Now What?
What shall we do now? Here's what!
Written on Friday 28th June 2003
Now the bombing is over and the occupation and carve-up of Iraq are well underway, what’s next for the anti-war movement? How can the enormous energy which went into it be taken forward into the creation of a full-on, strong and broad based peace and social justice movement? These are just a few suggestions – far from an exhaustive list, but something to start from.
First and foremost, I want to remind people of what Akael’s dad said to me in the hospital (March 29th). “We are thank to people in all the world, but especially in America and England. More than a million people in England say no to war. There is not a problem between people. There is a problem with governments.”
Don’t ever let anyone tell you the anti-war movement failed. If our government didn’t listen to the massive opposition it was they who failed, in declining to govern according to the will of the people. People in Iraq knew that, all over the world, we were coming out of our houses and onto the streets and demanding respect for them.
The struggle starts now for Iraqi people. They were never going to be able to fight off the US and UK troops. It’s important that we support them in getting their voices heard, within Iraq and internationally.
Some students that I spent a lot of time with in Iraq have set up Iraq Indymedia, producing both a website and a newspaper in dual English and Arabic. You can read it online at www.almuajaha.com . It’s independent and anyone can get involved, which makes it a unique and important project. Fundraising isn’t the most empowering thing in the world to suggest people can do, but that’s a really useful project to support.
On a similar note, we need to keep attention focussed on Iraq. Before I went over there I was working in the immigration department of a Law Centre and we were still getting loads of refugees from the Balkans and Afghanistan, and the Home Office line was, no, we’ve secured those countries. How surprisingly ungrateful, then, of people to keep fleeing from warlords and blood feuds and forceful recruitment to militias.
I met a young Serbian woman called Maja who was in Iraq as a peace activist and was itching to ask her about her perspective on the war, from having lived through one herself, but held off, thinking she was probably bored with being asked about the war in Serbia. When eventually we did start talking about it she said no, no-one had asked her about it. It was as if everyone had forgotten there had ever been a war in Serbia.
That mustn’t be allowed to happen with Iraq. We need to keep looking for independent sources of information outside of the mainstream media and spreading them, making sure Iraq isn’t ticked off as “liberated” before the Iraqis themselves feel like that’s the case. Subscribe to the IPT Reports list, to have reports emailed to you by Iraqis and foreign activists in Iraq, it’s an announcement-only list, so you get e mails only from the list moderator, not from everyone on the list.
* www.electroniciraq.net - weblog of an Iraqi bloke called Salam Pax
* www.indymedia.org - global independent and open news forum
* english.aljazeera.net - news the US/UK/ Iraqi authorities tried to control and couldn’t
Specifically for the bigger picture of the statue toppling ceremony, see www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm – it shows that the jubilant crowd surrounding the statue was about 150 people, including international press and US soldiers plus a couple of dozen Iraqis, one of whom appears in another picture at the shoulder of Ahmed Chalabi, the US’s then-favoured candidate for new leader. That, and the fact that the rest of the square is empty, with all entrances blocked by tanks, indicates that ordinary Iraqis weren’t part of that celebration, that those who were there were Chalabi’s exile force.
The media onslaught is in some instances quite sinister: the UK Foreign Office has set up “Towards Freedom TV” to tell the Iraqis all about their new found freedom which, apparently, isn’t obvious to them.
Also get background information about sanctions from www.casi.org and www.voicesuk.org – the Voices in the Wilderness website. They may have been lifted now but there are still countless untold stories and it’s important we make sure they’re never used that way again, with such punitive and deadly effect against a population which had no way to get rid of its government.
Direct action against companies profiting from the war
The US administration in Iraq has been merrily handing out contracts for reconstruction and other activities in Iraq. “For security reasons” the US Agency for International Development (USaid) is awarding them all to US companies and Iraq is paying for them. A radical idea, I know, but if those contracts were going to Iraqi companies, the money would begin to rebuild Iraq’s economy instead of draining it yet more.
