ENAAT Annual Meeting 2013 Dispatch

This year's annual meeting of the European Network Against Arms Trade (ENAAT) took place in Zurich, Switzerland. It was great that activists from almost a dozen European countries could come to the meeting. We were especially pleased that, for the first time, someone from Slovakia could report on the situation in her country.

The meeting started with a well-attended public debate at the University of Zurich. Four speakers presented their inputs: Ann Feltham (Campaign Against Arms Trade, UK) described how governments are lobbied to favour profits from arms exports over the promotion of human rights. Jo Lang (Group for Switzerland Without an Army, and vice-president of the Swiss Greens) pointed to the contradictions between Switzerland’s official rhetoric and the level of actual arms exports. Barbara Gysi (MP for the Swiss Social Democrats) focussed on the opposition to an imminent arms procurement in Switzerland: the purchase would involve a score of new Saab Gripen fighter jets from Sweden. According to the schedule, Swiss voters will decide on this deal in a binding referendum in 2014. Finally, Wendela de Vries (Campagne tegen Wapenhandel, the Netherlands) presented numerous examples of successful actions and campaigns from all over Europe: Illustrations included CAAT exposing arms dealers’ dinners in London’s Natural History Museum – wearing dinosaur suits; Campagne tegen Wapenhandel asking nasty questions at EADS’s shareholders meeting; or Aktion Aufschrei flying bomb-shaped balloons in front of the German Bundestag.

The following two days were filled with workshops and country reports. One workshop focussed on different strategies on ways to tackle banks that finance arms deals. In a different workshop, the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons was presented. On Sunday morning, there was a workshop about lobbying at the EU level and another workshop on drones - a topic that has become much more relevant in many countries: in Norway, to take just one example, the number of companies involved in the production and development of drones has multiplied by a factor of ten within a single year.

The discussions became very passionate in the workshop on the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). In some countries, big NGOs had stirred unrealistic hopes in that treaty (presumably for funding reasons), while governments use the treaty to legitimise arms sales and relax export regulations. At the same time, the ATT is a significant development on the international plain that cannot be ignored, especially because the future benefit or harm of the treaty depends on lobbying efforts in individual countries. The passionate debates continued long into the night, without finding a common approach about how to deal with the ATT in the future. Though one conclusion was that it is important to get involved in this kind of big campaign early on, in order to be able frame the perception and expectations about the potentials of international treaties of a more realistic level.

The next ENAAT meeting will take place in Oslo next summer. We are sure the meeting will be a great place again to share ideas and to hold inspiring debates on how to defy the multi-billion dollar arms business.

For more information:
http://enaat.org