Demilitarise June 2nd

We are sick of war of arms, of military parades

The 2nd June is our national day, the festival women and men who recognise their aspirations in the Consititution that defines the rights of all, the right to work, the education, to health care..., and that repudiates war.

To reinterate our NO:

to WAR, to MILITARY SPENDING, to the CULTURE OF WAR, to the MILITARISATION of our land and our lives.

To say that we want a June 2nd that is DIFFERENT where we can celebrate as citizens of:

• a country that is welcoming, founded on respect, on listening, and on mutual recognition between men and women, natives and immigrants, between "us" and "the others".
  

• a country where young people can have a future and old people a dignified and peaceful life

• a country where common goods - air, water, land, energy, our artistic and cultural historical patrimony, the natural environment, the landscape
- remain outside the logic of the market

• a country that knows how to face internal and international conflicts without recourse to force.
  

• a country that invests not in arms and war but in culture, education, healthcare, employment.

We've had enough of easy apologies

Nato's intervention has made the situation worse since 2001, with bombings and deaths on a daily basis, and widespread disillusion caused by the license given to warlords. This has embittered social and human relations. No change of tactics can cancel western deeds from the minds of Afghans: firing on weddings, murdering civilians during celebrations,protecting the corrupt mafiosi who fill the government of Karzai. di cui s’è riempito il governo Karzai.

Samia Walid, member of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan

On 18 may, at Taloquan in the north of Afghanistan, 12 civilians were killed and at least 80 injured during a protest provoked by the latest killing of civilians - two women and two men - in a night raid by US special forces.

This is the fourth "incident" of the kind in a week. On 16 May, NATO forces killed a 10 year old girl and injured another 4 children in the eastern province of Kunar. On the 14th they killed a 15 year old boy during a night raid in the Nangarhar province. On the 12th, in the same zone, another night raid caused the death of a 12 year old girl and her uncle, a policeman.

NATO forces are currently carrying out around 600 raids every month. The raids have produced horrific crimes, including the killing of children. In one case, last year, soliders dug the bullets out of the bodies of two pregnant women to conceal their responsibility for the killings.

When it isn't possible to hide their responsibility, the NATO leaders offer apologies. But these apologies come too easily. The bitter message for the families of victims is that their loved ones are collateral damage - a price that must be paid.

We ask those who still believe that NATO has a positive role to perform in Afghanistan - to prevent civil war or to improve the situation of women - to reflect on how they would feel if it were their own loved ones who were killed with such unconcern.

We are not ingenuous. We don't believe that the withdrawal of foreign troops will immediately bring about peace in Afghanistan. But we do believe that the presence of NATO troops is part of the problem, not the solution. Apart from the violence committed y NATO soldiers, the policy of creating alliances with fundamentalist groups and with warlords favours the use of armed force as a political strategy and makes the struggle of civil society more difficult.

Some people shrug their shoulders and say that warlords are part of the Afghan reality, a problem of the Afghan culture. We reply that warlords are a part of the Afghan reality, because it is a land that has been at war for decades. Warlords are not a part of the Afghan culture, they are a part of the culture of militarisation - which the presence of NATO forces can only reinforce.

Finally, we turn to the words of Samia Walid in an interview during her current visit to Italy:



Foreign forces must leave the country. A civil war could not be worse than what is happening now. It will be up to the people to decide their fate and if the resistance to fundamentalist revives, we will be with the women and men who want to build their own country.

Stay Human

There are men who struggle for a day, and they are good. There are others who struggle for a year, and they are better. There are some who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensible ones (Bertolt Brecht)

Vittorio Arrigoni, killed in Gaza a few hours after being abducte at the age of 36, asked us every day at the end of his articles to:

Stay human

Every day for years, Vittorio recounted in words and images, independently and impartialy, the real life, the struggle for survival of 2 million people imprisoned in Gaza, besieged , bombarded, starved, humiliated.

Vittorio chose to stay in that hell to help those who couldn't leave and to break the silence of indifference about the Gaza Strip, which had become a black hole in reporting, in politics - a gigantic black mark on the ethics and collective morals, smeared with indifference and complicity in the horror.

Vittorio has been murdered. His death today tears aside the veil that covers the Strip and speaks. You can still speak to us all, Vittorio, even though you are no longer here. You can still show us that injustice is insupportable.

Vittorio lived in Gaza for years. He chose to stay there, with his eyes to witness and with his body to show solidarity, because he had seen the theft of land, of water, the demolition of houses, the destruction of farms and of fishing boats (he was injured while accompanying fishermen pescatori, trying to protect them with his body from the armed attacks of the Israeli army, just like Rachel Corrie, killed at Rafah because she put her body between a bulldozer and a house).

