Student parliaments at four universities in Germany: the University of Cologne, University of Bonn, University of Wuppertal and the University of Arts have vowed to wage campaigns to ban the sale and marketing of Coca-Cola products from their campuses.

Momentum is building to wage similar campaigns on numerous other campuses throughout Germany.

At the University of Arts in Berlin, the student parliament overwhelmingly voted on July 12th to take such action. The vote was 10 to 1 with 4 abstentions. The vote was taken just six days after student leaders Pablo Hermann and Ringo Junigk organized the Kola Konferenz held before a packed audience. The event was attended by The Coca-Cola Company's spokesperson Pablo Largacha and company representatives in Germany. Coke's representatives left early when they realized some members of the audience were well-informed and the company's stream of empty public relations rhetoric was not going to work.

For example, Largacha, trying to sidestep issues of human rights abuses at Coke's bottling plants in Colombia, said Coca-Cola had set up a $10 million fund in Colombia to help communities. Members of the audience asked, but what have you done to help the workers at your bottling plants who continue to be victimized? Such questions were unsettling to Largacha. After spewing his empty rhetoric and lies, he found himself in an embarrassing and untenable position and wanted to leave the conference as quickly as possible.

In an effort to undermine the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke's effectiveness, Coca-Cola announced that it was giving the $10 million to the Colombian Foundation for Education and Opportunity one week prior to the 2005 shareholders' meeting. This was to serve two purposes -- to create good public relations and to give the impression that it was doing something positive in Colombia. This was done instead of addressing the serious human rights abuses in the bottling plants. The second reason was to buy off the head of CUT (labor federation in Colombia) by putting him on the board of the foundation.

Germany is the sixth largest market for Coca-Cola and thus extremely important to the company's maintaining growth and profitability. According to a May 2005 Business Week article, Germany accounts for about 3% of worldwide sales and 6% of total operating profits. "Coke still dominates the German soft-drink market, with 55% of retail Cola sales in 2004. But that was down from 62% in mid-2003.

Germans have many reasons to rebuke Coke since the company has laid off thousands of workers at the same time top officers of the company were rewarding themselves with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options.

Starting in January 2005, the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke received widespread coverage throughout Germany in the national and statewide print, radio and television media outlets. When Germany's Der Spiegel magazine did a story in January covering the campaign's successes on college and university campuses in the U.S., the magazine received 100,000 hits online on the article in the first four hours of its publication.

We continue to receive a barrage of communications from Germany of persons and groups ready to help. It's a terrific boost for our brothers and sisters worldwide fighting for justice from Coca-Cola.

Be sure to look at the website of the German Coca-Cola-Kampagne Kilumbian.

From the newsletter of killercoke.org