© 2009 AAP – Belinda Tasker

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/nuclear-vets-lack-proof-says-lawyer-20090123-7o49.html

This issue seeks to examine this mythologisation of the soldier figure in a variety of cultural forms but also welcomes studies of those representations of the soldier figure that, conversely, demystify the soldier figure and, indeed, the combatant experience itself. The editors therefore welcome articles that, through their study of the soldier as the central figure of cultural representations and memory of war, emphasise the ambiguities and ambivalences of the experience of war, foregrounding the ideological and ontological conflicts that are often reflected in the figure of the soldier.

Articles should be written in English and of 5 – 6000 words in length. They should be sent to Helena Scott (H.Scott@westminster.ac.uk) at the University of Westminster by the 1st February 2009. Articles should be submitted in accordance with Intellect’s guidelines to be found at http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/auth/links/StyleGuide.pdf.

Helena Scott
University of Westminster
Email: h.scott@westminster.ac.uk

BRITISH defence chiefs have admitted servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s.

The admission, made after years of denials, features in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers.

The Sunday Mirror newspaper said the court papers revealed that the ministry now believed that nuclear tests were responsible for the deaths of some British servicemen.

However, the ministry insisted that only 159 men were affected out of the 20,000 who were present.

About 800 former servicemen from Britain, New Zealand and Fiji earlier this year launched a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the ministry, claiming they had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during tests at sites including Maralinga in South Australia and Christmas Island.

While the case is not due to start until January, court documents seen by the newspaper show that two Royal Air Force servicemen, Eric Denson and John Brothers, were irradiated after being ordered to fly through mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs to collect samples.

Film badges worn by the men recorded the amount of radiation they were exposed to. “Eric had a dose equivalent to 190 years of background radiation,” the newspaper said. “John’s was 107. The (ministry’s) maximum safe dose was just 30.”

Mr Denson’s widow, Shirley Denson, who is part of the group suing the ministry, said she hoped the truth about the tests would finally be revealed.

“Hopefully this will mean they have to admit everything else,” she told the newspaper.

“There were 20,000 others there. They and their families suffered just as badly.

“In reality, they have no idea who had how much dose. Eric and John had records taken but most had none.”

AAP
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au…

An international firm has expressed interest in recruiting security personal from Fiji, according to the Fiji Embassy in Washington.

A statement from the embassy said RONCO Consulting Corporation representatives – Paul Brown, Director, Canine Services, and Isaac Evans, Director, Security Services – have approached Charge d’ Affaires Peni Lomaloma on the matter.

This came as a result of the public diplomacy programmes organised by the Fiji Embassy in Washington.

“They want to explore the possibility of including some Fiji security personnel in their company data base for future deployments all over the world.”

The statement said that through their experience in Iraq, Brown and Evans were made aware of the skills of Fiji service personal serving there.

Fijians have served in international peace missions in various hot spots around the world and have been trained in overseas military academies at all levels of command.

Lomaloma said Fiji soldiers are highly trained and can fit in easily with the personnel, procedures and equipments of those they will be working with at RONSON.

The Fiji Embassy Washington is now working with RONSON on identifying suitable local security firms the company can liaise with on its request.

http://www.fijilive.com/news_new/ind…

As quelling foreign populations becomes a staple of warfare, private mercenary forces are increasingly relied upon as a tool of foreign policy

31/05/08 “Al-Ahram” — It is not just government forces, the resistance and sectarian strife that have wrought chaos in Iraq. The US invasion of Iraq and subsequent policies were what triggered the security breakdown and unleashed the chaos. To make matters worse, on the heels of the occupying forces followed thousands of personnel from private firms that offer military services for hire. The corporate mercenary business is a relatively recent phenomenon and this article attempts to probe what function it plays and how it operates in Iraq and elsewhere.

There are now more than 50 private security firms currently operating in Iraq and their number is likely to increase, according to recent reports. Officially their function is to protect vital facilities (from government buildings to oil wells) and important persons (the US ambassador, for example). Some of these companies have special information gathering and analysis departments whose staff has access to state-of-the-art military and security technologies. Global Risks is one such company. Charged with protecting Baghdad International Airport, it has hired for this purpose 500 Nepalese and 500 Fijian soldiers who are apparently the cheapest of the 30 nationalities of mercenaries currently in Iraq.

