Nonviolence

Defense of Democracy and the demonstration celebrations

Five hundred people coming from 19 countries met for the activist conference at Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, on February 14 and 15 2009, invited by the International Coordinating Committee * «  No to war-No to NATO » and hosted by the “Collectif de Strasbourg
anti-OTAN” against NATO, to prepare the activities of the counter- summit on NATO’s 60th anniversary which will be held in Strasbourg in April 1-5.

On 3 and 4 April the heads of state and government of NATO will meet in Baden-Baden and Strasbourg to celebrate NATOs 60th birthday. We think: 60 years of NATO are not a reason to celebrate, but a reason to resist nonviolently!

Since its foundation in 1949 NATO pretended to defend the so-called free West against the allegedly aggressive communism. Would this have been the real reason for NATO's existence, NATO would have had to dissolve following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.

Social change doesn't just happen. It's the result of the work of committed people striving for a world of justice and peace. This work gestates in groups or cells of activists, in discussions, in training sessions, in reflecting on previous experiences, in planning, in experimenting and in learning from others. Preparing ourselves for our work for social justice is key to its success.

Nonviolent action against NATO

On 4 April 1949, the North-Atlantic
Treaty Organisation was founded with the signing of the NATO treaty. On 3 and 4 April
2009, the heads of state and government of the 26 member states and
their delegations will meet in Baden Baden and Strasbourg to
celebrate NATO's 60th birthday with a NATO summit (ed.).

My money clear conscience is a Belgian campaign that initially began asking the banks to disinvest from arms producers, later, the goal became disinvesting from controversial arms producers.

Citigroup, operating as Citi, is a major financial services company based in New York City. Formed by the 1998 merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group, the company employs 332,000 people around the world and holds over 200 million customer accounts in more than 100 countries.

The verdict will be slow in coming. There are several things to be optimistic, shall we say, “hopeful,” about when it comes to confronting the corruption, fraud, waste, and deceit of war profiteers – and, not surprisingly, there are many reasons to doubt that we’ll see any real change after all. I am genuinely torn as to what to expect. If Obama follows through on his positive programs, life will be much more difficult for military contractors.

Sweden has historically been a big weapons producer and exporter. For decades the Swedish peace movement have been working to end the Swedish weapons export. In spite of this the weapons export has dramatically increased lately. Since 2001 it has tripled and today Sweden is the second biggest weapons exporter in world per capita. Swedish weapons go to countries at war like the US, to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and human rights abusers like Bahrain.

This is the last issue of 2008, which has been a year full of events related to war profiteering. We have reported on many successful actions, as again we do with this issue with the disarmament action in Sweden. The last part of the year has been dominated by the financial crisis in the world - a financial crisis in many ways due to the way the system favours big corporations whose priority it is to make their own shareholders richer and nothing else.

With the new electronic format of The Broken Rifle we want to use the opportunity to also get the WRI network using the forums in our re-developed website. This article will be posted on the WRI forum, we invite people to react to it.

This article is the result of material published in the Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns and a session on gender and nonviolence at WRI's International Nonviolence Training Exchange, in Bilbao in October 2008.

It may seem simple and obvious that we want both men and women involved in our struggles against war and injustice. However, if we want to fully utilise people's talents, energy, and insights, we need to apply gender awareness to how we organise ourselves, how we design our campaigns, and how we conduct our trainings for action.

On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their co-worker and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. A U.S. Congressional Task Force verified that those responsible were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, USA. This is only the most notorious incident in the school's history of providing special training to Latin American military personnel known to have committed atrocities and engaged in torture.