The six activists arrived at H&K’s Nottingham warehouse building before any employees turned up. Using D-locks and arm-tubes, one pair locked themselves to the staff entrance while another pair blockaded the goods gate. Meanwhile the other two gained access to the roof and hung anti-arms-trade banners on the front of the building.

One of the banners accused H&K of “arming repressive regimes” while the other, a German banner displayed in solidarity with anti-arms-trade campaigners from H&K’s home turf, translated as “arms exports are facilitating murder”.

This action succeeded in shutting the company down for the whole day. Employees and deliveries were turned away; the phones went unanswered; no arms deals were done. H&K Managing Director Mike Thornton arrived to personally ask the blockaders to leave but they remained in place until they were cut free by police specialists.

It took police six and a half hours to remove the blockade and nearly eight hours to get the protesters down from the roof. A supportive employee of the company next door to H&K tried to bring mugs of tea to the blockaders, but was prevented by police, who falsely claimed that they could use Section 14 of the Public Order Act to deny the protesters food and drink.

Heckler & Koch was targeted for this action because of the company’s sales of weapons to armed forces that are known to commit human rights abuses, and because of the company’s licensing of other countries to manufacture H&K weapons – a strategy that allows the company to evade arms embargoes and profit from the sale of weapons to repressive regimes.

These concerns were set out in an open letter from the Shut Down H&K campaign to Heckler & Koch in December 2009. The company has yet to reply to the letter.

After being removed from the arms company’s premises, the six activists were arrested and taken to Nottingham’s Bridewell police station. They have been charged with Aggravated Trespass and subjected to bail conditions that prevent them from associating with each other. Their first court appearance will be on Tuesday 2nd March at 09:45 at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Heckler & Koch failed to reply, so 28 days later, groups of concerned citizens set out to audit the arms company and to pose the question to the people of Nottingham: “What are they hiding?”

Registered Delivery

One group of citizen auditors headed to the arms company’s secret warehouse; the unmarked Unit 3 at Easter Park on Lenton Lane. Going by the name of Artichokes War, they carried with them a letter reiterating the need for H&K to address public concerns, and inviting the company to give any reasons for its failure to be transparent.

Nottinghamshire police usually prevent any suspected campaigners from entering Easter Park on foot, so to avoid being stopped, the auditors simply entered the industrial park in a taxi. Once inside, they auditors approached the gate of Heckler & Koch under the watchful eye of two officers.

The auditors buzzed the intercom and a female employee responded. They explained to her that they were there to personally deliver a letter. The disembodied voice asked them to just leave their letter on the ground by the car park gate, but the auditors stood their ground. This was a registered delivery, they explained. They needed a signature. The intercom spoke again: Someone would be out shortly to collect the letter.

Five minutes passed… ten minutes… No-one emerged from the arms company’s secure warehouse. The police came over to find out what the auditors were up to, then went away again.

Finally, after half an hour of waiting, one of the auditors climbed over the barbed fence into the employees car park and walked up to the front door and rang the bell. No-one responded, so he pushed the letter through the letterbox and returned to the car park gate… only to find that he had now become a prisoner of Heckler & Koch!

It seems that the arms company were so afraid of the citizens’ audit that they dared not even buzz open the car park gate. Unable to climb back out the way he had got in, the auditor remained trapped until the police intervened.

Sadly, due to H&K’s reticence, the auditors failed, not only to review H&K’s sales records, but even to get a signature for their delivery. Fortunately there’s more than one way to record a delivery, and the auditors’ video record shows that the arms company has received the letter outlining concerns about its dodgy export deals. As to why the company has failed to reply; in the words of one auditor, “Maybe they have something to hide.”

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Street Theatre: What are they hiding?

Meanwhile, in the city centre, a group of activists was creating a curious spectacle for the public. A giant and mysterious object, covered by green tarpaulin and camo netting appeared on Market Square, surrounded by placards asking “What’s going on?” and “What are they hiding?”

When bemused passers by approached, the sound of gunfire was heard from under the tarpaulin, which promptly collapsed. The tarp was then drawn aside, revealing a tangled pile of bodies representing the victims of H&K weapons.

