Joining Disrupt Land Forces Is a Moral Duty in Times of Genocidal Decay

Land Forces is a biennial exposition of global weapons manufacturers, bringing companies, like Elbit, Lockheed, Boeing, Thales and NIOA, together to display their wares directly to potential clients – ministers, military bosses and diplomats – all under the one roof, without a spot of blood in sight.

This year Land Forces 2024 is being held at the Melbourne Convention Centre over the 11th to 13th of September, having decided to give up its once regular location in Meanjin-Brisbane, as the activist collective Disrupt Land Forces was so successful in its nonviolent actions, it ran it out of town.

“The genocide campaign is still ongoing in Gaza,” says Muayad, a Palestinian man living in Naarm, who adds that with the official death toll of the 10-month-long Israeli perpetrated genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza now surpassing 40,000, it’s never been more urgent a time to protest the expo.

“We don’t see any serious steps being taken by the Australian government or the weapons manufacturing firms to sanction the Israeli occupation,” the activist further set out. “We are protesting companies that have provided Israel with weapons directly used to kill innocent children”.

Muayad is just one of an estimated up to 25,000 concerned civilians who will descend upon Melbourne city to disrupt the event in a nonviolent manner to draw attention to the “unmoral profiting from the war crimes in Gaza, which we all see live on TV and social media”.

Spruiking death in the showroom

“The Land Forces event, Australia’s foremost military trade show, must be completely disrupted and eradicated from existence,” Canberra-based West Papua musician and activist Ronny Kareni told Sydney Criminal Lawyers.

“It serves as a chilling marketplace for arms deals and a networking hub for the defence industry, wielding a devastating impact on regions burdened by oppressive regimes, such as West Papua,” he continued.

West Papua has been occupied by Indonesia since Jakarta conducted a falsified referendum on self-determination in 1969. And over the last half a century, West Papua people have lived under brutal military rule, while an official transmigration program has left them as a minority in their own land.

The “horrific acts of extrajudicial killings, brutal torture, and arbitrary detentions” that are commonplace in West Papua, a country of Melanesian peoples, are directly facilitated by deals made in airconditioned exhibition centres by executive in suits at events such as Land Forces 2024.

“The Disrupt Land Forces protests are not merely symbolic acts of dissent,” Kareni underscored, “they are a passionate call to action, urging an urgent re-evaluation of the catastrophic repercussions of military trade on the most vulnerable, in places like West Papua”.

Land Forces security squad

Indeed, in the lead up to Disrupt Land Forces, which will be mobilising over the 8th to 14th of September, Victoria police, state ministers and the media have conducted a smear campaign against the nonviolent activists, who merely seek to highlight deals made to kill and maim the innocent.

“Victoria police is preparing for the biggest protest since the turn of the millennium at a military expo in Melbourne,” said the Channel 7 talking head last week. “As many as 25,000 people are expected, stretching police resources to the limit.”

The report further outlined that Victorian law enforcement is expecting the biggest protest numbers it has seen since those demonstrating against the 2000 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Naarm. And Victoria police chief commissioner Shane Patton said, “It could be really, really big.”

That thousands of civilians don’t like companies selling machinery designed to perpetrate the horrors they’ve been watching on their screens transpire in Gaza will turn out on the street to express this is evidently going to require up to 10 percent of the entire Victorian police force to manage.

And Patton warned that “if they come with an intent to disrupt, to confront, to assault, um, to impede, then we will deal swiftly with them”.

This statement implies Victoria police officers will likely be using force because the whole idea is to disrupt. But raising assault in relation to nonviolent protesters is a bit of sensationalism really, as is the entire report.

Although the fact that so many demonstrators are expected is not so startling after the entire population has been witnessing the Gaza genocide. And over 40 groups have committed to participate in Disrupt Land Forces, some of which didn’t exist before Israel began its mass slaughter.

In reply to this demonisation, Wage Peace put out a tongue-in-cheek warning to activists about a “paramilitary group” planning to attend Land Forces “to provide ‘protection’ to the arms trade”, most of whom “will be uniformed and armed” and “may identify themselves as police”.

“A one stop genocide shop”

“These merchants of evil will always go where there is conflict and ignite it. They have never cared about defending anyone. They care about multimillion dollar deals and their own profit,” remarked Carlos, a Colombian filmmaker and activist. “War has always been their end, not peace.”

“Disrupt Land Forces is our chance to expose them and let the world know that we refuse to keep feeding them with our taxes, that we know what they’re actually doing, and we won’t stand for it,” said the man who had to flee his own country due to the types of deals to be made at Land Forces.

Carlos fled Colombia as a result of the US Clinton administration’s 2000-launched Plan Colombia, which, as part of the war on drugs, saw $10 billion invested in military equipment from those exhibiting at Land Forces, so Israeli trained militias could knock out the leftwing political opposition.

Although, the filmmaker further points out that in today’s Colombia it’s a different story as president Gustavo Petro cut ties with Israel in May over the wholesale killing operation it’s carrying out in Gaza, of which the International Court of Justice ruled on 26 January is plausibly a genocide.

However, the Australian government has made no such determination, rather foreign minister Penny Wong cut aid funding to UNRWA, then the main aid channel into Gaza, on the day after the ICJ ordered that aid into the region be restored immediately.

And it’s actions like this that have led to a situation where Disrupt Land Forces is set to make quite a splash this year.

“As Palestinians we can’t see our people in Palestine slaughtered by weapons sold in this land where we live and work,” continued Muayad, who’s associated with the protest group Free Palestine Melbourne.

“The exposition is going to attract governments and war criminals to be part of it and aid the genocide campaign they’re conducting, therefore, morally, we need to express our outrage and rejection of this kind of killing exposition,” the Palestine man made certain in ending.