All of the infrastructural repair could be done by Iraqi companies – they’re perfectly capable of rebuilding the sewage, water, communications and other systems, the bridges, the offices and homes that they built in the first place, especially unhindered by the sanctions that stopped them replacing the water and sewage pipes damaged in the 1991 bombings.
You can find out about the contracts on www.blogistonpost.blogspot.com and on www.la.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/51989.php which sets out clearly what company has been awarded the contract, to do what, for how much money, and which agency secured the contract. Many of these companies have UK offices, including Bechtel, whose London office previously handled the contract for a plant to make chemicals used in mustard gas.
Get a group of friends together and go to the UK offices and creatively make plain your disapproval for companies that seek to profit from war. Be cheeky outside their offices. Be cheeky inside their offices. Leaflet their workers and anyone else in the area. Clog their fax / phone / e mail systems. Climb up the outside of the building and drape banners or other artworks from the walls. Start boycott campaigns. Do not, under any circumstances let off stink bombs in their lobbies as that would be very naughty. Neither should you consider carrying a briefcase full of dry concrete mix onto their premises and tipping it down their toilets to cause a blockage, gluing toilet doors shut or other pesky and costly but enormously enjoyable acts of sabotage.
Bechtel is a particularly appropriate target having, like Halliburton, strong links with the US government. Its vice president is a member of Baby Bush’s Defence Policy Board.
For more about direct action, see www.schnews.org.uk
Debt
Iraq is the most indebted country in the world in terms of its debt to export ratio, having $130 bn in external debts, rising all the time with compound interest. $36 bn has already been awarded by the security council in compensation claims against Iraq for the first Gulf War, much of it to filthy rich companies, and a further $127 bn is still under consideration. Iraq is likely to be expected to pay for the latest war and occupation as well.
When a country is in a lot of debt the creditor countries and the IMF and World Bank impose “structural adjustment” policies whereby the state’s expenses are shifted onto the individual and the country’s resources are privatised and multinationalised. In Iraq people don’t pay taxes or for water, education or healthcare. Electricity, petrol and rent are heavily subsidised and food has been given out free since the start of the sanctions, not just since the oil for food programme. (Note to any halfwits out there: This is not to praise the old Iraqi government in any way, merely to explain the situation. No, Saddam is not my boyfriend.).
If the Iraqi people are not liberated from the debt, they’re likely to suffer the most appalling poverty, even by current standards. There’s been a bit of confusion about the debt because the UK and US governments have also been calling for the droppig of debt. Ibn fact the debt they’re talking about is anything relating to the withdrawal of oil concessions the old government awarded to France and Russia, They want those revoked and any debts accruing from that to be dropped, but not the debts that are their means of controlling Iraq.
Look at www.jubileeiraq.org for info about the debt and the Jubilee Iraq campaign and, again, take direct action – against the IMF and World Bank, at Parliament, in the streets, at the offices of the arms dealers which sold the weapons that created so much of the debt and so on.
Compensation
Another important demand is for compensation for the Iraqi people who have lost limbs, family members, livelihoods, homes and everything else in the war and the sanctions. The countries which supplied Saddam with weapons, helicopters and expert assistance should be held liable to the Kurdish people killed in the Anfal campaign. The companies that sold him torture equipment should be held liable to the victims of it.
Someone once e mailed me, in response to something about chemical weapons, saying “If you drive your car into a crowd of people and kill someone, does that mean it’s my fault for selling you the car?” I wrote back saying the difference between a car and a chemical weapon is that a car can have beneficial uses, or at least innocent ones.
Yes. In English law if you sell something to someone knowing or believing they intend to use it for a criminal offence, you're liable as an accessory to the crime they commit, provided its within the range of what you expected them to do. When you sell a chemical weapon, you can’t expect it to be used for anything but an illegal purpose. The US government blocked condemnation of Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. Now they paint on concerned faces and talk about it as if they didn’t know. Yes, they knew. Yes, they were accessories.
