Press Release - 11 November 2006, New Delhi
Disarmament to combat poverty : a global challenge

To learn more about the campaign :
	The 10% option
	Participation in the International Peace Bureau Seminar (Nov. 2007)
Campaign documents :
	Newsletter, May 2007
	First steps of action
	Organisation
	The Initiators
	Concept note

On the 10th November 2006, the international campaign for disarmament to combat poverty was launched on the side lines of the India Social Forum in New Delhi. This campaign has been developing over a year long deliberations and consultations. The last consultation happened in March 2006 around the world social forum held in Karachi.

An action plan for the South Asia region has been drawn up for 2007 when a series of Peace education camps, coalition making and advocacy efforts are to be organised in India, Pakistan.

The European end of the campaign will see its first public launch in France in December 2006.

Poverty and social inequality, harsh denial of basic rights of the majority of human beings and world citizens, are nourishing a desperate and violent rejection of democratic values and enlarging support to chauvinistic and totalitarian forces.

The steady expansion of the arms trade and the proliferation of nuclear weapons are fuelling an arms race and militarization of states and societies and are putting at stake human security, democracy and development.
Nearly half of the world’s illiterate and forty percent of the world’s poor live in South Asia. Despite massive deprivation, the governments in the region have been spending excessively high amounts on military budgets and arms trade. Vital resources of the South are thus diverted to the benefit of powerful states and lethal industries of the North.
Such militarization is jeopardising food security, health, education, environment…In South Asia as well as in other parts of the world, it is high time to initiate a progressive reduction of arms trade and military budgets in order to convert the correspondent spending into social development investments to fight poverty and precariousness.

As a first step, the campaign “Disarmament to combat poverty” aims at obtaining a public commitment from France, India and Pakistan to reduce and redirect 10% of their military budgets by 2010.
Such a move is actually already sought by many social actors, labour organisations and corporate bodies; it will receive the support of vast majorities of European and Asian citizens.
It can have a direct and positive impact on the situation of millions of people who could benefit from innovations such as the extension of social security and protection to vulnerable workers and families or the development of civil service programmes involving youth into non-violent social action.
It will deliver a very encouraging message: that joining hands into non-violent people’s politics for justice and peace does provide a viable and liveable alternative to communal and chauvinistic antagonism and violence.

In South Asia many groups from various “walks of life” are already actively engaged in promoting such a perspective. The campaign proposes to carry further the existing efforts to develop dialogue and active convergence with all of them in order to enlarge non-violent mobilisations and public debates not only in the sub-continent but in Europe as well.
The focus on Europe is based on the conviction that any move towards disarmament does require a drastic shift into the defence policies of the “big power” states; that European citizens could back such a shift and that voices from the South have a crucial role to play to activate the mobilisations of the civil societies in the North.

We strongly believe that by the end of the 2000-2010 ‘UN International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence’, such a move could project the peoples of South Asia and Europe as the leading initiators of a New Deal of North-South cooperation geared towards achieving the Millenium Objectives and developing global human security.

International Coordination for the campaign Disarmament to Combat Poverty
can be reached via pdt@fdh.org