Passers by stopped to chat with the campaigners and were interested to learn about the local arms company and its refusal to answer questions about its dodgy arms exports. This piece of hastily-devised street theatre was replayed at Speakers’ Corner and by St Peter’s Church, where it attracted the most interest.

Finally, having collected many petition signatures and handed out thousands of leaflets, the campaigners marched single file bearing placards out to Heckler & Koch’s home on Lenton Lane. Despite being denied entry to Easter Park by Nottinghamshire Police, the activists ended their long day of campaigning in high spirits.

National Solidarity

Most of the street theatre group and the citizen auditors were veteran peace activists from around the country (and around the world), who were in Nottingham to attend the Peace News Winter Gathering. It meant a lot to local campaigners to have their support. The campaign against Heckler & Koch will keep pressing for answers in the year to come.

H&K weapons on display at the DSEi 2009 international arms fair

The first protest against Nottingham-based arms company Heckler & Koch took place in May 2000, but it wasn’t until May 2008 that another demonstration launched the Shut Down H&K campaign, which has been running ever since.

18 months in, the campaign has decided that it’s about time to speak to Heckler & Koch. So, the campaign has written H&K a letter summarising the people’s concerns and asking the company to come clean about its dirty business…

Dear Sir,

We are sure you must be aware of our campaign, Shut Down H&K. We are a group of Nottingham residents, students and anti-arms-trade campaigners who are concerned about the role of Heckler & Koch in the international arms trade.

We hope that you can appreciate that our campaign has arisen out of a genuine concern about the consequences of your trade. We are writing to request information about the recent operations of Heckler & Koch, and to ask you to address our concerns.

We are aware that:

1. Heckler & Koch weapons have been sold to many countries whose armed forces are well known to have committed serious and widespread violations of human rights in recent years, including the Philippines, Thailand and Saudi Arabia.
2. The British National Archives show how Heckler & Koch has used the UK to manufacture and sell weapons to countries such as Nigeria and Kenya when such sales were restricted by the German government.
3. Heckler & Koch has licensed manufacturers in countries such as Turkey and Pakistan to produce H&K-designed weapons. Through these arrangements, H&K has profited from sales to countries engaged in armed conflict including Indonesia and Sri Lanka during periods when direct sales to these countries were prohibited by the EU or by the governments of Germany and the UK.
4. In recent years, the security forces of Nepal, Lebanon and Georgia have been armed with Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles after the German government had denied export licenses for those transfers amid concerns about armed conflict and human rights violations.
5. Heckler & Koch weapons have fallen into the hands of child soldiers in Africa, terrorists in the Middle East, militias in Darfur, rebels in Nigeria, arms traffickers in the Philippines, mercenaries in Iraq and organised criminals in Serbia. Heckler & Koch weapons have been used by armed forces in conflicts in which those forces have been accused by international monitors of war crimes, including Bosnia in 1991, South Ossetia in 2008 and Sri Lanka in 2009.

With H&K continuing to advertise its weapons on the international market, we would like to make sure that the company is no longer directly or indirectly supplying weapons to regimes guilty of human rights violations, war crimes or crimes against humanity. In order to ascertain this we would like to know about the business activities of the H&K Group during the period of time since its change of ownership in 2002 (hereafter referred to as the Period).

As the office responsible for “international customer sales and customer services” for non-NATO countries (according to the H&K Group website) we trust that you have the relevant information. By making this information available you would be addressing the growing concerns about Heckler & Koch, and demonstrating that the company has nothing to hide.

1. We would like to see details of all sales (including training, service and repair) made by the H&K Group during the Period. We would also like to see details of any contracts for H&K to provide service or repair that have been in effect during the Period.
2. We would like to know if Heckler & Koch’s UK division (aka NSAF Ltd) has had any involvement, during the Period, in sales to customers that had been denied export licenses by the German government. If so, we would like to know the details of that involvement.
3. We would like to see details of any contracts that have been in effect during the Period whereby a third party was licensed to manufacture products for which the H&K Group owned the designs.
4. We would like to know the full extent of the H&K Group’s involvement in the supply of weapons (or parts of weapons) to Nepal, Lebanon and Georgia.
5. We ask H&K to provide an assurance that none of the weapons it is currently selling will pass into the hands of repressive regimes, arms traffickers, child soldiers, terrorist groups, organised criminals, or armed forces that deliberately target civilians, as so many H&K weapons have in the past. If H&K is prepared to make such an assurance, we would like to know how this can be guaranteed, given the lack of regulation of the international trade in small arms.

