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The Official Weekly Term-time Newspaper of Sussex’s Student Union The Official Weekly Term-time Newspaper of Sussex’s Student Union
Funded by the Student Union • Edition 7 • 7th November 2016 • thebadgeronline.com • Twitter: @TheBadgerNews • Facebook: /thebadgersussex • Printed on recycled paper
“Complicit in war crimes” Students protest at Careers Fair
Freya Marshall Payne and Tom Robinson Editor and News Sub-editor Sussex students occupied stalls from arms manufactures at a university careers fair in protest of their links to attacks on Palestinians. The protest, which took place at the annual careers fair at the AMEX Stadium on Wednesday, targeted General Dynamics and Thales, the fifth and tenth largest arms manufacturers respectively. Although the protest only lasted for an hour and students left peacefully of their own accord after the time was up, security at the event threatened to
contact police and arrest some of the activists. One security officer said: “We are going to wait for a bit, then we will bring the police in and they will start getting arrested.” The Badger noted a police van when entering the Amex Stadium to report, but the police were never called to disrupt the protest. A second year student protester told us: “[New VC] Prof Tickell has said explicitly to members of management that he wants issues to be caught prior to them getting to protests. He doesn’t want them to reach the point where we’re having to sit in buildings.
“The strategy with this has been completely different to the strategy used in my first year - two years ago they threw us out pretty immediately whereas this year they were told not to throw us out and allowed us to remain. “They just told us that as long as we didn’t block the stall completely and allowed people to get past, they were fine with us staying.” An open letter which called for the arms manufacturers to be withdrawn from the event gained 200 signatures. The letter was directed to Sussex and Brighton universities as co-hosts. It said: “It is unacceptable that the University of Sussex and the Univer-
sity of Brighton are inviting arms companies including General Dynamics and Thales, companies that profit from this human suffering, to a university event. The letter added that both universities promote themselves on their progressive values and it is “deeply hypocritical of them to lend their legitimacy to arms companies that promote and profit from the international arms trade”. Sussex University received the letter on Monday but, despite a reply saying they would contact the students to address their concerns, at the time of the protest no answer had been provided.
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Thales have been accused of breaching human rights and international law and have a history of selling weapons to repressive regimes including Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and Colombia. In 2011, Thales signed a $1.6 billion contract with Israel’s largest military technology firm, Elbit Systems, to develop the Watchkeeper military drone for the UK Government. Watchkeeper is based on the Elbit Systems Hermes 450 model used extensively in Gaza by the Israeli military... A third year student protester said...
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