There’s an Iraqi group called CIVIC – Campaign for Innocent Victims In Iraq - which is working on getting witness statements and stories from ordinary Iraqis around the country, setting up teams in loads of towns to gather the information. It’s good. www.iraqvictimsfund.org
The campaign for compensation is more about highlighting stories than actually expecting any money to be paid by the UK and US and other countries that participated in the war, the sanctions, the no-fly-zone killings and the arms and torture implement sales. Use direct action, again, at arms companies and government institutions, get stuff in the media, enact trials in the streets where the claim is considered, all the rest of it.
For arms dealers, see Campaign Against the Arms Trade on www.caat.org and to find out about arms companies investing in your university, town or whatever else, go to the CAAT clean investment campaign page.
Lives
Governments don’t listen to us. All those people marching and campaigning and acting against the war and the decision was already made long before the vote in Parliament which, anyway, was won mainly through the doctrine of collective responsibility and the Commons majority.
Collective responsibility means that the whole cabinet stands together on whatever decision is made, frequently by a “mini-cabinet” or an “inner cabinet” of the Prime Minister and a select few, often including unelected advisers. The Commons majority and the whip mean that it’s nearly always easy for the inner cabinet to push its decisions through the lower house. House of Lords amendments and objections can always be overruled. The Royal Assent is only a rubber stamp. The UK courts don’t have any power to strike out legislation as unconstitutional or oppressive and, even if they did, judges are not known for their radicalism, except by the most conservative.
Lord Hailsham called it “elective dictatorship”, whereby a Prime Minister and a small number of his or her closest allies control the entire legislature. As well Parliament isn’t really accountable because there’s so little difference between the main parties and, at any given time in the last couple of decades, there’s never been a strong opposition at election time. Add to that the increasing devolution of power to unelected bodies including corporations, which have taken over the running of public functions for profit, and shady cartels like the Carlisle Group and it’s clear that change isn’t going to come through the mainstream political process, lobbying, letter writing, voting and asking for reform.
Our power lies in our own lives. We can set up our own local political structures (and by “structures” I don’t mean “parties”), start running our communities in our own interests, talking to one another, building local economies where food and clothing and services are grown and made and provided on a local level, bringing money into our own places instead of draining it away to multinationals that don’t give a flying monkey’s arse about local people and environments, undermining those corporations, buying less stuff, undermining those politicians that don’t listen to us, developing mutual aid and support structures, merging gardens together and growing veg and fruit and reducing our dependence on oil and using our imaginations and our skills and our energy for our own collective benefit.
Check out www.avoncda.coop for loads of info about setting up co-operatives and employee buy-outs and so on – every single co-op is undermining capitalism, as is every person who buys stuff or services from a co-op. There are building services, cleaners, shops, food, transport, housing co-ops, everything, near enough.
Also look at the sites listed below for info on bio diesel and other ecologically sound technology and power. Apparently you can mix veg oil and diesel yourself, in your tank, if you’ve got a diesel engine, and if we all switched to bio diesel it would reduce our CO2 emissions enough to fulfil our 80% reduction target. Of course there’d still be the congestion problem to take on, but it’s a good start.
* www.veggievan.org
* www.biodiesel.org
* www.lowimpact.org
* www.eco-web.org
* www.greenenergy.org.uk
* www.ethicaljunction.org
* www.cat.org.uk - website of the Centre for Alternative Technology. Loads of useful info.
Politicians talk about this country’s “vital interests” and all they mean is business interests. That’s not the only form of economy. That’s not the only interest. These ideas are not out of reach. Our power comes from believing in ourselves and making it happen. There are inspiring people everywhere already making it happen. It’s time Western society grew up, ditched its teenage tantrums and demands and took responsibility for itself.
Organisational things
I’ve been travelling all over the country since I got back speaking to public meetings, school assemblies, universities and peace groups and, apart from thinking the war was a really bad idea, there seems to be one universal theme: frustration with the Socialist Worker Party. I haven’t met a single group that hasn’t had problems with them trying to dominate meetings, foisting their agendas on whole organisations and actively sabotaging things planned without their approval or that they don't agree with.