If you are willing, a delegation from the Shut Down H&K campaign would like to meet with representatives of Heckler & Koch to discuss our concerns in person.

We hope to hear from you soon.

Yours faithfully,

Shut Down H&K

Arms company Heckler & Koch has been in the news this week. It seems that H&K, whose international sales office is located in Nottingham, is still in the business of arming regimes that are well known to commit gross violations of human rights. We look at three examples from around the world.

Manipur, India

Victims of police violence: a pregnant woman and an unarmed suspect, executed in a crowded market in Manipur, July 2009.

Ever since the state of Manipur was annexed by India in 1949, there has been armed conflict between separatists and the Indian government. In 1958 the Indian government passed the notorious Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which gives military personnel powers to arrest or kill anyone they want within a so-called “disturbed” area.

The state of Manipur was declared a “disturbed” area, and was heavily militarised, with land across the state being confiscated to set up army camps. There followed decades of grievous human rights abuses, with Indian police and paramilitaries inflicting beatings, rapes, torture, forced labour, disappearances and extrajudicial killings, all the while protected from prosecution by the AFSPA.

Here’s one example: In 2004, Indian troops raided the home of a 32-year old woman called Manorama Devi, whom they suspected to belong to a separatist group. They arrested her and took her away. Her bullet-riddled corpse was found the next day outside a nearby village. She had been tortured and raped, and then shot in her vagina at close range.

Heckler & Koch cannot be unaware of the gross human rights abuses of its latest customers. The situation in Manipur has been documented for many years. However, that would not appear to be an impediment to business.

The Philippines

To discover the connection between Heckler & Koch and the worst ever atrocity against journalists, we have to go to South-East Asia and the Philippines. This archipelago nation has a terrible human rights record, with state security forces practising vigilantism, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

Filipino soldiers armed with modern Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles.

The Philippines has also been one of H&K’s best customers. Over the years the Filipino police and military have been equipped with a variety of H&K assault rifles, sniper rifles and submachine guns.

The endemic corruption of the Filipino security forces provides one of the many routes by which H&K weapons flow from the legal arms trade to the black market. Last year, several high-ranking military and police officials were arrested for taking 72 H&K submachine guns from a police depot and selling them to a Taiwanese-led gunrunning syndicate.

The President of the Philippines is Gloria Arroyo. Until very recently, her chief ally in the south of the country was the Ampatuan clan, which ruled province of Maguindanao. The Ampatuans delivered many votes for Arroyo in the 2004 and 2007 General Elections, which were marred by widespread fraud and violence. In return, the Arroyo administration tolerated the Ampatuan clan’s internecine chainsaw murders.

The scene of the Ampatuan massacre

In the aftermath of the massacre, an arms cache was discovered next to the mansion of the Ampatuan regional governor. Among the weapons recovered was a Heckler & Koch HK11 machine gun.

Once again, there can be no way that Heckler & Koch is unaware of the state-sponsored violence and corruption in the Philippines. And yet the company has continued to arm the regime with the latest in assault weapons.

The US Marine Corps

During the US-led “War on Terror”, the US Marines have committed numerous war crimes and serious abuses of human rights. Among those that have come to light:

US Marine with H&K submachine gun

• During the 2004 offensives against the Iraqi city of Fallujah, US Marine snipers deliberately shot civilians and medical personnel and vehicles, killing thousands. The Marines’ tactical siege and destruction of the city amounted to collective punishment, which is a war crime.
• In November 2005, a US Marine unit went on a rampage in the Iraqi town of Haditha, using guns and grenades to slaughter 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians including women, children and old people. When interviewed, US Iraq war veterans described such acts as common, and said they often go unreported and almost always go unpunished. The Marines are responsible for similar massacres in Afghanistan.
• There has been widespread torture and abuse of detainees by US Marines in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Documented abuses include beatings, electrocution, burning, sexual abuse and mock executions.

