Annelise Ebbe, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Denmark
"The war against Afghanistan was allegedly a reaction to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre. NATO Member States invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, “that an armed attack against one or more of them [the Parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”. The first US military response to the 9/11 attacks commenced on 7 October 2001 and were assigned the name Operation Infinite Justice which was changed to Operation Enduring Freedom because it caused offence to Muslims for whom infinite justice is the domain of god alone..."

Cynthia Cockburn. Women in Black against War, London. 
"NATO = Security?   “Security” is a word whose commonsense meaning, as the Oxford dictionary puts it, is “a feeling of safety”, of being “protected from danger”. The term as used in international diplomacy, governmental and military discourse perverts this meaning. So, one task of our antiwar / peace movements is to uncover the falsehoods inherent in the “security” concept deployed by NATO. We have to define the ‘real thing’, and for this a feminist analysis is useful. We have to struggle to bring it into being, and for this a feminist practice is absolutely necessary."...

Ana Azaria, Présidente, Organisation de Femmes Egalité
NATO, wars and military spending are not a priority for working-class women.
"When you are laid off, when your fixed-term contract is not renewed, when you struggle to pay always more for less and when at the beginning of the month your wallet is already empty… you have nothing to win with the increase of military spending.

"When children, at school, no longer enjoy a network of support to overcome their difficulties, when you can’t afford a house or healthcare… it is to be strongly denounced that money should be granted first to bankers, industrialists and to the army rather to education, housing and healthcare projects."...

Heidi Meinzolt
"In 2001 extremists from Saudi Arabia with connections to Al-Qaida, used civilian airplanes to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in New York USA.  If such an attack had happened in London or Madrid the culprits would have been brought to a civilian court and tried and sentenced there.  The attack on 9/11 was not a military attack, but the US government considered a declaration of war against Afghanistan to be sanctioned by the UN according to the principal of self-defence.  NATO supported the US interpretation of self-defence and regarded the attack as one on all NATO member states (Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty). In 2003 the USA and UK declared war on Iraq without a decision by the UN Security Council to use violence against Iraq (Chapter VII of the UN Charter)."...

Nelly Martin, Coordination Européenne Marche Mondiale des Femmes
"Patriarchy and capitalism use war to maintain their domination. Militarization is a reflection of the division of roles in patriarchy. It conveys the idea that masculinity is associated with violence and militarization, and implies that women need the protection of men and the military. The patriarchal and capitalist systems have made violence natural, a violence that is expressed through militarization and war."...

Marlene Tuininga, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Women in Black, Paris. 
"The upcoming of important and vocal, if too seldom heard, women’s groups all over the world in recent years is something quite new that can change the present paradigms in society.  These groups can be considered as the unexpected side effect of some very ugly things in the modern world : wars, forced migration and exile.   Knowing that most of the time these upheavals result in women being «liberated» from traditional forms of submission and oppression because their menfolk are either in the army, in prison, doing business elsewhere or dead, women are in the obligation of organizing themselves together. Staying behind or fleeing with their children, they develop unknown qualities and a new solidarity."...

Simona Ricciardelli, Women in Black, Naples, Italy
"Already in the early 1990s, after the end of the East-West conflict, the post-WW2 defence policy of the North Atlantic Treaty gave rise to a “security” organization linked to political, economic, and social factors whose purpose was to govern, by preventive and interventive means, the conflict between the the North of the world (the well-off nations) and the South (the impoverished countries). In 1992 the Western European Union, including Italy, overhauled its defense system, identifying NATO as Europe’s security model; once again a “policy of force” and “military solutions” were given priority, bearing out a patriarchal model of protection and control by the powerful over the other members in a subject role. By going along with this policy, Italy actually transgresses against the founding document of its democratic state, as laid down in Article 11 of the Constitution of the Republic."...

Women in Black, Seville, Spain
"It was the impact of Women in Black (Zene u Crnom) in Belgrade, their huge energy and profound theorizations, that brought us together in Seville - a group of women coming from different backgrounds – from feminism, from the Movement for Conscientious Objection (military refusal), from the world of teaching and education, and so on. The words of the Belgrade women, the ideas on which their antiwar activism was founded, were on the face of it easy to understand: any woman, by virtue of being a woman, was likely to agree with their approach! Yet at the very same time, it wasn’t altogether easy to integrate their ideas into our current conception of life, so immersed were we in the patriarchal vision of the world, so imprinted by it. Its pervasive discourse had trapped our minds in a great spider’s web from which it was difficult to disentangle ourselves."...

Sian Jones, London Women in Black and Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp "Women have a multitude of relationships to the military: they command regiments, enlist as soldiers, work in the arms industry, clean the kitchens and toilets of military bases… or oppose the military in protests and peace camps. Some women have little choice about their relationship with the military: they are killed, injured, forced from their homes, and bereaved by armed conflict. Others are recruited, sometimes ‘voluntarily’, but very often forcibly, to provide sexual services to male military personnel. Many of these are women and girls trafficked for the purposes of forced prostitution."...

Anna Valente and Margherita Granero. Women in Black, Torino, Italy
"1.  The NATO treaty has to be renewed.
Actions to highlight this could be useful, or at least we should get rid of the automatic mechanisms which permit of no knowledge or democratic control. (The 1999 revision of the treaty, with the “new strategic concept”, was not ratified by the parliament in Italy). Some connected questions: the fact that often the treaties or military agreements are secret, or at least not made public, sometimes even to the parliament, deprives us - as citizens - of any possibility of intervention on decisions that concern our territory, and our civil life, empting the concept of citizenship of all meaning and making us mere subjects."...

Monique Dental, Founder of  the Collective « Pratiques et Réflexions Féministes « Ruptures » , Paris, France.
"The Feminist Collective « Ruptures » and its network, committed to the implementation of basic women human rights and sustainable development at the national, European and international level, had already fought against any military solution during the Gulf crisis. While condemning the iraki agression we wrote, with other organizations, a « Women citizens letter » to the President of the French Republic demanding the convening of an international conference to address,  with  the people involved,  the serious problems of the Middle East."...