STOPPED
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Stop the
War and All Wars!
Invest
in Caring, not Killing!
Women's
weekly anti-war picket
October
- December 2001
Tuesdays 5-6.15pm
Opposite Downing
St, Whitehall SW1
All welcome
Come and say why you oppose the war
Report of first women’s anti-war picket
Tuesday (9 October 2001) was the first women’s picket against the war. Women from many different races, ages and nationalities came together to put our collective voices to Downing Street and the rest of the world. We told them that we will not stand for the bombing in our names and demanded an immediate end to this obscene slaughter. We call on all justice movements to side with carers against the war.
Lively
and determined chants rang out across Whitehall as dramatic puppets and
banners attracted the attention of passers-by.
The crowd listened intently as grandmothers and mothers, and other
women and men from Afghanistan, Britain, Israel, Sweden, the US, and
Zimbabwe, spoke of how their hearts went out to mothers in Afghanistan who
along with their children are starving while living in terror of being
bombed. It was reported that in armed conflict the majority of those
killed and injured are women and children. One mother spoke out for the 7
million people already starving in Afghanistan and the 1 in 4 children who
die before age 5 – the BBC has reported that one of the worst
humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. A lesbian
mother of a 19-year-old boy, bringing tears to many eyes, felt for Afghan
mothers who are hiding their sons from conscription, and said if they came
for her son she would do anything to hide him. An Afghan woman was furious
that food parcels are being dropped into countryside littered with 10
million landmines and that children running to pick up the food are being
blown up, adding to the half a million already disabled, many of whom are
orphans.
A Black American woman reported that many people oppose the war in the US but it has gone unreported. She called for Black people who make up 40% of the American armed forces to refuse to slaughter other people of colour. Others demanded that CNN and other media show what the bombs are doing to our sisters and brothers in Afghanistan and stop dehumanising the war by calling it “collateral damage”.
Exciting
news was given of a picket of the US embassy in Guyana by Indigenous women
and women of Indian and African descent against the war, which got wide
media coverage.
A
Jewish anti-Zionist man said the women’s picket was a great strength for
men against the war. He said Sharon was guilty of genocide in Palestine.
Quoting from a Ugandan refugee in London, a woman said “while men can run away from an invading army, we women may be pregnant, and we are responsible for the children. We can’t run.” She had been raped at gunpoint. The rape of women and children is always a consequence of war.
Pensioners, women with disabilities and mothers all called for the $40 billion lavished on the war to be reallocated to women and therefore to whole communities, beginning with women in Afghanistan.
Click on photos below for full-size view