Read more: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20020.htm

MORE than 200 military personnel returned from a six-months tour of duty in Iraq on Saturday.

The military’s media cell said a chartered Egyptian Airlines aircraft flew the soldiers home.

They arrived at Nadi Airport on Saturday morning.

“They were under the command of Colonel Jackson Evans, who himself returns after a year long tour of duty,” the media cell said.

It said Col Evans did two tours of duty, each lasting six months.

The media cell said the soldiers underwent medical checks at Nadi army base before they were released to their families.

The soldiers are expected to return to their respective units today to apply for their leave.

The media cell said the military’s chief staff officer operations, Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Qiliho, was on hand to welcome the soldiers back.

http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=88910

Published: Today

A SOLDIER faces a manslaughter charge for allegedly killing a hero comrade by blasting him in the head with a sniper rifle in Iraq.

Killed … Rifleman Vakabua

Military cops believe Rifleman Aaron Kendrick cocked, aimed and fired the weapon inside barracks as “a stupid joke”.

He had no idea the L96 high-velocity rifle was loaded as he pointed it at Rifleman Edward Vakabua, 23, while he slept a few yards away in Basra. The giant Fijian, who had saved a wounded soldier’s life a month earlier, was killed instantly.

The shooting happened inside dictator Saddam Hussein’s former palace, which the 4th Battalion of the Rifles – dubbed the Lions of Basra – had made their headquarters.

Stupidity

Charged … Rifleman Kendrick

The war-weary soldiers had been taking a break from battling a massive militia uprising in southern Iraq in which they were taking heavy casualties.

Another 4 Rifles soldier at the base said: “What happened was just a mindless accident. Nobody thinks Edward was murdered.

“But at the same time it’s the number one rule in the Army that you don’t play around with weapons.

“It was appalling stupidity and someone deserves to get locked up for a long time.

“Edward’s death was the last thing we needed at the time and left everyone really down. The enemy were killing enough of us without any of us having to help them.”

During the probe into the shooting, detectives from the Red Caps’ Special Investigations Branch discovered Kendrick, in his early 20s, was never trained to use a sniper rifle.

The weapon had also been left loaded in the troops’ accommodation room against strict Army safety procedures.

Vakabua – described as “tough, proud, indomitable and courageous” – was buried in Fiji after the shooting on July 6 last year.

Charges for the killing will be pressed against Kendrick by the Army Prosecuting Authority this week, military sources told The Sun. If convicted, he faces a long spell in the Glasshouse – the military’s prison at Colchester, Essex.

t.newtondunn@the-sun.co.uk

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/article1036841.ece

In November 2006 the Australian Blackhawk helicopter crash off Kadavu (Fiji) drew attention to the fact that our SAS were on the Kanimbla in Fiji waters prior to the 2006 coup. A new report – by the Fiji Human Rights Commission which is an active supporter of the current Fiji interim administration – argues that Australia’s intervention was illegal. It implies that Australia’s actions (sending warships, and providing military support for the Fiji police, headed at the time by an Australian Federal Police officer) were provocative.
What was the effect of Australia’s intervention: did it undermine attempts to negotiate a peaceful settlement between Fiji’s military forces and the government?

http://www.mapw.org.au/download/australian-military-intervention-and-fiji-2006-coup

22-23 September, 2008, Örebro University, Sweden
Call for papers

Submission of abstracts: April 15, 2008
Paper submission: September 1, 2008

Convenors are Erika Svedberg from the Institute of Thematic Gender Studies and Örebro University and Annica Kronsell from the Department of Political Science at Lund University. The convenors were part of a group organizing the international conference at Lund University: A World in Transition. Feminist Perspectives on International Relations, in May 1996.2 This conference is a follow-up of that successful event. The War Question for Feminism-conference is organized within the Institute of Thematic Gender Studies a new two-campus milieu for gender research at Linköping University and Örebro University in Sweden, led by Professors Nina Lykke and Anna Jónasdóttir.3.

