NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9505

Text File | 1992-12-21 | 6.4 KB | 123 lines

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From: Karen Marysdaughter <[e-mail]>
Subject: Rprt: IVth Intl WTR Conf, Brussels
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/* Written  9:38 am  Dec 19, 1992 by [e-mail] in igc:nonviolent.act */
/* ---------- "Rprt: IVth Intl WTR Conf, Brussels" ---------- */
                      [105 lines, 7 screens]

Report on the IVth International Conference on War Tax Resistance
    and Peace Tax Campaigns, Nov. 5-8, 1992 Brussels, Belgium

                    by Lynne Weiss (US NWTRCC)


The organizers of the IVth international Conference took full
advantage of the Conference's Brussels location. Participants had
a chance to visit and meet with diplomats at NATO headquarters,
with a British member of the European Parliament who supports
peace tax legislation in the European Community, and to hear a
panel discussion between Belgian war tax resisters and Belgian
legislators who have sponsored peace tax legislation for Belgium.

About forty-five of the sixty conference participants understood
English. All the meetings were conducted in English, with
simultaneous translations provided. To accommodate the
translators, even questions and brief observations had to be
delivered through a microphone at the front of the room.

Despite this constraint, discussions were lively and spirited.
Representatives attended from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland,
Belgium, Luxembourg, England, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Canada, and
India. Marian Franz, of the US Peace Tax Campaign, arranged for
funding for a Mennonite military CO and war tax resister from
Honduras (who prefers to remain nameless) to attend the
conference. Representatives from the US were myself (for NWTRCC,
the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee), Bob Irwin
(New England War Tax Resistance) (our seven-month old son, David
Russell Weiss-Irwin, was the only child at the conference),
Michael Fogler (Peace Taxpayers, Lexington KY), Marion Franz and
David Bassett (Peace Tax Campaign), and George Willoughby (WTR
Concerns Committee, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting).

Contrary to what I had heard, there are many European war tax
resisters. Their revenue agencies are extremely efficient,
however, unlike the US IRS. Most European tax resisters know
exactly what the consequences of any particular action will be,
and, inevitably, those consequences occur in a timely manner. Like
many US resisters, they suffer seizure of money from bank
accounts, seizure of personal property (especially cars), and
short jail sentences. However, in most of the European countries
represented at the conference, these seizures/sanctions occur
fairly quickly, so no one has time to build up a huge tax
liability and then face the loss of a house.

So far, the Dutch are the most advanced in terms of getting war
tax refusal recognized as a legal right and are viewed as the most
likely to be the first to get peace tax legislation passed. Many
countries had a surge of interest in WTR around the time of the
Gulf war. (In Germany, especially, the public interest in WTR was
so great it nearly destroyed the existing WTR group. Then,
unfortunately, interest evaporated quickly  once the war ended -
so the German WTR workers ended up feeling that they'd put out a
huge amount of energy that didn't result in much.)

I tried to spread information about war tax resistance (as opposed
to the peace tax campaign) in the US. Whenever it seemed
appropriate, I talked about the Colrain campaign as an example of
sustained active resistance. I also distributed ARS (Alternative
Revenue Service) EZ Peace forms as an example of a grassroots
organizing tool. I tried to express the diversity of the US war
tax resistance scene, which I think is difficult to comprehend if
you come from a country with one WTR group for the whole country.

I was the resource person for the workshop "WTR at the Grassroots
Level: Experiences, Seizures, Ideas, Strategies." In that workshop
I showed Carol Coney's video "Paying for Peace," which greatly
impressed people. Participants were impressed to realize that the
US WTR movement dates from the Second World War (most of the
European movements are about 10 years old), and also enjoyed the
chance to see on video people they knew or had heard about, such
as Carolyn Stevens, Betsy Corner, and Randy Kehler. We broke into
three groups to develop ideas for grassroots campaigns; one group
worked on as idea to have each country at the conference develop a
form similar to the EZ Peace form that would be appropriate to the
military/tax system of that country. Another group worked on
developing a poster to convey the connection between taxes and
militarism; the third group developed a list of potential allies
for the WTR movement and though about ways to connect "our" issues
to "their" issues.

The international group (now in existence six years) is forming a
stronger sense of itself as a coordinated body. An ongoing
international committee of six was formed; Marion Franz tells me
that they have begun to explore obtaining recognition as an NGO
(non-governmental organization) by the UN. The Conference agreed
to support Peace Brigade International's Sri Lanka project to
provide a constructive nonviolent presence in the Tamil/Sinhalese
conflict as its international project for 1993. (In 1991, the
international group donated $15,000 to the Innu, indigenous people
of eastern Canada whose land is being taken over by a NATO base.)
The group also sent letters to US legislators expressing support
for US peace tax legislation. A 1994 conference is scheduled to
take place in Spain.
__________________________________________________________________
Contacts: Addresses of persons mentioned in this posting may be
had from Karen Marysdaughter <[e-mail]>.
WTR information is regularly posted to the conference
'nonviolent.act' (peacenet), and from there to the mailing list
ACTIV-L, and to the usenet newsgroup misc.activism.progressive.
This posting by ed agro <[e-mail]>.
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