War starts here!

WRI/ofog Seminar and WRI Council meeting in Luleå, Sweden

This year's WRI Council meeting will take place from 19-21 July 2011 in Luleå, in the very north of Sweden. The Council meeting itself is part of a seminar and action camp under the title "War Starts Here", organised by WRI's new Swedish affiliate ofog. The camp and seminar will begin on 22 July, and last until 29 July.

The seminar will include discussions and workshops on five broader themes:

• War starts here - let's stop it from here (military basis and infrastructure)
• Right to land and indigenous people/resistance
• The military-industrial chain
• War against women and feminist antimilitarism
• Artic and the war on natural resources

After the seminar, there will be an opportunity to participate in nonviolent action training, and then in a range of actions against NEAT, the North European Aerospace Testrange.

NEAT is Europe’s largest overland test range and consists of an area 360 by 100 km of restricted air space and 1,650 sq km of restricted land area (expandable to 3,000sq km). It is a cooperation of the Swedish organisations FMV (the Swedish Defence Material Administration) and SSC (the Swedish Space Corporation). NEAT is used as a training area for bomb dropping, for testing drones and AMRAAM (Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile), which could be carried by drones, and for other weapon testing and war exercises (see also the article in The Broken Rifle No 86, September 2010).

More information on the camp is available at http://warstartshere.com/en

For information on the WRI Council, please contact the WRI office at info@wri-irg.org.