Theme 1: War as a Feminist Issue
The central argument for this theme is that war is a feminist issue/question. There is a long-standing and historical split within the women’s movement on whether to be pro-nation or pro-peace which seem to have made feminists somewhat uncomfortable with the war question. War is a feminist concern because conflict relations between states or organized groups affect women as well as men, violence used in violent conflict is often sexualized and because militaries and arms is a substantial part of public resource spending. If there would ever be a truly feminist state, would this state have a military organization? Would it have an army, weapon production and military spending? War is an economic issue and feminist researchers should not ignore the military/defense budget as part of the (welfare) state budget? Arms production and trade is also connected to military budgets and what would a feminist analysis of the arms trade come up with? The means used in the waging of contemporary wars – like rape, forced prostitution and other forms of sexual violence seem to be an integral part of the organized forms of violence. It shows that the means used in war-making are gendered. The trend for some militaries of western democratic states is to engage in the war on terror while another trend is to move much more into international peace-enforcement and peace-keeping. Is the trend to train militaries for peace-keeping tasks a way to de-militarize the military? Are the efforts of gender mainstreaming peace-keeping a way to feminize the military?

Theme 2: Militarism and Masculinities
This theme takes the starting point in that the military organization historically has been exclusively male and part of nation building, in relation to state militaries or to resistances like guerrilla, insurgency warfare. Nation building is highly interconnected with militaries with conscription as an illustrative example. Norms relevant for military practice like hierarchy, group cohesion and organized violence as problem solving, have been tied to norms of heterosexual masculinity. How is masculinity related to the task of the military organization? What is the relationship between masculinity and the role of the warrior, in the ‘war on terror’ militaries, insurgency, and guerrillas or in peacekeeping? Are UN peace-keepers real men or ‘sissies in arms’? Sexuality has been an integral aspect of the military organization with the wide use of pornographic material, sexualized language, sexual harassment within bases and prostitution as well as rape near military bases. As we are seeing sexualized violence in war being used against both civilians and soldiers as part of strategic warfare we might ask; what is the relationship between patriarchy, militarism and misogyny in different contexts in contemporary warfare?

What does this tell us about the relationship between military violence and sexuality? Can the military be democratized? Is it possible to think of a military where men and women serve side by side as comrades, without sexism? Is it possible to move beyond the heterosexual masculinity norm as an organizing principle of the military?

Theme 3: Feminist concepts travelling into the area of security, the military, violent conflicts and peacekeeping operations
The focus of this theme is on travelling concepts. The idea of travelling concepts was developed in the Women’s Studies/Gender Studies project Athena with the aim of considering how concepts introduced and developed by feminist scholars are used for particularly educational but also research purposes in different European contexts. A central question is how feminist concepts may be translated across linguistic and cultural barriers while still conveying the same meaning. What happens when concepts travel? When feminist concepts are put into practice, do they acquire new meanings? When new meanings develop, how can they be understood? What does it tell us about the context in which they are being used? In this theme we are particularly concerned with the translation and implementation of feminist concepts into political, policy and administrative settings. Central questions are how have, for example, the concepts of gender/gender mainstreaming/gender perspectives been used or put into practice in security, defense and military understandings and settings. One example here is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. We want to look at how concepts from feminist research and activism travel from one setting to for example different national settings of security policy and military strategy.

We welcome abstracts of no more than 300 words addressing one of the three themes of the conference. Please send it to the conference organizers:

Erika.Svedberg@sam.oru.se and Annica.Kronsell@svet.lu.se

no later than April 15, 2008.

Deadlines:
Submission of abstracts: April 15, 2008
Paper submission: September 1, 2008

1 This title was inspired by the work of Christine Sylvester.

2 A selection of papers and summeries of workshop discussions were published as a special edition of Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift, 1997.

3 It is connected with GEXcel – Gendering Excellence (www.genderexcel.org), a five-years Visiting Fellows Programme which started in 2007 supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council. GEXcel gathers prominent senior as well as younger scholars from all over the world.