European Bureau for Conscientious Objection
“Our action took place on the Parliament Square in the heart of Athens where the central metro station is. We opened a big banner writing on its first half THE MONEY IS THERE (for military tank, airplane, submarine and bombs) and on its second half THE MONEY IS NOT THERE (for schools, hospitals, public transportation and peace). We also opened a banner with the IPB poster and a banner with the graph Military Spending vs. Millennium Development Goals (after translation in greek and calculation in Euros). We took textiles of different colours and we opened them in scale to show the proportional length of the costs. The coloured textiles are the MDGs and the black one is the military spending. On the military spending textile we put military helmets with the peace sign on them asking for social spending instead of military spending. We were reading our press release and we were asking people passing by to write on the black textile of the military spending where they would like this money to go instead (education, health, environment etc). People were very positive and we gave 800 press releases and some GDAMS follow-up fliers.” More info and photos available from http://exoplismoi.wordpress.com/.