The tour will have stops in Cambridge, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, on the East Coast as well as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Seattle on the West Coast.

The United States maintains over 700 military bases across the globe in 40 countries. These bases directly threaten local communities and cause geopolitical destabilization. They make U.S. foreign military interventions, wars like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and even nuclear war possible. Communities around the world have been organizing and resisting US foreign bases in their backyards for decades. Local movements are now uniting in an international network in the effort to close US bases. Leading experts/activists from around the world will share their first hand experiences in the movement to say “No to US Bases for Empire!”

Please join us to hear the first hand accounts from those who have to suffer the consequences of these military bases as well as experts from the United States on how people in the United States can join the growing movement to resist these bases across the world.
East Coast: Featuring Jan Tamas and Olivier Bancoult
April 13 / Cambridge, MA / 7:00 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult
• Location: Friends Meeting House, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Contact: Erin Placey, American Friends Service Committee, (603) 224 2407, eplacey@afsc.org

April 14 / Brunswick, ME / 7:00 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult
• Location: Brunswick Curtis Library, 23 Pleasant Street, Brunswick, Maine 04011

April 15 / New Brunswick, NJ / 7:00 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult, Daniel Volman
• Address: Rutgers Labor Education Center, Rutgers University, Cook Campus, 50 Labor Center Way, New Brunswick, NJ
• Location: Catherine Goodman, US Peace Council (NJ Chapter), 908-507-8133, Cathy@USPeaceCouncil.org

April 16 / New York, NY/ 6:30 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult, Frida Berrigan
• Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Concourse level C202/203, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
• Contact Person: Leslie Cagan, United for Peace and Justice, 212-868-5545

April 17 / Philadelphia, PA / 6:00 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult
• Location: Arch Street Meeting House, 4th & Arch Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19106
• Contact: Allison E. Budschalow, American Friends Service Committee, 215-241-7179

April 18 / Washington, DC / 11:00 AM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult, Emira Woods (IPS), and Phyllis Bennis (IPS)
• Location: American University, Main Campus, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Ward Circle, Washington, DC, Ward Building, Room 1
• Contact: Saif Rahman, Institute for Policy Studies, 202-234-9382 x 254, saif@ips-dc.org

April 18 / Washington, DC / 6:30 PM

• Speakers: Jan Tamas, Olivier Bancoult
• Location: Busboys and Poets Restaurant 2021 14th St. NW, Washington DC
• Contact: Saif Rahman, Institute for Policy Studies, 202-234-9382 x 254, saif@ips-dc.org

West Coast Featuring Andrea Licata
April 15 / Los Angeles, CA / 7:00 PM

• Speakers: Andrea Licata, Annalisa Enrile, Maricela Guzman, Kelly Hayes-Raitt
• Location: Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 3300 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA
• Contact: (213) 489-1900 x114 Email: sgibson@afsc.org or mguzman@afsc.org
• Web: losangeles.afsc.org
  April 16 / San Jose

• Speakers: Andrea Licata

April 17 / San Francisco, CA

• Speakers: Andrea Licata, Sabina Perez
• Address: Veterans Building, Room 210, 401 Van Ness, San Francisco, CA
• Location: Paul Coz, Veterans for Peace Chapter 69
• Contact: Sandra Swartz, American Friends Service Committee, 415-999-2436

April 18 / Santa Cruz, CA/ 7:30 PM

• Speakers: Andrea Licata
• Location: Resource Center for Nonviolence, 515 Broadway, Santa Cruz, CA
• Contact: Sandino Gomez, 831-750-8687

April 19 / Seattle, WA

• Speakers: Andrea Licata
• Contact: Gerry Condon, projectsafehave@hotmail.com

Speaker Biographies

Olivier Bancoult (Mauritius): Olivier, an electrician by trade, is the chairman of the Chagos Refugee Group. Between 1965 and 1973, 2,000 native people were deported from the Chagos Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Among the Chagossians were four-year-old Olivier Bancoult and his family. All of them were deported by the United Kingdom to make way for the construction of a U.S. military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the archipelago. The Chagossians were dumped on the wharf of Mauritius, 1,200 miles from their idyllic home, without jobs, formal education, money, or homes. Most have lived in poverty since. Today, as the leader of the Chagossian Refugee Group, Mr. Bancoult continues to wage a legal battle through the courts of the U.S. and U.K. seeking restitution and return to the islands. Three times the High Court of England ruled in favor of the Chagossians only to have the rulings overturned by arcane “Royal decrees”. Mr. Bancoult and his people await the decision on the last of these appeals to be heard on June 30, 2008 – obancoultcrg@intnet.mu

