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Not In Our Name (NION)
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MARCH 20, 2003
12:59 PM
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CONTACT:
Not
In Our Name
(NION)
Cat David, 212-625-1137
Email: media@notinourname.net
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Not In Our Name Vows to Step Up Actions in
Resistance to “War on the World”
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| WASHINGTON
- March 20 - The Bush administration has begun its attack on the
people of Iraq. In an unprecedented use of force, the Pentagon
has vowed to “shock and awe” the people of Baghdad into surrender.
Today, organizers from the Not In Our Name Project (NION) responded
to the news.
Robina Niaz,
an organizer with NION, said, “Of course the invasion of Iraq
is a terrible tragedy. However, this is not a failure of the peace
movement but a failure of US foreign policy. I am not discouraged
because I believe we have made great strides. Who could have imagined
that the whole world would become organized and march millions
strong against the war?”
Mary Lou Greenberg,
another organizer, described how NION will continue its fight:
“Now that the war has started, it’s up to the people to stop it
as soon as possible, building on everything the movement has done
so far – from school walkouts and civil disobedience to resistance
from the pulpit. People are going to step up the resistance. We
are expecting that with the start of war there will be heightened
efforts to silence and intimidate people but the antiwar movement
will not be silenced.”
“We’re going
to work with other forces to take it to a new and more powerful
level,” said Maya Sen, another NION organizer. She pointed to
the March 5 National Moratorium Against the War that was called
by NION, in which thousands of students nationwide walked out
of classes. “We encourage people to speak out at their jobs, stage
walkouts and teach-ins, and disrupt business as usual. The idea
is that people bring resistance into their daily lives.”
Joe Urgo, a
veteran and organizer with NION, said, “This war started before
Iraq and is clearly intended to go beyond it. My only answer is
relying on the people to stop it. The people in this country have
a dynamic role to play, a place where they can put their hands
on and change history.”
NION, an organization
that was founded one year ago this week, has vowed to resist not
only the war that will “last a generation,” in the words of the
administration, but also the ethnic profiling and roundups of
immigrants and other attacks on Americans’ civil rights taking
place at home.
Maya Sen said
that NION is unique in how it links these issues together: “We’ve
always taken the position that the aggressive actions the US is
taking against immigrants at home is really just another front
in the same war the US is fighting abroad on Iraq. There has been
a real building of consciousness on this issue over the past year.”
From the time
of its inception, NION has grown into a network that includes
28 chapters across the country and several in other countries,
representing the broad and deep diversity of the peace and justice
movement around the globe, and has mobilized hundreds of thousands
of people to take action to resist a government program it sees
as “immoral, unjust, and illegitimate.”
###
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