Of course, none of this matters to Heckler & Koch, which stands to profit a great deal from the Marine Corps. H&K already supplies the Marines with submachine guns, and it was announced this week that H&K is almost certain to win a contract to supply the Corps with thousands of state-of-the-art automatic rifles in a deal worth millions of dollars.

Conclusion

In one week, three separate news stories have illustrated how forces that are well known to commit serious human rights abuses, war crimes and crimes against humanity are continuing to be armed with modern Heckler & Koch weapons.

These are only the latest examples in a disgraceful history of arming the world’s oppressors. If there is one lesson to be learned from 60 years of Heckler & Koch, it is that the company should not be allowed to reach 61. It should be shut down and its employees tried for complicity in the abuses that they have knowingly profited from.

There is a campaign against Heckler & Koch based in Nottingham called Shut Down H&K. Check the events listing for the next meeting or demonstration, and get involved!

A 25-foot long model of a H&K weapon had been built from a frame of willow wood, covered and painted black, and bearing the legend popularised by Brighton’s anti-arms-trade campaign Smash EDO: “Every bomb and every bullet fired is made somewhere… Find it… Resist it!”

This gun was carried by the demonstrators in a long march from the Arboretum to the gates of Easter Park – the Lenton Lane industrial site that contains H&K’s warehouse. In returning the gun to the company that produced it, the demonstrators made a highly visible statement that H&K’s dirty business is not wanted by the people of Nottingham.

This demonstration was organised by the Nottingham Arms Dump project, independently of, but in solidarity with the long-running Shut Down H&K campaign, whose monthly picket took place four days earlier. For the first time, there were two demonstrations against Heckler & Koch in the same week!

Despite the fact that this was a peaceful demonstration, H&K’s landlord, the car insurance company LV=, asked police to prevent demonstrators from delivering the gun to the gate of Heckler & Koch. The Shut Down H&K campaign has called for a boycott of LV=, which knowingly profits from the arms trade.

The 25ft gun was modelled on the Heckler & Koch MP5. Developed in the 1960s, this submachine gun remains one of H&K’s bestselling products. Among the infamous users of the MP5:

A child poses with an MP5 in an al-Qaeda propaganda video. Not a good look for Heckler & Koch.

• Indonesia’s feared special forces unit Kopassus, which has been accused of many human rights abuses.
• Thailand, which until 2003 used the MP5 to execute prisoners in Bangkwang prison.
• The Sri Lankan army, which was recently accused of war crimes as it moved to crush Tamil resistance in the north of the country.
• Children in Iraq trained to fight by Al-Qaeda.

Anti-militarists hold Heckler & Koch and its employees responsible for the death and destruction that has been caused by weapons such as the MP5, and will continue campaigning against the company’s UK office until it has been shut down.

Indigenous communities of the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting against new “Free Trade” laws that would open up their ancestral lands to drilling for gas and oil. Since April 2009, indigenous protesters have stepped up their protest, blocking road and river transport and shutting down oil and gas pumping stations. On June 6, Peruvian President Alan García ordered in the troops, and police opened fire using live rounds on a crowd of protesters.

Peruvian police armed with H&K rifles take up positions in Bagua

The shots came from rooftop snipers and a hovering helicopter as well as ground forces. A representative of Save The Children reported that children as young as four years old were wounded by indiscriminate police shooting. The bloody crackdown continues, with some estimates putting the death toll in the 80s. There are eyewitness reports of the Peruvian police hiding bodies by burning or dumping them in the Utcubamba river.

The Peruvian armed forces are only one of many deadly actors employing H&K’s tools for killing and repression in the world today. Two other conflicts that have been in the news lately are the bloody conclusion to the Sri Lankan Civil War, in which government forces were armed with H&K submachine guns, and the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan’s Swat district, in which both Taliban and government forces are armed with H&K rifles and submachine guns.

And to whom do the armed forces of Peru, Sri Lanka and Pakistan go in order to keep their weapons serviced and maintained? Could it be the Nottingham office of Heckler & Koch, which according to the company’s own website is responsible for “international customer sales and customer services outside NATO”?

