Mar.-Apr. 2003:
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Stop That Train!

During the week of February 21, activists across Italy protested against U.S. military trains traveling through that country and actually forced a number of trains to stop.

The actions began when a small group of protesters took to the station of Monselice to stop trains transporting war goods from a U.S. base in Vicenza to Camp Derby in Pisa. The “train of death,” as it was called, was forced to halt its journey in front of the station of Monselice. Blocked by protestors and bonfires for more than two hours, it finally restarted—but in the opposite direction, returning through Padua to Vicenza.

Protesters soon learned that there were a total of 24 trains scheduled to make the journey in the coming days. On February 22, all along the proposed routes, blockades were set up, walls were painted, banners were hung and flags from a wide range of groups were seen. Trainstopping soon became a national focusing point for the antiwar movement. Pacifists, ecologists, communists, socialists and even parliamentary delegates began attending trainstopping actions throughout Italy. Groups of trainwatchers also formed, sending reports to a radio network that conducted and informed all those involved from a broadcasting station in Padua. Police dragged demonstrators from the path of the trains and reportedly beat some of the protesters, but to no avail.

By day three, the situation only seemed to be gaining momentum. People began pulling the emergency brakes on trains running along the route in an effort to stop or hinder the shipments, because, as one person commented, death trains must be stopped, as war is a danger to all of us. Trainstopping transformed into planestopping in Pisa, where in the afternoon a group of activists from Rome, Pisa and Naples occupied the military airport, blocking the paths and positions of the planes and hindering the normal operations of the airport. Reports of civil disobedience occupations were also reported from Torino, Milan, Padua, Palermo, and a handful of other locations. Some government representatives defended the trainstopping on the grounds that Article 11 of the Italian constitution declares that Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offence and as a means for settling international disputes.

February 26 started off with police finding activists chained to railroad tracks in Pisa; the police were forced to hack through the chains with industrial bolt cutters. With the arrival of several parliamentary members at the base at Vicenza, a civil inspection was organized. With this first glimpse into the activities of the U.S. operations in Italy, 20-year-old public rumors of the storage of nuclear weapons inside the base were finally confirmed. Luca Casarini, a prominent activist in the civil disobedience movement commented, “We are for global disarmament, and if it’s worth it for Iraq, it is also worth it for the United States who occupy our territory.”

That evening, a nearly three-kilometer-long caravan of trucks, tanks and military arms was stalled on the Italian highway as they were attempting to transport the goods for loading at the Verona station. Peace flags were draped over U.S. military trucks and met with bewildered looks from the soldiers. The activists were all loaded into vans and detained.

The next morning, an all-night vigil by trainwatchers at the Pisa railroad station culminated in an 8:30 a.m. demonstration when a last effort was made to stop the delivery of the arms shipment. That day the movement took on a distinctly international air. There was a protest at the Italian embassy in London in solidarity with the trainstopping movement, and on the German-Italian border, further obstruction of military transports took place, in some cases completely stopping the flow of traffic.

Back in Italy, the union of shipyard workers in Livorno announced that they would refuse to load warships headed for Turkey with the war train cargo. In Novara, 3,000 high school and university students demonstrated against global war; the demonstration included two civil disobedience actions.

As of February 28, actions continued to take place throughout Italy. With 20 “death trains” remaining in Italy, the business of trainstopping seems far from over.

—War Resisters’ International

Plowshares In Ireland

In the early hours of February 3, five members of the Catholic Worker movement in Ireland cut their way into Shannon Airport. Calling themselves the “Pitstop Plowshares,” Deirdre Clancy, Karen Fallon, Damien Moran and Ciaron O’Reilly, all from Ireland, and Nuin Dunlop, from the United States, poured human blood on the runway that has been servicing U.S. military flights, troop and munition deployments to U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Qatar.

After the blood pouring, the Plowshares activists constructed a shrine to Iraqi children killed and threatened by U.S./British bombardment and then began to unpave the runway, working on its edge with a mallet. They also painted “pit stop of death” on the door of the hangar housing a U.S. Navy plane under repair and attempted to dismantle the hangar.

