Surprise party and luminous future
September 21st and 22nd 2019, near Bure (55)
In Bure, north-eastern France, the State wants to bury the most dangerous of French nuclear system’s waste, hiding it out of sight. We refuse this policy of oblivion. We do not want the State to sacrifice entire territories, thereby polluting the underground for hundreds of thousands of years. We refuse the normalisation of contaminated life. We do not accept that the threat of its perpetual pollution be concealed. We do not want nuclear energy.
This industry, hidden because unbearable, irradiates thousands of workers in nuclear plants, expropriates Nigerians and Aboriginals to make ground for new uranium mines, pollutes everywhere around each facility it builds, and every decade in this world causes a catastrophe that’s beyond comprehension.
From Japan to the United States or the Algerian desert, many are those who oppose this deadly technology. In Bure, the resistance is being organized since the early 1990s. This determination is now met with a repression that has become intolerable: more than fifty trials, several prison sentences and hundreds of months of suspended jail sentences in total, the militarisation of the territory, a ban on the access to the Lejuc woods since the eviction of its occupants, widespread surveillance… Those who oppose the radioactive waste burial project are spied on, bullied, placed under legal supervision, brutalised, their houses are raided, and they are kept from leading their everyday lives at peace.
We call for all ciswomen*, trans and queer people to gather together on the 21st and 22nd of September 2019 and stand proudly alongside those fighting in Bure and elsewhere against the nuclear system and the world that sustains it.
A non-mixed space that we carry with anger and determination when facing enduring male privileges: for too long, cismen** have been deciding, organising, speaking for us and without us – in our political struggles as elsewhere. We aspire to invent moments and struggles that are creative, funny and empowering all the while paying attention to the many power relationships that make us up, in order to go beyond them and fight them through our experiences and in the places we make ours.
A non-mixed space that we carry with power and joy, bearing in mind the 40 000 women of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in England who surrounded in 1982 a nuclear missiles storage camp, the Green Belt Movement’ women who have planted 51 million trees in Kenya since 1977, as well as the dozens of thousands of Argentine feminist activists who took to the streets in 2018 for the right to abortion to be acknowledged, or those women fighting for justice after their brother, their son, or nephew have been murdered by the police in poorer neighborhoods in France.
Since, without us having decided, nuclear waste results from the electricy we use to heat our homes, switch on our lights, use our phones or the Internet, we rise up against the sacrifice of rural territories. From our connections with forests that have been cleared, soils holed, subsoil boiled down to a « resource », we draw the strength and the desire to defend the land, air and water that make up life. When facing a nuclear horizon made to look as if inevitable, we affirm the will to a life freed from industrial hubris, and against it the desire of a production thought out at the scale of our lives, starting from our needs and not those of economic growth. We defend the possibility of collectively deciding what we want to produce and find ways of living without alienating sources of energy.
Program:
It’s possible to arrive on Friday night. A space for children is planned.
Saturday: Welcome and workshops / festive parade / Dinner, concerts and party
Sunday: conclusion, what happens next for our radiant future
Join us!
The Atomic Bombshells Collective (Collectif des Bombes Atomiques)
* “ciswomen” is meant as “cisgender women”, meaning women whose gender identity matches that of their assigned gender at birth.
** “cismen” is meant as “cisgender men”, meaning men whose gender identity matches that of their assigned gender at birth.