Make no mistake about it: Heckler & Koch is not a respectable company. It is a purveyor of the tools of murder and repression, staffed by people without a conscience, owned by crooked millionaire playboys, and it needs to be shut down.

Describing itself as “the world’s premier small arms system company“, Heckler & Koch makes assault rifles, submachine guns and pistols. Their weapons are used around the world, and have been responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths. H&K weapons have armed repressive regimes in Burma and Indonesia, and been trafficked into warzones in Bosnia and Darfur. The company’s recent customers include Georgia, Thailand, Lebanon, and the notorious private military company Blackwater.

Kopassus, the notorious Indonesian stormtroopers, marching with H&K weapons

All of this seems shockingly incompatible with LV=’s friendly, caring image. The so-called “friendly society” has a Corporate Social Responsibility programme that aims to raise awareness of “everyday safety and good citizenship,” and its website proudly proclaims that “Our focus is on doing the right thing”. However, it turns out that LV= owns a small business park on an industrial estate in Nottingham, on which is an unmarked warehouse that serves as H&K’s UK office; responsible for international sales and customer service to non-NATO countries.

When the campaigners learned of this, they wrote to LV=, explaining the nature of H&K’s business, and asking LV= to consider not renewing the arms company’s lease, or at least making a statement condemning the arms trade. LV= replied unequivocally. Not only are they “pleased to have invested,” they have “no wish to disinvest” in Heckler & Koch and they are not prepared to make any statement that may be seen as “victimising” a business. They also rebuffed the campaigners’ offer to meet with them.

This position is shockingly hypocritical: In order to avoid “victimising” Heckler & Koch with harsh words, LV= is prepared to turn a blind eye to the Janjaweed “victimising” Darfuri villages, Indonesian armed forces “victimising” Papuans, and the Georgian army “victimising” South Ossetian civilians, to name just three of the many armed conflicts around the world in which human-rights-abusing aggressors have been armed with Heckler & Koch guns.

The Shut Down H&K campaign is now calling for a public boycott of LV=, with the aim of securing from the company a commitment to disinvest from the arms industry. This press release is for UK-wide distribution.

[wpvideo bSNvbZUY]

In 2009 Heckler & Koch will be 60 years old. In order to pre-empt the company’s birthday celebrations, German peace groups organised a protest with the slogan 60 Jahre Heckler & Koch: kein Grund zum Feiern (60 Years of Heckler & Koch: No Cause for Celebration). The Nottingham activists were invited to a March 7^th demonstration by the peace groups RIB, ORL and DFG-VK, who also funded their journey.

In Germany, the damning case against Heckler & Koch was laid out in a lecture by the country’s leading anti-arms-trade campaigner Jürgen Grässlin. Speaking on the eve of the demonstration at a hall in the town of Rottweil, Grässlin talked about H&K’s history of arming repressive regimes. He showed the audience slides of H&K rifles in the hands of genocidal militias, and presented a pair of flip-flops he had taken from a Sudanese mass grave of people executed with H&K guns.

Then it was the turn of the Nottingham delegation to speak about their campaign and how H&K has used its UK operation to evade arms embargoes and supply guns that were used in human rights abuses in countries like Bosnia, Sudan, Ecuador and Indonesia. The German audience was genuinely shocked to hear about the tactics used by Nottinghamshire Police to suppress the campaign. The audio and transcript of the speech are available here.

[audio http://nottsantimilitarism.wordpress.com/files/2009/03/hk-speech-2009-03-062.mp3]

Heckler & Koch’s global HQ is in the picturesque South-West German town of Oberndorf am Neckar, far from the misery inflicted by its trade. The theme of the demonstration was Maskerade des Todes (Masquerade of the Dead) signifying the estimated 1.5 million people who have been killed by H&K weapons. Some 200 demonstrators gathered at the railway station in the midday sunshine and listened to music and speeches before setting off on a march into the town centre.

Many of the marchers were dressed all in black, their faces covered by white deathmasks. Some bore crosses with the names of countries in which people have been killed with H&K weapons, while others carried signs saying “I am a soft target” – a reference to the euphemistic description of human beings in H&K’s marketing brochures. Still more marchers were dressed as soldiers, arms industry execs or bankers, and a lone clown played the funeral drum.

