The Broken Rifle

Welcome to the first issue of The Broken Rifle in electronic format only. For you to receive our quarterly publication you need to subscribe by going to http://lists.wri-irg.org/sympa/subscribe/thebrokenrifle or by sending and email to thebrokenrifle-subscribe@lists.wri-irg.org.

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.

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.

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.

In February 2009 WRI will launch its latest publication the “Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns”.

WRI has often been asked for material on nonviolence training, or for introductory workshops. And finally decided it was time to produce its own training resource, where we could present an approach to nonviolence based on participatory forms of organising and reflecting what has been learnt from years of international work.

On 26 November 2008, War Resisters' International will be launching its
new website, after more than six months of development work. The new
site will include a new online Conscientious Objection
Information System (COBIS), which will combine WRI's co-alert system in cases of imprisoned conscientious objectors, a conscientious objector and activist database, the co-update e-newsletter, and the world survey on conscientious objection and recruitment. The system will also include a permanent Prisoners for Peace list, which will strengthen our
support for imprisoned conscientious objectors and peace activists.

In November 2008, WRI Council member and MEP
Tobias Pflüger published a new publication on "Professional soldiers
and the right to conscientious objection in the European Union",
based on research of War Resisters' International. The publication
provides an overview of the present state of the right to conscientious
objection in the European Union, including the candidate countries
Croatia, Turkey, and FYROM (Macedonia).

The Broken Rifle is the newsletter of War Resisters' International, and is published in English, Spanish, French and German. This issue was produced by Javier Gárate. Special thanks go to Joanne Sheehan, Kerstin Bergea and Howard Clark.
 If you want extra copies of this issue of The Broken Rifle, please contact the WRI office, or download it from our website.

War Resisters' International
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London N! 9DX, Britain
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