I’m not trying to alienate anyone – factional fighting isn’t going to help - and there are some good people in the SWP but as an organisation it’s parasitic and drains the life out of a genuine popular movement by forcing people to spend so much time and energy struggling for the right not to be dominated by the party line and even putting a lot of people off coming to meetings and marches altogether.
I’ll leave it there, but if you want to debate and discuss this, there’s an article on this by Mark Thomas and a debate.
Cheers all. La lucha continua. The struggle goes on.
Now the bombing is over and the occupation and carve-up of Iraq are well underway, what’s next for the anti-war movement? How can the enormous energy which went into it be taken forward into the creation of a full-on, strong and broad based peace and social justice movement? These are just a few suggestions – far from an exhaustive list, but something to start from.
First and foremost, I want to remind people of what Akael’s dad said to me in the hospital (March 29th). “We are thank to people in all the world, but especially in America and England. More than a million people in England say no to war. There is not a problem between people. There is a problem with governments.”
Don’t ever let anyone tell you the anti-war movement failed. If our government didn’t listen to the massive opposition it was they who failed, in declining to govern according to the will of the people. People in Iraq knew that, all over the world, we were coming out of our houses and onto the streets and demanding respect for them.
The struggle starts now for Iraqi people. They were never going to be able to fight off the US and UK troops. It’s important that we support them in getting their voices heard, within Iraq and internationally.
Some students that I spent a lot of time with in Iraq have set up Iraq Indymedia, producing both a website and a newspaper in dual English and Arabic. You can read it online at www.almuajaha.com . It’s independent and anyone can get involved, which makes it a unique and important project. Fundraising isn’t the most empowering thing in the world to suggest people can do, but that’s a really useful project to support.
On a similar note, we need to keep attention focussed on Iraq. Before I went over there I was working in the immigration department of a Law Centre and we were still getting loads of refugees from the Balkans and Afghanistan, and the Home Office line was, no, we’ve secured those countries. How surprisingly ungrateful, then, of people to keep fleeing from warlords and blood feuds and forceful recruitment to militias.
I met a young Serbian woman called Maja who was in Iraq as a peace activist and was itching to ask her about her perspective on the war, from having lived through one herself, but held off, thinking she was probably bored with being asked about the war in Serbia. When eventually we did start talking about it she said no, no-one had asked her about it. It was as if everyone had forgotten there had ever been a war in Serbia.
That mustn’t be allowed to happen with Iraq. We need to keep looking for independent sources of information outside of the mainstream media and spreading them, making sure Iraq isn’t ticked off as “liberated” before the Iraqis themselves feel like that’s the case. Subscribe to the IPT Reports list, to have reports emailed to you by Iraqis and foreign activists in Iraq, it’s an announcement-only list, so you get e mails only from the list moderator, not from everyone on the list.
* www.electroniciraq.net - weblog of an Iraqi bloke called Salam Pax
* www.indymedia.org - global independent and open news forum
* english.aljazeera.net - news the US/UK/ Iraqi authorities tried to control and couldn’t
Specifically for the bigger picture of the statue toppling ceremony, see www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm – it shows that the jubilant crowd surrounding the statue was about 150 people, including international press and US soldiers plus a couple of dozen Iraqis, one of whom appears in another picture at the shoulder of Ahmed Chalabi, the US’s then-favoured candidate for new leader. That, and the fact that the rest of the square is empty, with all entrances blocked by tanks, indicates that ordinary Iraqis weren’t part of that celebration, that those who were there were Chalabi’s exile force.
The media onslaught is in some instances quite sinister: the UK Foreign Office has set up “Towards Freedom TV” to tell the Iraqis all about their new found freedom which, apparently, isn’t obvious to them.
Also get background information about sanctions from www.casi.org and www.voicesuk.org – the Voices in the Wilderness website. They may have been lifted now but there are still countless untold stories and it’s important we make sure they’re never used that way again, with such punitive and deadly effect against a population which had no way to get rid of its government.