The marchers gathered around a cobbled square and watched as a piece of street theatre played out before them. First the board of H&K toasted their booming business with champagne and then none other than Death himself took centre stage, praising H&K – his favourite company – for sending him so many souls. The Grim Reaper personally congratulated the CEO of H&K, who offered to replace his ageing scythe with a more efficient, modern tool – a Heckler & Koch assault rifle. Death was pleased!

Next Jürgen Grässlin delivered a powerful denunciation of Heckler & Koch, listing the company’s many shameful dealings – a history that gives no cause for celebration. Finally the Nottingam delegation stepped up to speak, thanking the German campaigners for inviting them, and delivering the message that opposition to the arms trade must be as global as the arms trade itself. In an overwhelming show of solidarity, the German campaigners had an impromptu whip-round that raised €270 for the UK campaign.

The British activists were struck by the differences between this demonstration and the demos against H&K in Nottingham. First of all, the police presence was nowhere near as oppressive. There were about half a dozen German police who maintained a respectful distance, and very little police surveillance. By contrast, every Nottingham picket has been attended by numerous riot vans with at least one policeperson for every demonstrator, and constant and oppressive surveillance, despite the fact that these demonstrations have always been peaceful. The second difference is that the Heckler & Koch HQ in Oberndorf is well signposted, as opposed to the Nottingham depot, which is completely unsignposted, hidden in an unmarked warehouse as if ashamed of its business.

The demonstration was reported favourably on German TV news and in local newspapers and was filmed for a documentary about Grässlin. The collaboration between the German and British campaigns has been a boost for both, and they will continue to work together in a spirit of international solidarity against the arms trade.

The Notts Indymedia photo report has more pictures of the speeches in Rottweil (part 2) and the demo at Oberndorf (part 3 and part 4). Monthly demonstrations against Heckler & Koch in Nottingham will continue with a picket on Tuesday April 14^th and a special campaign anniversary demo on Monday May 11^th.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Georgian military “used indiscriminate and disproportionate force resulting in civilian deaths in South Ossetia”. However, that hasn’t stopped these war criminals from being customers of Heckler & Koch!

When Heckler & Koch applied for permission to supply 230 assault rifles to Georgia, the German government refused on the grounds that Georgia was involved in a war. But as any successful arms company knows, there are many ways to get around these obstacles, and sure enough, the German-made weapons showed up in Georgia anyway!

To quote the head of BITS, “It doesn’t matter how these weapons landed in Georgia; whether they were illegally exported from Germany, whether a licensed exporter violated German laws or whether a recipient of the weapons who acquired them legally in Germany, further exported them.”

The point is, that’s just how the arms industry works.

And which department of Heckler & Koch is responsible for sales to Georgia and other non-NATO countries? Check the corporate website: It’s Heckler & Koch GB, based at Unit 3, Easter Park, Lenton Lane, Nottingham NG7 2PX.

So next time you see pictures of wretched South Ossetian civilians clutching the bodies of their loved ones amid the shredded ruins of their homes, just remember: a company in Nottingham helped to make that happen.

Child posing with police H&K submachine gun at a summer fete in London

Police are giving young children Heckler & Koch guns to handle at community events in England. At a recent summer fete in east London, the Met ran a stall displaying a H&K MP5 submachine gun. Children as young as seven were allowed to pose for photos holding the police weapon, which has a firing rate of 800 rounds per minute.

The stunt has been sharply criticised by MPs and anti-gun campaigners. MP Jim Fitzpatrick said “Giving young children real guns to handle is inappropriate. It could be glamorising the weapons and creating familiarity which is plainly wrong.”

George Galloway MP said “The foolish display at this festival can serve only to normalise firearms or make they appear attractive, even glamorous. We are tragically used to seeing images of primary school aged boys handling assault rifles in Liberia or Mogadishu, but in Limehouse?!”

Police defended the initiative, claiming that it is intended to “divert people away from gun crime”, but Lyn Costello, co-founder of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, called it “a serious error of judgment.”

And it seems that this event was not a one-off: “We’ve done this kind of thing in other places” said Superintendent Tarrant of the Met’s CO19 firearms unit. “We will continue doing it in future.”