Civil disobedience/NVDA

Members of the European Antimilitarist network will be taking part in Burghfield Lockdown

During this, the International Week of Action for Military-Free Education and Research, WRI and other organisations have issued this call to action: War is not the answer: resist youth militarisation!

From the moment we are born, children and young people all over the world are exposed to the military and military values around them. They are taught that armed force and violence can solve problems.

We call this the militarisation of youth.

In some countries, this militarisation is visible and obvious: young people (mainly, though not exclusively, young men) are forced to join the military through conscription. This might include forced recruitment, or recruitment of children.

A seven-mile pink scarf knitted by over 5,000 people from around Britain and beyond has been unfurled between the Atomic Weapons Establishments (AWE) at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire. The knitters are calling on Parliament not to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system when the decision comes up in 2016.

Today it is obvious that unarmed popular movements are able to overthrow authoritarian regimes, even militarized and dictatorial regimes that have controlled countries for decades. Through mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, noncooperation, strikes and boycotts some 30 dictatorships have fallen during the last decades. We have more recently seen how entrenched authoritarian regimes have fallen within “the Arab Spring” in Egypt and Tunisia, and previously similar dramatic transitions have happened throughout Latin America, Easter Europe, Western Africa, as well as in South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. All these examples point towards the people power or nonviolent revolution that Gandhi was instrumental in developing during the struggle in South Africa and India. However, it is also obvious today that these regime changes point towards a number of problems and challenges, some of which our theme group want to engage with.

Yeo-ok Yang and Jungmin Choi, activists of World Without War, and Reverend Bora Im of Hyanglin Church were put into prison on May 20.

They were sentenced to pay a fine of two million won each (approximately 2,000 USD) for taking a direct action to block the construction of Jeju Naval Base, which had been illegally undertaken without an agreement with local residents.

International activist enter water of the Spanish military to denounce military expenditure and infrastructure, pointing out that “War starts from here: let's stop it from here!”

Today, on 14 April, the Global Day of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS), 40 antimilitarist activists from groups coming from Britain, Germany, the United States, and from several Spanish cities and the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria, took part in a nonviolent direct action at the Navy Base (Arsenal Militar) of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. They visualised the global threat posed by military spending with a huge banner marked with yellow marks along which to “cut” definitively military spending and military infrastructures, penetrating military water by 200m. The activists approached a quay where the war ships Tornado and Meteoro of the Spanish navy where moored, in front of which they let two helium balloons of a diameter of 2m rise marked with antimilitarist symbols.

Andrew Dey

Activists around the world have been on trial for nonviolently resisting war.

In the USA, the Transform Now

The International Peace Bureau announced that the date of the 4th edition of the Global Day of

Action on Military Spending is  Monday, 14 April 2014. It coincides, once again, with the release by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) of their annual statistics on global military spending.

Jim Haber

Outside the courthouse in Knoxville, Tenn., where three anti-nuclear activists were severely sentenced on February 18, Michelle Boertje-Obed, the wife of one of the three Transform Now Plowshares members, encouraged everyone to see Judge Amul Thapar’s ruling in a positive light. Despite her husband Greg having just received over 5 years in prison for infiltrating the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility on July 28, 2012 and damaging federal property — along with Michael Walli and 84-year-old Catholic nun Megan Rice – Michelle pointed out that the judge could have easily given them much longer sentences, as recommended by the prosecution.

On December 2012, the antimilitaristic group from Bilbao Grupo Antimilitarista de Bilbao (KEM-MOC) carried out a nonviolent action in an exhibit commemorating the army. For this action, one participant is facing trial, with the prosecutor requesting a 3-year sentence.

As the Seoul International Aerospace & Defense Exhibition 2013 started on 28th October, 22 civil society organizations in South Korea engaged in a series of actions targeting the largest arms fair in the Asia-Pacific region. The coalition organized an alternative exhibition of their own in response to the Seoul ADEX 2013, and named it the Peace and Disarmament Exhibition.