Jan Tamas (Czech Republic): Active in the nonviolent Humanist movement since 1997. Since 2000, he has traveled frequently to Kenya and has helped launch several development projects there. In 2005 he was elected as a chairman of the Humanist Party. In 2006, he helped form and is the spokesperson for the “No to Bases Initiative” which unites more than sixty organizations, and actively opposes the U.S. plan to establish an NMD military base in the Czech Republlic. He has a Ph.D. in technical cybernetics and works as a freelance IT consultant. He lives in Prague, is married and has no children

Andrea Licata (Italy): Editor of an anthology creating plans for converting the long-standing mammoth US airbase in Aviano to peaceful civilian purposes. He is one of the leading organizers of the community-based campaign against the expansion of the US air base in the Dal Molin suburb of Vicenza—in which the US is putting state-of-the-art weaponry to be able to launch rapid-response attacks in the region. Andrea was an organizer of demonstrations that occurred in December 2007, in which hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Vicenza in protest against the US base expansion.

Phyllis Bennis: Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute. She has been a writer, analyst and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. While working as a journalist at the United Nations during the run-up to the 1990-91 Gulf War, she began working on U.S. domination of the UN, and stayed involved in work on Iraq sanctions and disarmament, and later U.S. war and occupation in Iraq. In 2001 she helped found and currently co-chairs the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation. She works closely with the United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalition, and since 2002 has played an active role in the growing global peace movement.

Frida Berrigan: Senior program associate at the Arms and Security Project of the New America Foundation.and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. A graduate of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, Frida worked with a Central America solidarity organization for two years before coming to the World Policy Institute. Maintaining an interest in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America, she also focuses on nuclear weapons policy, weapons sales to areas of conflict particularly in SE Asia, and military training programs. Most recently she has published articles in the Providence Journal, the Nonviolent Activist and the Hartford Courant.

Annalisa Enrile: National Chairperson of GABRIELA Network, an organization she has been with since 1994. She is a professor at the USC School of Social Work where she teaches human behavior, community practice, and feminist theory and social action. Annalisa has had extensive experience in the area of trafficking, militarization, and global violence against women. She spent a year in the Philippines on a Fulbright Fellowship examining domestic violence and grassroots responses where she trained with GABRIELA Philippines. She continues to work with GABRIELA Philippines and fights injustice on both sides of the Pacific.

Maricela Guzman: Served in the US Navy on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and in Naples, Italy from 1998 – 2002. After she left the military, she came out against invasion of Iraq and participated in marches over budget cuts to the VA. Maricela is a member of Service Women Action Network (SWAN). She has collaborated with other organizations in promoting military benefits for our troops and veterans, women’s rights in the military, the antiwar movement, and is involved in the counter-recruitment of youth in Los Angeles. Her goal is to become a psychologist and someday hopes to work with veterans that are dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She will describe the militarization of the US border with Mexico.

Kelly Hayes-Raitt: Spent February in the Philippines and the first week of March in Guam, where she experienced firsthand the impact of the US military. She interviewed dozens of community activists, which she blogged about at www.PeacePATHFoundation.org. She will spend this summer in Syria identifying programs to help Iraqi refugees. Kelly joined a women’s delegation to Iraq just five weeks before the US-led invasion. The experience touched her so deeply that she returned a few months later and provided on-air commentaries from Baghdad, Basra and Fallouja to KFWB news radio, KNBC local evening news, and NPR. During the next two years, Kelly addressed over 200 audiences about her experiences in Iraq—including a group of Congresswomen in the US Capitol.

Emira Woods: Co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and founding member of Resist Africom. She has written on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to US military policy. Ms. Woods completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and her graduate studies at Harvard. Prior to joining IPS, Ms. Woods was Program Manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. Previous to that, she served as Program Officer of Oxfam America’s Africa program.

Daniel Volman: is the director of the African Security Research Project in Washington, DC, and a specialist on U.S. military policy toward Africa and African security issues.