| PRESS RELEASE: REFUSENIKS & MILITARY FAMILIES SPEAK OUT plus Video premiere – a Payday event, part of the 6th Global Women’s Strike SATURDAY 12 MARCH 2005 2-5 pm Trinity United Reformed Church (TURC), Buck St, NW1 payday@paydaynet.org www.refusingtokill.net 020 7209 4751, 0780 378 9699 This exciting and timely event brings together soldiers refusing to kill, women fighting for justice for loved ones, anti-rape and anti-racist campaigners, and a wide range of anti-war activists. In Iraq, murder, rape and torture continue for hundreds of thousands of people, the US & UK shoot to kill policy is internationally exposed by the wounding of freed Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena and the murder of Nicola Calipari. In the UK there is the unprecedented government attack on human rights, plans to criminalise dissent and to end the right to protest. Muslim communities are targeted, race riots are whipped up, and asylum seekers are deported back to rape, war and devastation. Key speakers include Sue Webster, British, of Afro-Caribbean descent, wife of Abdullah William Webster, an Afro-American who has been a soldier for 20 years. They have a two-year-old daughter. A devout Muslim, Sgt Webster is serving a 14-month sentence for refusing to go to Iraq on religious grounds. Amnesty International has declared Sgt Webster a prisoner of conscience while Ms Webster is determined to get public attention for her husband’s fight not to kill. Rose Gentle, mother of British Army Fusilier Gordon Gentle, who was killed aged 19 in Iraq last June. In August 2004 Ms Gentle and her daughter Maxine, delivered to Downing Street an angry letter Maxine had written to Mr Blair about her brother’s death. They met John Prescott, only to walk out a few minutes later because “he was talking rubbish”. Rose Gentle is a tireless campaigner against the war and founded Military Families Against the War. Video premiere: Refusing to Kill Black people are prominent among refuseniks from around the world. Jamaican James Fairweather, a WW2 veteran, describes the racism of the US Army based in Germany in 1946, and how Caribbean soldiers defied the law to help feed starving "enemy" women and children; a man from Sudan tells of women and men conscripted and killed in their millions in the war there; a Ugandan woman had to seek asylum in the UK after fleeing pervasive rape and violence in the army. Payday, an international and multi-racial network of men, co-ordinates men’s participation in the Global Women’s Strike. End Poverty and War – Invest in Caring Not Killing! A living wage for all our work & Pay equity in the global market payday@paydaynet.org www.refusingtokill.net 020 7209 4751 Global Women’s Strike womenstrike8m@server101.com 020 7482 2496 www.globalwomenstrike.net |