The Okinawa International Forum for People's Security
Concept and Objectives

Focus on Global South
Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Okinawa International Forum for People's Security

The Conference and Its Context

The International Forum for People's Security will be held in Okinawa from June 29-July 2, 2000. Expected to last three days it is one of several people's assemblies that are timed for the G-7 Summit that will be held on the island later in July. The main aim of the gathering is to highlight the threats to lives and the political, social, and environmental interests of peoples in the Asia-Pacific posed by the current regional and global security systems based on ever growing military power, to redefine the concept of security, and to promote practices to ensure the true security of the people.

The location of the conference, Okinawa, is especially significant since it is the site of sustained popular protests against the massive U.S. military presence. It is where 75% of U.S. bases in the Japanese territory are concentrated, which occupy about 20% best area of the land of this small island. Challenging the popular will against bases expressed in the Okinawa-wide referendum and mounting opposition by local grassroots communities, rapid military base buildup is now pushed ahead. A new major U.S. marine assault base, the only U.S. military base to be newly built in Asia after the end of the Cold War, is going to be constructed in Nago City in the island, the very venue of the forthcoming G7 summit. Okinawa is also where in 1945 the fiercest ground battle was fought between the U.S. and Japanese military that claimed the lives of 200,000 civilians. The people in Okinawa from their experience developed peace movements, during the period of the U.S. military rule as well as after reversion to Japan, sending to the world the warning that military forces and bases are not for the security of the people but, on the contrary, direct physical, economic, social, and environmental threats to people's security. Okinawa offers an ideal environment where to reconceptualize the notion of security and develop strategies to ensure people's security through people's own action.

The Forum is being held at a time marked by critical developments in the Asia-Pacific scene. Among these are:

• Redefinition of the U.S.-Japan military alliance through the adoption of the U.S. Japan Joint Defense Guidelines to open ways to Japanese participation in military intervention in regional and other conflict situations
• increasing tensions between China and the US-Japan alliance and renewed antagonism between mainland China and Taiwan and continuing tensions in the Korean peninsula
• Renewed U.S.-Japan military base strengthening efforts in Okinawa and the rising local rejection of U.S. military presence
• the Japanese government's willingness to the US program to build a "theater missile defense"
• reintroduction of US troops in the Philippines under the guise of "military exercises"
• the Philippine-China standoff in the Spratlys
• the regional impact of the Indo-Pakistan nuclear arms race
• the crisis of the Indonesian nation-state, and
• continuing social crises throughout the region owing to the Asian financial collapse and the imposition of "globalization from above"

Another Step towards an Alternative Security System

The Forum is being organized jointly by Focus on the Global South (Bangkok) and the Tokyo and Okinawa Organizing Committees for OIFPS, with the support the Okinawa Citizens' Peace Coalition consisting of 35 grassroots base-concerned groups. The Tokyo Committee is a coalition of peace, women's, labor, religious, and other groups.

The assembly must be seen as the fourth regional conference that the CASAP network has organized to develop an alternative regional security system in the last three years. The first, which took place in February 1997, saw some 200 people come together in Bangkok to form the Asia Pacific Alternative Security Network, later renamed the Council for Alternative Security in the Asia Pacific (CASAP). The second CASAP conference saw over 150 gather in Manila to hold a parallel meeting on the occasion of the annual meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum in June 1998. At that meeting, CASAP passed a resolution to hold a conference on the implications of the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race. This conference took place in Dakha, Bangladesh, in late February 2000 and resulted in the creation of the South Asian Peace Council.

Objectives

More specifically, the objectives of the conference, as defined by its organizers, include the following;

• To develop a collective critical analysis of the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific and highlight its destabilizing effects on the security of the region and identify the relationship between the U.S.-promoted free market-oriented globalization process and the U.S. global strategy
• To assist participants in developing strategies for ending the US military bases in the region and to push for the withdrawal of US military bases in Okinawa;
• To develop a critical approach toward the traditional assumption that national armies are the best guardians of national security;
• To expose the contribution to national and regional insecurity of military establishments and increased military expenditures;
• To find ways to resolve people-to-people armed conflicts by the people themselves and to defeat the manipulation of historical memories, beliefs, and traditions to fan conflicts among people's groups;
• To expose the negative environmental impacts of the US military presence and regional military activities;
• To develop a security strategy for the Asia Pacific without the US military presence and with smaller armies and radically reduced arms spending;
• To develop an alternative and more comprehensive paradigm of security, which goes beyond the limited framework of military security and is anchored on the idea of comprehensive people's security;
• To promote the role of people's movements, civil society organizations, and non-governmental organizations in the construction of regional peace, alongside states;
• To provide a forum for the exchange of views and experiences among anti-bases and peace activists from different parts of Asia and the world;
• To promote active solidarity among the peace, disarmament, anti-militarist, anti-bases, environmental, and human rights movements in the Asia-Pacific region;
• To evolve effective tools for advocacy and lobbying at the regional level.

The conference will put particular emphasis on two things. First, it will more explicitly define the content of alternative security or people's security, elaborating a strategy based on this definition, and operationalizing this strategy into a set of regionally coordinated tactics and actions. Only if there is an inspiring, well argued, and practical program of alternative security will people be won from the myth of the "necessity" of the US military presence.

Second, it will accord gender a central role in a system of alternative security since abandoning deeply rooted patriarchal attitudes is essential if we are to break with the current security system that is based on male chauvinist values.

Contours of the Program

Talks, panel discussions, and workshops still have to be concretely worked out. However, the program might be structured around the following themes:

• US military presence in the Asia-Pacific: current structure, latest developments, how to counter it, how to end it
• Okinawa: struggle for land, struggle for self-determination, struggle for peace
• The US-Japan-China relations: their effects on regional security
• Korea: how the struggle for peace intersects with the struggle for unification
• State security versus people's security: towards an alternative paradigm of security for the Asia-Pacific
• Gender dimensions of militarism and people's security
• Environmental dimensions of militarism and people's security: toxic tragedies in the Philippines, Korea, Okinawa, and Japan
• The ASEAN Regional Forum and the limits of state-level regional security systems
• The role of civil society organizations in the building of alternative security systems within and beyond borders
• China, ASEAN, and security in Southeast Asia
• Ethnic conflicts, national conflicts, "humanitarian intervention," and alternative security
• Globalization, capitalism, and insecurity
• East Asia and South Asia: the chain of nuclear insecurity and how to break it