25th February 2007
PEACE CAMPAIGN AT ARMY RECRUITMENT DRIVE
Members of Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum teamed up with a group of local teenagers in an information-giving exercise at an army recruitment drive in Queens Square on Saturday.
Hundreds of leaflets were handed out, mainly to young people and their parents, detailing the realities of army life. One leaflet, produced by national advice agency AT EASE, alerted young recruits to the binding contracts which can tie them into the army from before their 18th birthday until the age of 22 or later. A second leaflet outlined some of the dangers not usually highlighted by army recruiters, including the bullying regimes at army training barracks, the possible consequences - court martial and life-imprisonment - for soldiers who refuse to fight in an illegal war, and the lack of care shown by the MoD towards serving soldiers and ex-servicemen and women.
The campaigners also put up a large banner in protest at the army's use of weapons of mass slaughter for children's entertainment. Young children were encouraged by recruiters to clamber up and sit in the cab of a multiple launched rocket system (MLRS). This vehicle is described on the army website as "a self-propelled artillery rocket system with a range in excess of 30km… a single round of 12 rockets delivers 7,728 bomblets or 336 anti-tank mines."
Genny Bove of Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum commented:
"The multiple launched rocket system (MLRS) fires cluster bombs. Many of the bomblets do not explode on impact, but lie on the ground until unlucky children come across them. When cluster bomblets explode they fragment into hundreds of razor-sharp pieces of steel which can decapitate the victim, sever limbs and cause many other terrible injuries. With the UK committing itself just last Friday in Oslo to work with 45 other nations towards a new international treaty banning cluster bombs, it is ignorant and insensitive of the army to place a war machine which fires these weapons in our town centre and encourage children to play on it. As our banner pointed out, war is NOT family entertainment."
A recent report by Handicap International says that 98 percent of casualties from cluster munitions are non-combatants.
For more information about Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum, contact us on 0845 330 4505 or email 
wrexhamsaw@yahoo.com.
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