Editorial

Welcome to our November issue of War Profiteers' News and the last one for 2009. In this issue we continue to draw attention on corporate crimes in the contradictory India, that appears to the world as one of the new super powers, while continues to threat the lives of government dissidents and local communities, as we present the Campaign of the Month of the Dongria people against the mining corporation Vedanta and their project in the state of Orissa. The War Profiteers of the Month focuses on Tata, one of the leading Indian corporations involved in a number of corporate crimes and heavily involved in the arms trade. Tata is leading the way for expanding India's corporate presence internationally. In this issue we also present news about communities resisting the uranium mining, as part of our continued effort to raise awareness about India in preparation for our upcoming conference: “Nonviolent Livelihood Struggle and Global Militarism: Links and Strategies” to take place in Ahmedabad between the 22 – 25 of January 2010.

The top story of this issue is the Swiss referendum to band arms exports. We reported about this in the last issue, and since then, there has been a lot of positive news coming from the campaign, the latest news stating that, according to a recent poll on voting intention, there is a small margin between the yes and no votes. WRI's affiliate Switzerland Without an Army have gone from aiming to get a good number of votes to now trying to actually win it. Both the government and the major arms export companies in Switzerland have started a huge campaign to win, which is already a sign of the success of the campaign to stop Swiss arms exports. Here from WRI we wish all the best to the campaign in their referendum on the 29 of November.

The other main story comes from the Global Network against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space and their annual Keep Space for Peace week of action. Bruce Gagnon, the coordinator of GN, has written a report of this year's activity that focused especially on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s), or drones, which is a growing industry in the arms trade, and which is being strongly used in the Afghan intervention.

Javier Gárate