REFUSING TO KILL IS NOT A CRIME
On the International Day of Action against imprisoning refuseniks, 1 December 2006

London: Picket in Parliament Square & outside the Turkish Airlines
 

	click here for the big picture

Istanbul: March by the Conscientious Objection Platform
March in Istanbul - Mehmet Tarhan reads the Platform Manifesto
Philadelphia: Speak out with two distinguished mothers of soldiers who refuse to go to Iraq
From l to r: Al and Celeste Zappala who lost their son Sherwood Baker in Iraq; Carolyn Ho, mother of Ehren Watada; Gloria Pacis, mother of Stephen Funk; Margaret Prescod from Women of Color in the Global Women's Strike (GWS) and KPFP radio presenter, Phoebe Jones from GWS and Eric Gjertsen from Payday.	Nilgun giving a report on Turkey

Athens showing of Refusing To Kill, 9 September 2006

Just uploaded on the COs Association website! You can see the info about the event on http://arnisi-strateusis.gr/?q=node/115 and by clicking on the last link before the attachments the photos (http://arnisi-strateusis.gr/?q=image/tid/12).

As you can see the room was more than full, we even brought some extra chairs behind and still some were standing during the showing, we were about 60 persons! Lazaros Petromelidis, the president of the COs Association welcomed everybody first and said some things about the occasion, the organizers, the movie and Payday! Then we showed the movie, which everybody liked a lot (it had a big applause in the end)!

Afterwards there were the speeches and later a big open discussion where several persons from the audience participated; asking, commenting, etc. it took us 2 hours!

More analytically on the speeches, Yiannis Chrisovergis from the Association read a greeting from EBCO and then Michalis Maragakis spoke, thanking everybody for this honour and congratulating Payday on the documentary! He spoke about his time in prison and the big worldwide campaign for his release, the situation then and now etc. He even announced that he offers all the letters he had received when he was imprisoned to the Greek Section of Amnesty International to thank the organization for its work all these years and to inform and mobilize even more people today... this was very moving!

Lazaros Petromelidis spoke after him representing the Greek Association of COs and then me on behalf of Amnesty International and Marilena Livanou on behalf of World Without Wars and Violence.

As for publicity we had media coverage from one of the biggest newspapers, Eleftherotypia with two articles: one small for the press release of Amnesty International (http://www.enet.gr/online/online_text/c=112,dt=07.12.2006,id=66552020) and one bigger on the day of the showing (http://www.iospress.gr/iospress/iospress200612.htm) where they copied almost all our leaflet!

Another good news (which keeps us still busy) is that the COs of the Association in Thessaloniki (the second biggest town in Greece) decided suddenly to show the Refusing to kill too!

yours for spreading Refusing To Kill,

Alexia