King’s College London Action Palestine (KCLAP) are extremely excited to announce the launch of a new campaign to Demilitarise King’s! Through KCLAP’s research last year, and with the help from our friends at Fossil Free, we found out that King’s has invested around £1.5m in arms companies. The national pension scheme for King’s staff also has fund investments in cluster munitions and land mines. The ethical implications of this go way beyond Palestine. British bombs are playing a key role in Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Yemen, in a conflict in which over 10,000 civilians have been killed. With the blessings of our government, Saudi Arabia has targeted multiple civilian sites including schools and a funeral.
It was very disappointing to learn that King’s is yet another institution taking part in the business of repression and human suffering. The thought of being a student in a university that is investing £1.5m in the military industrial complex is deeply disturbing and just an example of how the marketisation of education is failing its students. Our university should be a place promoting a better, sustainable world and not a nest of corporations and militarism. King’s has a duty to listen to its students who refuse to be affiliated and have any involvement with arms companies profiting from war.
The campaign is now under the umbrella of the KCL Anti-Racism Campaigning Network. We want to ensure that King’s divests from arms companies and companies that are complicit in human right abuses, or have connections with rogue states or states that break international law. Our campaign will push for our university to make sure that projects and scholarships are funded only through ethical sources.
Need a hand launching a campaign? Email Jess, your Universities Network coordinator for support!
