an interview with david heller
"It's exciting to wake up in the morning
and think 'it's a big bad world but we're on
track to change it.' Every day throws up new
challenges, new people and new adventures for
the campaigns."
more information and
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Friends of the Earth Flanders
& Brussels website
(Flemish
)
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David Heller photographed at the
bi-annual general meeting.
Croatia: September 2004.
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I have worked with Freinds of the Earth
Flanders & Brussels' European Voluntary
Service as a campaigner and in web support
for four years.
Most of my life I've been involved in the
peace movement. I was dragged around London
on demonstrations by my parents when I was
younger, including demonstrations against
cruise missiles. Later, I was an activist in
campaigns against the arms trade, especially
nuclear weapons. I lived at a peace camp in
Scotland and while I was there Friends of the
Earth Flanders & Brussels organized a
peace march from Brussels to Faslane in
Scotland. They arrived on my doorstep after
walking for weeks, and I was inspired by
their energy and enthusiasm, I thought they
were a group of people that I wanted to keep
in touch with. They asked me to work with
them under the European Voluntary
service.
Friends of the Earth Flanders &
Brussels was established in 1991, the first
big project took place in 1992; a walk across
America. A group of people mainly from
Belgium, but also from different Native
American groups, walked from New York to the
Nevada nuclear test site. They walked about
5000 kilometers, which took nine months. The
project set the main focus for Friends of the
Earth Flanders & Brussels: a combination
of environmental, human rights and
disarmament issues.
Our historic focus has been on nuclear
issues; weapons testing, power and now we're
looking at other issues including;
genetically modified food and organic
agriculture, transport and climate change,
but we aim to make links between these
campaigns and disarmament and human rights
issues. For example, when we talk about
transport we talk about oil consumption and
the war in Iraq, emphasizing the fact that it
was a war about oil. When we talk about
disarmament issues we make the link with the
environment, when we work on depleted
uranium, there are clear links to human
rights, and the environmental impacts of
weapons.
We hold demonstrations, perform street
theatre, hold stalls, and use various other
methods to try to reach people directly. Most
of our work is in Gent, through our office,
but we have paying members across Flanders
and we organize different activities across
Flanders, but we mainly operate in Gent at
the moment for practical reasons. The next
biggest area in which we work is Brussels,
because Parliament is there so it's often the
most appropriate place to lobby or
demonstrate. Next, Friends of the Earth
Flanders & Brussels is looking to promote
local groups and to work in the areas where
they are established.
Friends of the Earth Flanders &
Brussels is an international, outward looking
group, but we are also very aware of the need
to work locally in Flanders.
Friends of the Earth Flanders &
Brussels works with a large group of
volunteers; about 30-40 international
volunteers under the European Voluntary
Service; other international volunteers, and
also many Flemish volunteers. The volunteer'
s commitment ranges from working every day to
once a month, with tasks including helping
with campaigns, holding street stalls or
project work. The volunteers participate in
non-hierarchical working groups, using
consensus for decision-making - the groups
have a lot of autonomy within the
organization, complying with guidelines set
at our general meeting. We have a
spokes-council where a spokesperson from each
group meets every two months to work on
common issues and strategic development.
We have a paying membership of around 200
and we are about to start on a membership
drive. In the past we have worked as an
affinity group, working on actions without
having paid membership. We've enjoyed broad
support from people who knew about us, and
not just in Gent. Membership is a priority,
not just in financial terms, but to give
people a sense that they belong and encourage
them to get involved in campaigns, letter
writing and cyberactions. In the past three
months we have gone from a membership of less
than 50 to 200, and our aim is to have 10,000
members by 2010. I think that it's an
ambitious but realistic target because there
isn't another grass root campaigning
environmental group in Flanders at the
moment. If we do good outreach work I am sure
we'll be able to grow very rapidly.