Direct action against companies profiting from the war
The US administration in Iraq has been merrily handing out contracts for reconstruction and other activities in Iraq. “For security reasons” the US Agency for International Development (USaid) is awarding them all to US companies and Iraq is paying for them. A radical idea, I know, but if those contracts were going to Iraqi companies, the money would begin to rebuild Iraq’s economy instead of draining it yet more.
All of the infrastructural repair could be done by Iraqi companies – they’re perfectly capable of rebuilding the sewage, water, communications and other systems, the bridges, the offices and homes that they built in the first place, especially unhindered by the sanctions that stopped them replacing the water and sewage pipes damaged in the 1991 bombings.
You can find out about the contracts on www.blogistonpost.blogspot.com and on www.la.indymedia.org/news/2003/04/51989.php which sets out clearly what company has been awarded the contract, to do what, for how much money, and which agency secured the contract. Many of these companies have UK offices, including Bechtel, whose London office previously handled the contract for a plant to make chemicals used in mustard gas.
Get a group of friends together and go to the UK offices and creatively make plain your disapproval for companies that seek to profit from war. Be cheeky outside their offices. Be cheeky inside their offices. Leaflet their workers and anyone else in the area. Clog their fax / phone / e mail systems. Climb up the outside of the building and drape banners or other artworks from the walls. Start boycott campaigns. Do not, under any circumstances let off stink bombs in their lobbies as that would be very naughty. Neither should you consider carrying a briefcase full of dry concrete mix onto their premises and tipping it down their toilets to cause a blockage, gluing toilet doors shut or other pesky and costly but enormously enjoyable acts of sabotage.
Bechtel is a particularly appropriate target having, like Halliburton, strong links with the US government. Its vice president is a member of Baby Bush’s Defence Policy Board.
For more about direct action, see www.schnews.org.uk
Debt
Iraq is the most indebted country in the world in terms of its debt to export ratio, having $130 bn in external debts, rising all the time with compound interest. $36 bn has already been awarded by the security council in compensation claims against Iraq for the first Gulf War, much of it to filthy rich companies, and a further $127 bn is still under consideration. Iraq is likely to be expected to pay for the latest war and occupation as well.
When a country is in a lot of debt the creditor countries and the IMF and World Bank impose “structural adjustment” policies whereby the state’s expenses are shifted onto the individual and the country’s resources are privatised and multinationalised. In Iraq people don’t pay taxes or for water, education or healthcare. Electricity, petrol and rent are heavily subsidised and food has been given out free since the start of the sanctions, not just since the oil for food programme. (Note to any halfwits out there: This is not to praise the old Iraqi government in any way, merely to explain the situation. No, Saddam is not my boyfriend.).
If the Iraqi people are not liberated from the debt, they’re likely to suffer the most appalling poverty, even by current standards. There’s been a bit of confusion about the debt because the UK and US governments have also been calling for the droppig of debt. Ibn fact the debt they’re talking about is anything relating to the withdrawal of oil concessions the old government awarded to France and Russia, They want those revoked and any debts accruing from that to be dropped, but not the debts that are their means of controlling Iraq.
Look at www.jubileeiraq.org for info about the debt and the Jubilee Iraq campaign and, again, take direct action – against the IMF and World Bank, at Parliament, in the streets, at the offices of the arms dealers which sold the weapons that created so much of the debt and so on.
Compensation
Another important demand is for compensation for the Iraqi people who have lost limbs, family members, livelihoods, homes and everything else in the war and the sanctions. The countries which supplied Saddam with weapons, helicopters and expert assistance should be held liable to the Kurdish people killed in the Anfal campaign. The companies that sold him torture equipment should be held liable to the victims of it.
Someone once e mailed me, in response to something about chemical weapons, saying “If you drive your car into a crowd of people and kill someone, does that mean it’s my fault for selling you the car?” I wrote back saying the difference between a car and a chemical weapon is that a car can have beneficial uses, or at least innocent ones.
