Rally against the arms trade

On Mon­day 16 Sep­tem­ber a small group of PiH singers joined mem­bers of CAAT and a larg­er pro-Pales­tin­ian group out­side the Edin­burgh Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence Cen­tre where an arms indus­try con­fer­ence was being held. The con­fer­ence was pri­mar­i­ly spon­sored by Leonar­do and involved oth­er arms man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies includ­ing BAE Sys­tems as well as busi­ness, aca­d­e­m­ic and gov­ern­ment representatives.

This was a very vocal and noisy demon­stra­tion involv­ing record­ings of bombs falling and very loud ampli­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions from many present.

Thanks to the per­sua­sive and help­ful inter­ven­tions of John and Kathy we did man­age to secure our­selves a ‘slot’ dur­ing which we were able to sing sev­er­al of the songs which we sad­ly now know so well from our week­ly vig­ils, includ­ing The Chil­dren Are Always Ours, Ara­bic Bel­la Ciao, Lay Down your Sword and Shield, Ros­es and Bread and Cease­fire Now.

Many of those present, includ­ing some slight­ly bewil­dered staff from the EICC, lis­tened atten­tive­ly and some of the oth­er demon­stra­tors were encour­aged to join us in some of the rep­e­ti­tions and call and response songs.

Very many thanks to John who stepped in to lead us so ably in what were quite chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances, and to those oth­ers who helped to enable us to make our voic­es heard and empha­sise the fact that protest in har­mo­ny real­ly can feel so much more effec­tive than protest in rage.