Students' anti nuclear message

Members of the ICAN Hiroshima Youth Committee in Japan make paper cranes as part of a campaign against nuclear weapons. Gisborne Secondary College students have joined the campaign.

Students from Gisborne Secondary College will present 2,000 peace cranes to the Prime Minister's representative as a message against nuclear weapons.
They will give a gift of hand folded Japanese paper cranes to Senator Jan McLucas, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, on Monday morning at their school.
Half of the cranes were folded by students from Hiroshima, Japan, which was destroyed by a nuclear bomb in World War II, killing 140,000 people. 
These will be presented by Dr Jenny Grounds, a GP in Riddells Creek, who will represent ICAN as president of MAPW (Medical Association for Prevention of War). 
The rest were folded by students from Gisborne, several of whom visited Hiroshima last October as part of their Japanese studies.
Bundles of 1,000 cranes - symbolising support for nuclear disarmament - will be delivered to every president and prime minister worldwide as part of a project of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which is urging governments to negotiate a global ban on nuclear weapons.
Senator McLucas will travel from Queensland to accept the cranes on the Prime Minister's behalf. In a letter accompanying the cranes, the students from Hiroshima wrote:
"As youth from Hiroshima, we are deeply concerned that our future is still being threatened by close to 20,000 nuclear weapons. We are writing to you and other leaders to ask for help in eliminating this threat … We fear that unless governments and individuals do more to rid the world of these horrible weapons, another city might one day
suffer the same fate as our own."
More than 140,000 paper cranes have already been delivered to leaders worldwide, and messages of support have been
received from the presidents of Afghanistan, Cyprus, Greece, Kazakhstan, the Marshall Islands, Mozambique, Slovenia, Switzerland, Tunisia and Vanuatu, as well as the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
ICAN is calling on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to join other nations in calling for negotiations in 2013 on a treaty to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons.
www.icanw.org/resources/paper-crane-project