Wade Huntley (phone), Gwyn Kirk (phone), Kevin Martin, Miriam Pemberton, Balthazar Pinguel, Virginia Rodino, Greg Speeter, Hyuk-Kyo Suh (phone), Anisa Virgi, and Chong-Ae Yu.

Summary of Key Points

1. We made a slight revision to the one-pager to make it clear that we endorse the goals of the Six-Party Talks.
2. The Chinese government and partner organizations are not enthusiastic about the A-P Freeze concept, but we will reach out to more independent scholars and frame the Freeze in a way that is more appealing to China.
3. We formed a subcommittee to prepare for the Kwangju international meeting on peace and regional security (October 24-25, 2008): John Feffer, Kevin Martin, and Virginia Rodino.
4. We opted for a campaign structure rather than a coalition structure and urged participants to get their organizations to endorse the call to action one-pager by July 15.
5. We created a provisional steering committee of: Christine Ahn, John Feffer, Wade Huntley, Gwyn Kirk, Miriam Pemberton, Virginia Rodino, Greg Speeder, and Chong-Ae Yu.
6. The Institute for Policy Studies will continue to serve as the coordinating body.
7. Minji Choe has created a A-P Freeze website at http://pacificfreeze.ips-dc.org/ — all people are encouraged to send materials for the website to Minji Choe at minji2c@gmail.com
8. We agreed it would be best to launch the campaign officially in all six countries (or as many of the six as possible), that we would discuss this strategy in Kwangu, but that we should build up our U.S. campaign as much as possible in the meantime.
9. In terms of a policymaking strategy, Miriam Pemberton volunteered to look into the people advising Obama on the Six-Party Talks and see how we might approach them.
10. On media strategy, we will work on building contacts with Asian American media, get the word out through the PSI newsletter, approach Foreign Affairs to do an analytical piece, and publish something in Foreign Policy In Focus in the second week of September.
11. In terms of foundations, John Feffer and Anisa Virgi would prepare a general fundraising proposal, work with Wade Huntley on potential Canadian funders, and reach out to several U.S. foundations to raise enough money to hire a part-time staff person.
12. Anyone who has a suggestion of a catchy slogan for the campaign – for example, For Your Security and Ours or Security for Everyone’s Homeland – should email it to John Feffer and Minji Choe.
13. Our next general meeting will be the third week of September.

Discussion of One-Pager

“The Asia Pacific Freeze Campaign: A Call for a Safer, Greener Future”

We had a discussion for about 30 minutes on the one-page call to action. To the question of whether the Freeze had a timeline, we decided to keep the call vague as to when we want governments to initiate the freeze. The call is to get people talking and raise the issue of military spending higher on the agendas of the governments in the Six Party Talks. We decided to explicitly endorse the goals of these talks. But we also want to be clear that we have a larger vision that goes beyond simply denuclearization to encompass demilitarization more generally and involves more than simply the Korean peninsula.

China Delegation

We discussed the AFSC-sponsored delegation that went to China and Japan in April, Kevin Martin of Peace Action and Bal Pinguel reported on the trip. They agreed that China is a status-quo power that doesn’t want to compete against U.S. military power. This position has been consistent and even extends to their position on U.S. military bases. To the surprise of the delegation, the representatives they met – who largely represented Chinese government positions though they worked for the parastatal Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament – were not against the United States maintaining military bases in the region. The reason: the bases serve as a buffer against Japanese militarism. In general, China supports the institutionalization of the 6-Party process as a regional security system. The Chinese representatives were not enthusiastic about the Freeze idea. They believe that the United States has the largest military budget and should be the one that starts the process of reducing military budgets.

China is also focused on economic development. One of the delegation members concluded that the China’s greatest contribution to world peace was simply feeding its population for otherwise the refugee problem a food crisis would generate would overwhelm countries in the region and represent a serious security risk.

We discussed how we should approach the question of China. Some felt that it would be good to frame the Freeze by emphasizing the regional security framework aspect and pointing out that U.S. military spending is increasing at a rate greater than China’s. It would be useful to reach out to independent scholars and look at the model of cooperation on environmental questions between independent activists in China and those outside the country. A cautionary example to avoid would be the uncritical relationship between some U.S. peace groups and official Soviet peace groups during the Cold War period.

