A Tribute to Chaiwat Satha-Anand
Chaiwat Satha-Anand, aged 69, succumbed to cancer on 27 June 2024.
Chaiwat was one of the first to endorse A Call to All who Care about Humanity and Planet Earth issued by SHAPE in August 2022.
Chaiwat was active in SHAPE. He made a valuable contribution as a panellist in our first webinar on the theme 'Humanity's Future' on 27 October 2022. He also joined SHAPE'S Coordinating Committee. On a couple of occasions, in private conversations, he offered his insights on global issues and how SHAPE could play a meaningful role in the quest for peace.
Given his vast reservoir of experience in peace building activities, especially in Thailand between Buddhists and Muslims, Chaiwat felt that a group like SHAPE should endeavour to strengthen relations between different religious and cultural communities in both the intellectual sphere and at the grassroots level. He saw tremendous potential for evolving novel peaceful approaches to conflict resolution. Many of his writings shed much light on such approaches.
Indeed, peaceful conflict resolution both in theory and practice will always be remembered as one of Chaiwat's greatest legacies. SHAPE and other organisations and institutions associated with this kind and compassionate human being should disseminate his ideas on peace and inter-community harmony as widely as possible. The young in particular should be encouraged to absorb his thoughts as they confront conflicts with ethnic and religious undertones in a world where because of our increasing interdependence our differences will appear to be sharper and bolder.
Chaiwat was so much a part of our present. It is our mission now to make his ideas the rhythm of the future.
Richard Falk, Joseph Camilleri and Chandra Muzaffar.
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* Incidentally, of that initial list of 45 endorsers, three have now left this transient world. The other two were:
Professor. Azyumardi Azra, the illustrious Indonesian scholar activist who died on 18 September 2022, and
· John Pilger, an outstanding journalist, film-maker, author and unflinching critic of the foreign policies of the United States and its two Anglophone allies Britain and Australia, who passed away on 30 December 2023 (at the age of 84).
We salute their wonderful contribution to the struggle for a just and peaceful world.