Vittorio had seen people with cancer sent back at the Eretz crossing between Gaza and Israel "because of security issues". He had seen Palestinians treated with disdain, beaten, humiliated. He had seen the desparation of the fishermen who were prevented from fishing and he had seen the desperation of the farms, clinging to an olive tree while a bulldozer dragged it away. He had seen women give birth behind a mound because it was impossible to get to the hospitatl. He had seen fear and terror in the eyes of children and he had seen their broken bodies. He had seen premature babies die because the electricity was cut off for 30 minutes at the hospital. He had met girls and boys who had known nothing but sorrow since they were born. He had felt the cold that penetrates the bones in the freezing Gaza nights, without heating, without light. He was in Gaza during operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January 2009) and witnessed the destruction of thousands of houses and the illing of 3000 people, including hundreds of children, who certainly were not firing rockets.

“Stay human”, Vittorio always said. Wherever we are from, we are part of the same community. Every man, every woman, every child on this planet, wherever he or she is born and lives, has the right to life and dignity. The same rights that we claim for ourselves belong to all the others, without exception.

We embrace the familiy, the volunteers of the ISM, he friends, the young people of Gaza who mobilised to try to save his life.

Let's stay human even if all around humanity seems absent.

Stay human for him, Vittorio Arrigoni, just, passionate, human

I am sure that the greatest contribution we can offer to the memory of Vittorio is to continue to work to support the population of Gaza and of Palestine in there struggle for freedom, justice and human rights

Mairead Maguire (Nobel peace laureate)

The gaze of women.

L'Aquila: Everyone has looked, but who has really seen it?

The committee Donne terre-mutate launches a national encounter.

To bring women from all over Italy to see L’Aquila as it is.

To smell the scents and touch the broken remnents and to hold hands.

Donne terre-mutate Call us to L'Aquila 7 and May

www.laquiladonne.com

An Arab, a Jew, a human. We remember Julian Mer Khamis

Juliano Mer Khamis, Israeli actor and director, was the son of Arna, a Jewish Israeli woman, founder of the theatre school in the Jenin refugee camp, and of Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian from Haifa.

In 2006 he opened the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, as a school of theatre for Palestinian girls and boys, as a space for expression and freedom where they could “Find a new horizon, preserve their values of liberation and not fall into the trap set by the occupation to become the mirror image of their enemy. But for this it's necessary to construct a strong identity that doesn't give way to sendiments of revenge, that is based on universal values, culture, consciousness: If someone kills your daughter, and you have the strength to not kill his daughter, you have the strength to resist and to maintain your values. Then you will be able to beat them because you are stronger as a human being”.

For Juliano, this was the real struggle against the Israeli occupation because "What occupation is doing is destroying society”. But it was also a struggle against all fundamentalism to "build on the basis not of tradition or religion, but of freedom, of democratic structures, of a high level of education, of free opinion, of culture... To combat tradition is to combat the occupation”.

This commitment to freedom, starting with children, was an annoyance to those who did not share his dream of being“the connection, a door, a window”.

On 4 April, Juliano was killed by an armed man, his face covered, who had waited at the entrance to the refugee camp.

We will keep alive his memory and his dream of freedom

War is never the solution

Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya started with the usual pretext: to defend the civilian population - this time from the attacks by the forces of Gaddafi, up to a month ago, the firm ally of those who now bomb him.

We've seen the results of the military interventions and of the lies told to us about Iraq and Afghanistan: thousands of civilians killed and, after so many years, peace is still far away.

As the democratic organisations in Afghanistan say: “For the price of one day of war, we could have built all the schools and hospitals that we need and we could emerge from underdevelopment”.

This intervention is also in violation of article 11 of the Italian constition which repudiates war, and in which it is specified that not only wars of aggression (an offense against the freedom of other peoples) but also war as tool for resolving international conflicts: even if we are right in a conflict, our fundamental law prohibits us from imposing our point of view by force of arms and instead suggests that we use all diplomatic and legal instruments.




And we have many questions

• Why has the international community only now realised that Gaddafi is the head of an authoritarian regime?

• Why did the Italian government sign a economic-military treaty with Libya, which it has not cancelled with the necessary parliamentary vote?

• Why did Italy sell arms to Libya?

• Why did the Security Council of the UN vote for a resolution that allows anyone to go and bomb Libya, rather than defend the civilian population by sending an interposition force of civilian observers to verify the truce declared on March 18.?

• Why did the UN choose ex-colonial countries with large-scale economic interests in Libya to defend the rebels rather than countries that are really neutral in the conflict?

• Why does the fate of the Libyan opposition provoke so much international indignation and the intervention of NATO while this doesn't happen for other countries (Palestine, Bahrain, Sudan) ?

• Why has the Saudi regime sided with the Libyan rebels while repressing any attempt at democratisation in their own country and sending soldiers to repress protests in Bahrain(45 dead in the last few days)?

• Why do solidarity and respect for human rights not apply to the thousands of people who have been washed up on our shores in flight from poverty, conflict and dictatorship?

We are not indifferent to the fate of the Libyan population, just as we were not indifferent to the fate of migrants imprisoned in Gaddafi's camps as part of the treaty that our government with the support of the opposition signed with Libya and reconfirmed yesterday by parliament to allow deportation of immigrants to Libya. However, we have seen that military interventions are bound to fail from our experience of Kosovo (now a large US base) Somalia, Iraq, and above all Afghanistan where none of the declared humanitarian aims have been realised.

