Activists from around the country are celebrating the cancellation of the first arms fair planned in Australia in 17 years.
The Asia Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition was to have been held in Adelaide in mid-November.
The merchants of death were planning to exhibit items such as missiles, night vision equipment, bombs, grenades and weapon systems.
The last arms fair in Australia—AIDEX in Canberra in 1991—was severely disrupted by mass direct action. As a result, organisers cancelled the follow-up exhibition planned for 1993.
Now the Adelaide arms fair has been called off for fear of protests.
The Sunday Mail in Adelaide reported: “Organisers made the decision after talks with the State Government and police over planned protest action against the three-day event.
“In recent weeks, police have given the Government several confidential briefings on the scale of the planned protests—including the participation of an ultra-radical group responsible for violence at last year’s APEC meeting in Sydney—and the cost of the huge police operation to counter them.”
But as Melbourne peace activist Jacob Grech of OzPeace put it: “The military and military befuddled governments are always jumping at shadows and making rash decisions based on dodgy intelligence.“The violent protesters coming to Adelaide bring to mind ‘Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction’.
“The military industry make billions of dollars every month through convincing governments that there are evil people out there out to destroy society… fortunately this time their myth-making backfired and their show was cancelled as a result.”
By David Glanz
Read the Sunday Mail article at http://tiny.cc/yj46n
