FROM RUTH LUSCHNAT IN BERLIN
8th March brought good weather to Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. At 10.00 am we went to the press conference of the WECF. (Women in Europe for a Common Future) Not many journalists had come.
The WECF told us that their coalition of ecological and women’s organisations in Europe, wants to push throught a rigid REACH, a law that requires all chemical substances in products to be authorised, or better, most of them not authorised and replaced by ecologically renewable substances. This law is to be decided upon in 2 years’ time and the chemical lobby wants to make it looser than it is already.
The WECF hopes that if the European market goes “poison free” it will influence chemical production worldwide. We asked how they would make sure that big corporations are not just exporting their poison production and trade into countries outside the EU, as in the case of DDT, after it had been banned in Europe. They said that all chemicals defined as too dangerous to marketed in Europe should also go on the UN list of banned chemicals, which now includes DDT and a growing number of other poisons.
To draw attention to their work they were doing an action on Alexanderplatz, in which women ued their bodies to form the sign for poison, an orange circle with a black cross in it. This is the action going on in the background of the pictures of our Justice for Bhopal action.
These actions were visited by the green Minister for Ecology Mr. Trittin, who arrived near the end.
<center
The reaction to our solidarity for Bhopal action was good, many older people still remember Bhopal and are fearful that younger people might not know about it, because they weren’t born when it happened. We distributed around 300 leaflets that told the story.
People understood very well when we showed a WANTED poster of a criminal boss – Warren Anderson – since the habit of bosses doing and taking whatever they want is very much part of German reality these days. This was even easier to understand for bypassers then the action with the orange cloth which many people thought had something to do with the recent Ukrainian revolution.
So much from Berlin, I’m very curious about the action of the brooms
in the US on 8th March.
greetings from berlin
Ruth Luschnat
[Scroll down for US brooms story and check here for a press statement on that action.]
Share this:
