| April 28, 1915 The International Conference of Women for a Permanent Peace convened on this day in 1915 at The Hague in the Netherlands. More than 1,200 delegates from 12 countries—Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Poland, Belgium and the United States—were all dedicated to the cause of peace and a resolution of the great international conflict that is now referred to as World War I.  The conference selected a delegation of women that spent May and June meeting with government officials of the belligerent nations to demand an end to the war. Often called the Women’s Peace Congress, the meeting was the result of an invitation by a Dutch women’s suffrage organization, led by Aletta Jacobs, to women’s rights activists around the world. Jacobs believed that a peaceful international assemblage of women would “have its moral effect upon the belligerent countries,” as she put it.  Aletta Jacobs, Dutch suffragist and an organizer of the Women’s Peace Congress This was the origin of the organization known today as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. WILPF history |
| April 28, 1965 U.S. troops landed in the Dominican Republic. In an effort to forestall what he claimed would be a “communist dictatorship” in the Dominican Republic, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent more than 22,000 U.S. troops to restore order on the island nation and to support the military junta.  U.S. troops in the Dominican Republic, 1965 Learn more about the history |
April 28, 1978 Demonstrators blocking the rail line into the Rocky Flats weapons facility At the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, near Denver, over 5,000 protested and nearly 300 were arrested over the following eight months for blocking railroad tracks entering the plant where plutonium bombs used as detonators in hydrogen bombs were produced.  Concert at the Rocky Flats demonstration in 1979 |
| April 28, 1979 A few weeks after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania [see March 28, 1979], a crowd of close to 15,000 assembled at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production plant near Denver, Colorado. Singers Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt took the stage along with various speakers including Dr. Helen Caldicott. The following day, 286 protesters, including Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, were arrested for trespassing in their civil disobedience at the Rocky Flats facility. |
| April 28, 1987 Benjamin Linder, a volunteer engineer from Seattle, was murdered in Nicaragua by the U.S.-sponsored insurgents known as the contras (characterized by then-President Ronald Reagan as “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers”). Linder had been working on a hydroelectric project in rural Nicaragua. |
| April 28, 1996 Sixty-one were arrested for dismantling railroad tracks leading out of the Gundremmingen nuclear power station in Bavaria, Germany. |
| April 28, 2004 The first photos of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal were shown on CBS’s ”60 Minutes II.” The photos had been taken by U.S. military personnel responsible for detaining and interrogating Iraqi prisoners arrested following the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  Article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who helped break the story About Standard Operating Procedure, a new documentary by Erroll Morris on Abu Ghraib |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april28
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