I am involved in the nuclear disarmament
campaign. Friends of the Earth Flanders &
Brussels works mainly on the issue of
American nuclear weapons in Europe – a
leftover from the cold war. The United States
is the only country in the world that has
nuclear weapons outside its own territory; it
has weapons in Britain, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey. The fact
that these weapons are based outside the U.S.
leads to problems under the Non Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) and at a time when there is
attention to proliferation of nuclear
weapons, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
(WMD) in Iraq, North Korea, Iran, India,
Pakistan and Israel, it's incredibly
hypocritical. The most extreme example is the
war in Iraq; especially while the U.S.
maintain the largest stockpile of weapons of
mass destruction in the world, some of which
are directly in contravention with the NPT
due to the fact that they are in other
countries.
Over the past few years we have focused on
a very successful campaign of civil
disobedience at the nuclear weapon base in
Belgium, at NATO political headquarters in
Brussels and the military headquarters in
Mons. We have also picked up other aspects of
anti nuclear work – with mayors of local
communities to try to get them to do work
with their local population on the issue
(Mayors for Peace); coordinated with the
office of the mayor of Hiroshima who has a
close relationship with the issue of nuclear
disarmament. There has been a lot of movement
in getting local authorities to sign up to
this network.
We work on monitoring treaties, the NPT,
test ban treaties and have sent delegations
to international conferences on the NPT and
others. We try to work with groups in other
countries who are involved in similar methods
of campaigning, on the Mayors for Peace
Initiative, also civil disobedience in
Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany in
particular, where we've been using a model of
'citizens' weapons inspections. We send
people into the nuclear weapons bases, often
trespassing to try and gather information, a
lot of the time it's a question of getting
the information and getting it out to people.
With the U.S. being so keen to conduct
weapons inspections, it gave us a nice action
model to say 'you're going to do weapons
inspections in Iraq so how about letting
people in to inspect your Weapons of Mass
Destruction. You won't let us in, we're going
in anyway!'
We used this type of action model in
Belgium very successfully, with up to 2000
people taking part in the inspections, during
the largest one there were 1117 arrests. A
lot of people managed to get into the base –
but the fences were only 1.5 m high so people
were able to climb over (at others, for
example, Faslane the fence is 3 meters with
razor wire at the top). The police and
military had to mobilize huge numbers to try
to stop us and still we managed to get past
them. It's inspiring to be able to mobilize a
population that has no real tradition of
civil disobedience, except maybe in the trade
unions, and to take them to a point where
they are willing to risk being arrested. But,
it has to be backed up by the campaigning
work, research lobbying work in local
communities, and with the mayors and local
authorities. To mobilize 2000 people when we
only have a support base of 200, we had to do
a lot of work with local groups who came
together just for that one campaign. We
didn't successfully manage to turn them all
into members though. Its one of our
challenges now to make sure that in the
future when we run campaigns that we build on
the support and turn it into membership. This
is part of our strategic planning process, to
build membership.
We have established practical solidarity
projects with different indigenous groups,
particularly in North and Latin America, and
we envisage that membership with the Friends
of the EarthI network will help by further
developing links with groups in North and
Latin America, also we will have access to
others in the network who are supporting the
same indigenous groups.
Friends of the Earth Flanders &
Brussels is excited at the opportunity to
join the Friends of the Earth International
network because we do a lot of international
campaigning and having membership of more
formal federation means that we can
consolidate that work. For example we might
already work with some of the groups in the
network but doing it in the context of
Friends of the Earth means that we can work
in a more structured way. Now when we make
contact with another group they will know us
as a member of the network. Also it will give
us ideas for camp work at a national level,
and we can share information and strategies
that we don't have the resources to carry out
alone.
We believe we can offer much to the
Friends of the Earth International network.
We are in dialogue with the umbrella
organization for environmental groups in
Flanders who identified a need for Friends of
the Earth groups within Flanders, we are
plugging a gap in the Flemish environmental
landscape and in turn, the Friends of the
Earth international network. On a practical
level, we can also contribute as a group by
being able to mobilize activists for events
in Brussels and we have already worked with
Friends of the Earth Europe on the GM tomato
tour and the carbon dinosaur tour.
During the Friends of the Earth
International BGM in Croatia, I was inspired
and horrified by some of the stories I have
heard and I think it's going to be great for
Friends of the Earth Flanders & Brussels
to join the Friends of the Earth
International network.
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