Kwangju Meeting on Regional Peace and Security

There will be an international meeting in the South Korean city of Kwangju between October 24-25. A foundation in South Korea has invited 3-5 U.S. participants. All local costs will be covered by the foundation. U.S. participants will have to pay their airfare. The A-P Freeze will be a major part of this meeting, and we will have a chance to shape the agenda and invitation list.

The group felt that, coming out of the Kwangju conference, our initiative would have a little more credibility as well as more solidified partnerships. We would have “a transnational wind at our back”. We formed an subcommittee to prepare for the Kwangju meeting: John Feffer, Kevin Martin, and Virginia Rodino.

Organizational Structure

We discussed the organization structure of the campaign. We decided to compose ourselves as a campaign, rather than a coalition. We decided to establish a provisional steering committee that reflects different sectors (peace, Asian-American, budget priorities, union, academic). And we decided to put out a call to our organizations to endorse the one-page call to action. We set a goal of lining up the endorsements of our organizations by July 15. And we looked to September to widen the circle of endorsements.

The Institute for Policy Studies will continue to serve as the coordinating body. John Feffer will continue to do the administrative work, with the help of a Korean intern (Minji Choe until end of June and then another intern coming in September). Miriam Pemberton will provide military budget expertise. We will facilitate email communication and website coordination.

The steering committee will be: Christine Ahn, John Feffer, Wade Huntley, Gwyn Kirk, Miriam Pemberton, Virginia Rodino, Greg Speeder, and Chong-Ae Yu.

Minji Choe has been working on a website. She has uploaded some useful materials and is working to improve the site. If anyone has suggestions for the site, please email Minji at: minji2c@gmail.com. The site is located at: http://pacificfreeze.ips-dc.org/

Framing the Campaign

We discussed the overall viability of the campaign and agreed that the viability depended a lot on the organizational buy-in. This was, however, hard to predict in advance. There are several primary constituencies that we need to reach out to – budget priorities, peace movement, Asia-Pacific, anti-nuclear – as well as second-tier categories such as faith and unions. We need to come up with a list of organizations where we have access point. One participant noted that we were “making the path by walking it.” Another suggested working with the Korea Peace Campaign to see if Veterans for Peace would adopt the Freeze as an organization. Another suggestion was to hold a workshop on the Freeze at the next United for Peace and Justice national conference and then try to pull together a working group on the issue. Another target group would be elite foreign policy think tanks, like Brookings, which might find the regional security angle particularly appealing. We agreed that we as the initial conveners of the campaign need to bring this issue to our respective organizations.

In terms of a strategy aimed at policymakers, we decided to hold off on developing a congressional approach. Instead, we would look at the people advising Obama on the Six-Party Talks and see how we might approach them. Miriam Pemberton volunteered to work on this angle.

We talked about ways of framing the campaign – in the media, with our organizations, and to the public at large. The framing will clearly depend a great deal on the audience. For the public at large, for instance, one suggestion was, instead of focusing on the waste of money, to talk instead of safety, that increased military spending will not make us safer. Other words that we can emphasize are: sustainability, future. We offered two examples of possible bumper stickers for the campaign: For Your Security and Ours (a play on the Polish revolutionary slogan of For Your Freedom and Ours) and Security for Everyone’s Homeland. Anyone who has a suggestion of a catchy slogan for the campaign should email it to John Feffer and Minji Choe.

On the media side, we need to build up contacts in Asian-American media to establish credibility. We agreed to take up Alex Toma’s offer to do a piece about the Freeze for the PSI newsletter. John Feffer and JJ Suh would approach Foreign Affairs to do a piece about the campaign. And FPIF would aim to publish a piece on the campaign in the second week of September.

We agreed it would be best to launch the campaign officially in all six countries (or as many of the six as possible), that we would discuss this strategy in Kwangu, but that we should build up our U.S. campaign as much as possible in the meantime.

In terms of foundations, John Feffer and Anisa Virgi would prepare a general fundraising proposal. They would work with Wade Huntley on potential Canadian funders. And they would pursue several other leads in order to raise money for several people to participate in the Kwangju meeting, to hire a part-time staff person, and to establish a core operating budget.