We consider humanitarian intervention to be a complete deception, not just because by definition we are against any war but because past and present experience prove it.

At the same time, migrants arrived at Lampeduas are abandoned in inhuman conditions, together with the local population, by the authorities who should take care of them, out of respect for those human rights that the "defend" only with weapons.

We refuse the military response to conflict.

We oppose the use of Italian military bases for this intervention.

We call for a real and effective arms blockade to all parties in the war.
We call for a cessation of the bombing.

War cannot be humanised. It can only be abolished

Albert Einstein

Appeal by the Italian network of women in black for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

Italy is at war

There is no combat in our territory, but the mechanisms of war are in action with all that implies: rising military spending, militarisation of territory and of minds.

The involvement of Italy in the military intervention in Afghanistan started and the end of 2001 when Italy joined the ISAF mission to provide “security support” and sent 350 military personnel.

It was supposed to last “at least six months” and cost “a few tens of billion lire”.

And now, it's almost 10 years later

The “peacekeeping “ mission has become a war, and leadership has passed from the UN to NATO in 2003 . We moved from light weapons to assault weapons, from light rules of engagements to ever more aggressive rules, from 350 soldiers to 1000 in 2003, 3900 in 2010 and 4200 now.

Since the start of the mission, the cost has been 3 billion 100 million Euro, and costs continue to be 65 million Euro a month.

The refinancing of the military intervention happens every six months with bipartisan support (with a few exceptions), in violation of article 11 of the Constitution, without ever discussing the objectives gained in Parliament. The same happened again in February.

410 million Euro (2.26 million a day) has been budgeted for the Afghanistan mission for the first six months of 2011, while the budget for reconstruction and assistance gets ever tinier (just 16 million for the six month period).

While we are facing ferocious cuts in education, culture, research, health, local government, and the environment, we see that the arms sector and military spending are not suffering any reduction - contrary to what is happening in other European countries.

Since 2006 there has been a 28% rise in military spending in Italy, and this is set to rise by a further 8.4% in 2011. To this we must add money assigned to the Ministry of Development, which have been improperly used to fund new arms systems, and a sum of 1.5 billion Euro for military missions abroad.

The total is therefore 24.3 billion Euro. Among the projects being funded is the purchase of 131 F35 fighterbombers at the cost of 16 billion Euro and of ten frigates at teh cost of 5.6 billion Euro.

The war in Afghanistan fits into the NATO strategic concept, defined at the Lisbon summit 20th November 2010, while consists of bringing in more and more countries and in intervening wherever their interests are "threatened", exercising a form of world dominion and representing a continual threat to peace.

We women in black have always been against the war, and so also against the military intervention in Afghanistan.

In the light of the current situation, we state that all declared objectives have failed; the fight against terrorism, bringing democracy and security, liberating Afghan women.

In reality, the Taleban have retaken control of two thirds of the country. Karzai was reelected fraudulently, the conflict has spread to Pakistan, warlords and druglords are in control, almost 80% of the population is living in poverty, the production of opium has increased to a point where it represents 93% of world production, corruption is widepread, the lives of women have worsened to the point that suicides have increased to unprecedented levels ( women between 18 and 35 set fire to themselves to escape the intollerable violence of their fate).

The Karzai government has reintroduced the “Ministry of Vice and Virtue” and has enacted a law according to which Shiite women cannot refuse sexual relations with their husbands, cannot go to school, cannot go to the doctor or to work without being accompanied by a male relative.

Now they are promulgating a law that brings refuges for mistreated women - up to now run by Afghan NGOs) under direct government control. To go to a refuge, women will have to be accompanied by a male relative and be handed over to the family on request.

If such political deals involving the bodies and lives of women are still happening, it is also the responsibility of the "liberators" among them Italy, which from the start took on the task of rebuilding the Afghan justice system. If this is the result, we must question the millions invested.

We, women in black, during these years have formed relationships with Afghan women's associations (RAWA, HAWCA, OPAWC) who have been a valuable source of testimony and who have made known to us the couragious capacity for unarmed resistance of the women and the Afghan population as a whole.

These women and the many different voices of civil society make up the democratic, nonviolent resistance of the Afghan people and they ask for our support in bringing the military occupation to an end, which would mean for them, as a first step, an end to aerial bombardment - the principle (though by no means the only) cause of the deaths of over 40,000 civilians since the war started.

There is no peace without justice.

• We call for the trial of all the war criminals and war lors who are currently present in the Afghan government.
  


• We call on all who identify themselves as feminists or pacifists to join us in identifying practices, instruments, and forms of opposition to bring about the withrawal of troops from Afghanistan.


• Do not allow Afghanistan to become yet another NATO military base


• Support the democratic forces, starting with the women.
  


• Support the reconstruction of the country outside the logic of militarisation.