Media Centre

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, February 20, 2003

(Vancouver, Canada) How can we stop imperial wars and prevent crimes against humanity? Distinguished scholar-activists Sunera Thobani and SUH Sung will discuss this very question in the final session of the Canadian Conference on Preventing Crimes against Humanity: Lessons from the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945) at the First Nations Longhouse at the University of B.C.

Prof. Sunera Thobani is an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy and a respected feminist and anti-racist scholar. Her research focuses on immigration, globalization and women. She teaches in the UBC Women's Studies program and is the past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (1993?1996). She was the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Professor in Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. She will speak on "Women, Globalization and the Danger of War".

Prof. SUH spent 19 years in prison under the repressive South Korean regimes. Amnesty International designated SUH a prisoner of conscience in 1973. The rise of the democracy movement in Korea led to SUH's release in 1990 and he is now professor of comparative international law at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. He is one of Asia's foremost campaigners for peace, an expert on Korean affairs and is currently co-convener of the International Symposium on Human Rights and Peace in East Asia

Thobani and Suh will speak Saturday afternoon, March 22 at the First Nations Long House, U.B.C. "These distinguished speakers will help us see how the lessons from the Asia?Pacific war apply in today's world," said Thekla Lit, co?chair of the conference.

The two?day conference commemorates the 40th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and will include plenary and workshop sessions on Japan's military sexual slavery ("comfort women"), biological warfare, terror of A?bombs, POWs & Canadian Hong Kong veterans, violence against women in war and in peace, the First Nation's residential school experiences, peace and justice in the Middle East, racial profiling, weaponization of space and a special workshop for teachers.

Registration for the conference can be done on?line via the conference web?site: www.aplconference.ca. In order to make the conference widely accessible, organizers have set a low registration fee and out?of?town students can apply for travel subsidies.

This conference is jointly sponsored by Canada Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia (ALPHA); Canada Asia Pacific Resource Network (CAPRN); Greater Vancouver Japanese Canadian Citizens' Association (JCCA) Human Rights Committee; UBC First Nations House of Learning; UBC Women's Studies and Gender Relations; UBC International House.