From Draft NOtices, July-September 2012
– Rick Jahnkow
A recent report by Associated Press reporter Ben Hubbard indicates that the Syrian government’s brutal attacks on opponents of President Bashar Assad’s regime have led to a significant increase in draft avoidance.
Syria conscripts young men for a term of 18 months, which some people try to avoid by traveling abroad, seeking waivers for medical reasons, “using connections and bribes to get their names off the rolls,” or hiding in opposition areas. According to Hubbard, anti-regime activists are saying that the number of men avoiding the draft has increased significantly during the 15-month conflict that the U.N. says has taken 9,000 lives.
Hubbard says the true extent of draft resistance is hard to gauge, but a notable sign of its seriousness is the fact that Assad proclaimed an amnesty in June if men who have failed to report for duty will show up within 90 days (120 days for those outside the country).
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2012
In the April-June 2012 issue of Draft NOtices, we published an article by Stephanie Jennings on the misleading “Kony 2012” campaign of Invisible Children, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization that has been exposed has having connections to groups pursuing a right-wing religious agenda.
In April 2012, Invisible Children mobilized thousands of students across the U.S. to put pressure on the U.S. government to arrest Joseph Kony, a murderous African leader whose small rebel group has kidnapped children to use as soldiers. One of the many concerns expressed by critics of the Kony 2012 campaign is that it could be used to create a pretext for a much larger U.S. military presence in Africa. The U.S. has so far failed to convince any country on the continent to host the headquarters for the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which is currently based in Germany (see Draft Notices, January-March 2008, “U.S. Militarization of Africa”).
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2012
– Rick Jahnkow
Military recruiters are known for minimizing the personal risk associated with joining the armed forces. They are very good at exploiting any sense of invincibility that comes from the average teenager’s lack of direct experience with death or serious injury. If necessary, a recruiter will admit to a young person that bad things do sometimes happen in the military, but they only happen to people who are too “weak” or “stupid” to survive the challenges of being a proud member of the U.S. (insert the military branch here).
It could be a little harder to use this recruiting technique now that government officials have told Associated Press that 45% of the 1.6 million veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are filing injury claims with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Furthermore, the veterans are claiming an average of 8-9 physical or mental injuries each. (For comparison, only 21% of veterans filed injury claims after the 1991 Gulf War.)
According to Dr. David Cifu, the VA’s medical rehabilitation chief, one reason for the high rate of injury claims is that more military personnel are being kept alive. This is presumably because of the greater use of protective gear and improved battlefield medical care.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