When they were arrested by Irish police, the five refused to co-operate with bail conditions and issued a statement and a call for mass nonviolent resistance to Irish complicity in the forthcoming war on Iraq. Their statement began, “We come to Shannon Airport to carry out an act of life-affirming disarmament in a place of preparations for slaughter. Like the railway tracks that ran to the town of Auschwitz, the runway at Shannon has been militarized for service on an assembly line of death.”

At press time, it was expected they would be moved to Limerick Prison. They have pledged to continue their acts of witness in and out of prison. They can be reached through Shannon Peace House, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.

Dirty Tricks, 2003

In its efforts to secure U.N. backing for a war against Iraq, the Bush administration is apparently using a wide range of surveillance and spying techniques, according to the British magazine The Observer.

The magazine’s March 2 issue reported that The Observer had received a leaked interoffice memo from a high-ranking staffer at the U.S. National Security Agency urging NSA staff and undisclosed allies to deploy a “surge [of surveillance and eavesdropping] particularly directed at the UN Security Council members (minus U.S. and [Great Britain] of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/dependencies, etc.—the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.” [punctuation as published in The Observer] The memo was signed Frank Koza and dated January 31. The Observer stated that it had verified that a Frank Koza was indeed on the staff of the NSA and had secured his telephone number but had failed to reach him.

The revelation was widely assumed to be embarrassing to NSA head Condoleeza Rice and the administration, to the extent they are capable of embarrassment.

Women Against the War

Beyond the continuing work of Women in Black groups around the world, there are a number of women-led U.S. antiwar initiatives. One such effort is the Lysistrata Project.

During the devastating Peloponnesian War in fourth-century BC Greece, the comic playwright Aristophanes wondered what might happen if women refused sex with men who went to war. The idea became “Lysistrata”—titled for its heroine, who sells the idea to women on both sides of the war, one of the oldest antiwar works in the Western canon.

In January, New York actors Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower started the Lysistrata Project—meant not to induce women to trade sex for peace, but to stage simultaneous readings from the play on one day in cities and towns around the world. At press time, readings were scheduled for March 3 in all 50 U.S. states and 58 other countries.

Also as this issue went to press, we were receiving daily bulletins from Code Pink: Women’s Pre-emptive Strike for Peace, a United for Peace and Justice-endorsed antiwar mobilization scheduled to take place in Washington on March 8, International Women’s Day. “We call on women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq. We call on mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters, on workers, students, teachers, healers, artists, writers, singers, poets, and every ordinary outraged woman willing to be outrageous for peace. Women have been the guardians of life-not because we are better or purer or more innately nurturing than men, but because the men have busied themselves making war.” For more information on Code Pink, see www.codepink4peace.org.

Arts Against the War

Finally, across the country, artists, writers and performers in nearly every field have been organizing art-based antiwar initiatives.

Nearly two dozen poets including Sapphire, Mos Def and Sharon Olds read their work on the state of New York City’s Avery Fisher Hall February 17, the Monday night after the massive antiwar demonstrations of February 15. The reading was staged as a response to the cancellation by First Lady Laura Bush of a planned reading at the White House for fear that some of the poets would have opposed war against Iraq. On stage with the poets were playwright Arthur Miller, folksinger Odetta and actor Wallace Shawn. Similar readings were held in other locations across the country.

Some 100 actors and other notables, including Susan Sarandon, Alfre Woodard and most of the cast of “The West Wing,” are seeking more signatures on an “Artists Say Win Without War” petition to be presented to the White House, available on the web at www.moveon.org/artistswinwithoutwar.

And in the February 26 issue of The New York Times, Musicians United to Win Without War ran an ad headlined, “War is wrong and we know it.”The ad quoted the “War is not the answer” line from the late Marvin Gaye’s song “What’s Going On?” and was signed by dozens of performers and songwriters including singers Natalie Merchant, Lou Reed and Sheryl Crow, rappers Jay-Z and Nas and the groups R.E.M. and the Dave Mathews Band.