Editor’s Note: The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF, is one of the oldest organizations fighting for a world without war. WILPF members can be found in more than 40 nations. In Portland, WILPF carries on the tradition of working for peace by attacking the root causes of war: poverty, racism, injustice and political repression. Last month, the Rose City hosted WILPF’s “Western Gathering,” the coming together of WILPF activists from the western half of the continent. WILPF international president Regina Birchem was in attendance. Alliance editor Dave Mazza had a chance to talk with Ms. Birchem the day before the gathering began.

Dave Mazza: How long have you been serving as WILPF’s president?

Regina Birchem: I was elected in August 2004 at our tri-annual congress in Sweden.

DM: What brings you to the Rose City?

RB: I’m here in Portland for WILPF’s Western Gathering. Our organization has more than 40 different countries and we call them sections. The U.S. section is our largest. We have a branch in Portland and they have organized a regional meeting for the West Coast.

DM: How was WILPF started?

RB: WILPF was founded in 1915, during World War I, by Jane Addams and her colleagues who were social workers and suffragists in Europe, the U.S. and India. They saw the outbreak of war destroying everything they were working for, particularly Addams in Chicago, where she was working with immigrant communities.

DM: One of the things I find so impressive about WILPF is the range of issues it takes on. How does WILPF choose its fights?

RB: The reason we take on other issues is that we see peace is based on many different factors in society. The organization’s purpose is to remove the barriers to peace and make war unthinkable. So that means we work on economic issues, race issues, justice issues, environmental issues and gender issues — all that it takes to make a fair and just life. We have a huge scope. That’s why we are a diverse organization. We are an international organization but we have a national expression towards making war unthinkable. Like in El Salvador they might approach it differently because of their political and sociological circumstances. In Bolivia we have a group there very much involved in the water issues we all know about. For the past five or six years they have been fighting corporate control of the water. In Cuba we don’t have a group but we have very good relations with the Cuban Women’s Federation. When we were able to, we took many delegations to Cuba. Right now the bush administration says it’s illegal but many of our people go anyway.

DM: How many members in WILPF?

RB: That’s a tough question. We are a small organization membership-wise but it’s very hard to say how many members we actually have. There are different ways of determining membership. In the U.S. you are considered a member if you pay your dues. In Colombia they don’t mention money. If you come and work with them — they work with people displaced due to fumigation that’s part of the supposed drug war and also people displaced by the oil industry — you are a member of WILPF. It is hard to say, but I would estimate 25,000 members. But there’s a huge number of people who are not members who use our materials, especially now with the Internet where they can download information from our website. They follow us, they say WILPF is a wonderful organization, but they aren’t part of us.

DM: We used to call them fellow travelers.

RB: Yes, yes, fellow travelers.

DM: Huge numbers of people seem to be tuning out what’s happening around them. What do you think is going on there?

RB: I was just talking with Pat Hollingsworth [of Portland WILPF] about that. She feels we have to think about the world we live in and how the organization expresses itself in the culture of the U.S. — the whole question of what it means to be a member. I feel there is sort of a resistance to becoming a member of things. People may become supporters but they want to simplify their lives and don’t want to become a member of things. Then there are others that feel that this whole world is such a mess they need to seek out people to do something about it — a community of like-minded people. These are some of the things we will be talking about it. Of course, one of the major campaigns we are working on here is the U.S. political involvement and policy in the Middle East. The other is water, which touches everybody.

DM: You mention water as a priority for WILPF. While there’s a lot of work put your foot in the river and you know that water is going to go to another watershed and eventually into the ocean. The water we drink now may have been drunk by Socrates. Water has a lot of symbolism and it’s a basic necessity not just for our life but for our connection with nature.

DM: One of the issues that concerns me is the absence of youth from the movement. Is that a problem for WILPF?

RB: Before you started this interview you asked what was my focus as president. One is to make this organization more multigenerational. In some countries, in some communities, WILPF is recognized by the elderly women.

Elsewhere it is more youthful. Take the U.S. life has changed so much. Both parents are working, so the daily schedule is different. Whenever we have international meetings we would have young women seminars with “young” defined as you were young to the organization. Last year we were in Geneva at our meeting. The young women heard their seminar and told us “we want to take over our seminar and we want to call it ‘Y-WILPF’ or ‘Young WILPF.” So they are organizing a network among themselves and they are organizing a seminar in London in September alongside our meeting.

DM: Connecting with people is not just limited to youth. People seem overwhelmed to the degree they don’t think there’s any point to resisting. How do we overcome that?

RB: That’s why I said a national expression. It is also a dilemma for us. At our international level we do so much work with the UN. We have two wonderful projects at the UN. One is reaching “critical will” which focuses on ridding the world of nuclear weapons. The other is called the Peace Women’s Project. Women should be involved in the peace building processes, not just be advocates, so when the men sit around the table and make decisions women are absent. Also in times of, and after the conflict, what happens to women is a serious issue. But how to bring what happens into our communities — that’s a big gap.

We have different ways in which we put our energies to use. Probably the one that connects most clearly to people’s lives is in Geneva. We do a lot of work on human rights through the Human Rights Commission. So that is a connection that goes on in many local communities. We try to enable many people to come to the UN conference and to make their statement and to work with other people and to learn how the UN works. One of our main principles is that peace is going to come about by negotiation rather than coercion or force. WILPF was right here at the opening of the UN in San Francisco. We see it as essential; however, right now we see the UN as shaky. It is being manipulated and used to justify wars. If we did not have the UN, what would we have? If we did not have the UN, we would not be able in the political climate we have today to write that beautiful charter we wrote 50 years ago as to what the UN is.

DM: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the people of Portland?

RB: I think that people are preoccupied with their changing economic situation. They are seeing themselves go downhill and many of their dreams are not being realized. The television is a big “nummer.” So the alternative press, like the Alliance is essential.

Dave Mazza is editor of The Portland Alliance.

going on around that issue in places like India, it is something of a sleeper issue here in the U.S. Why is that so?
RB: Actually that’s true. In the U.S. we haven’t been so aware of the water problem and that is true in Europe, too. They are, however, starting to become aware. The corporations focused on the Third World countries first. Once the money there dried up — and you can‘t make money on poor people — they began quickly buying up community and municipal water authorities in Europe and here. It’s amazing how many are owned by these four multinational corporations... . You can