Yes. In English law if you sell something to someone knowing or believing they intend to use it for a criminal offence, you're liable as an accessory to the crime they commit, provided its within the range of what you expected them to do. When you sell a chemical weapon, you can’t expect it to be used for anything but an illegal purpose. The US government blocked condemnation of Saddam’s gassing of the Kurds. Now they paint on concerned faces and talk about it as if they didn’t know. Yes, they knew. Yes, they were accessories.
There’s an Iraqi group called CIVIC – Campaign for Innocent Victims In Iraq - which is working on getting witness statements and stories from ordinary Iraqis around the country, setting up teams in loads of towns to gather the information. It’s good. www.iraqvictimsfund.org
The campaign for compensation is more about highlighting stories than actually expecting any money to be paid by the UK and US and other countries that participated in the war, the sanctions, the no-fly-zone killings and the arms and torture implement sales. Use direct action, again, at arms companies and government institutions, get stuff in the media, enact trials in the streets where the claim is considered, all the rest of it.
For arms dealers, see Campaign Against the Arms Trade on www.caat.org and to find out about arms companies investing in your university, town or whatever else, go to the CAAT clean investment campaign page.
Lives
Governments don’t listen to us. All those people marching and campaigning and acting against the war and the decision was already made long before the vote in Parliament which, anyway, was won mainly through the doctrine of collective responsibility and the Commons majority.
Collective responsibility means that the whole cabinet stands together on whatever decision is made, frequently by a “mini-cabinet” or an “inner cabinet” of the Prime Minister and a select few, often including unelected advisers. The Commons majority and the whip mean that it’s nearly always easy for the inner cabinet to push its decisions through the lower house. House of Lords amendments and objections can always be overruled. The Royal Assent is only a rubber stamp. The UK courts don’t have any power to strike out legislation as unconstitutional or oppressive and, even if they did, judges are not known for their radicalism, except by the most conservative.
Lord Hailsham called it “elective dictatorship”, whereby a Prime Minister and a small number of his or her closest allies control the entire legislature. As well Parliament isn’t really accountable because there’s so little difference between the main parties and, at any given time in the last couple of decades, there’s never been a strong opposition at election time. Add to that the increasing devolution of power to unelected bodies including corporations, which have taken over the running of public functions for profit, and shady cartels like the Carlisle Group and it’s clear that change isn’t going to come through the mainstream political process, lobbying, letter writing, voting and asking for reform.
Our power lies in our own lives. We can set up our own local political structures (and by “structures” I don’t mean “parties”), start running our communities in our own interests, talking to one another, building local economies where food and clothing and services are grown and made and provided on a local level, bringing money into our own places instead of draining it away to multinationals that don’t give a flying monkey’s arse about local people and environments, undermining those corporations, buying less stuff, undermining those politicians that don’t listen to us, developing mutual aid and support structures, merging gardens together and growing veg and fruit and reducing our dependence on oil and using our imaginations and our skills and our energy for our own collective benefit.
Check out www.avoncda.coop for loads of info about setting up co-operatives and employee buy-outs and so on – every single co-op is undermining capitalism, as is every person who buys stuff or services from a co-op. There are building services, cleaners, shops, food, transport, housing co-ops, everything, near enough.
Also look at the sites listed below for info on bio diesel and other ecologically sound technology and power. Apparently you can mix veg oil and diesel yourself, in your tank, if you’ve got a diesel engine, and if we all switched to bio diesel it would reduce our CO2 emissions enough to fulfil our 80% reduction target. Of course there’d still be the congestion problem to take on, but it’s a good start.
* www.veggievan.org
* www.biodiesel.org
* www.lowimpact.org
* www.eco-web.org
* www.greenenergy.org.uk
* www.ethicaljunction.org
* www.cat.org.uk - website of the Centre for Alternative Technology. Loads of useful info.
Politicians talk about this country’s “vital interests” and all they mean is business interests. That’s not the only form of economy. That’s not the only interest. These ideas are not out of reach. Our power comes from believing in ourselves and making it happen. There are inspiring people everywhere already making it happen. It’s time Western society grew up, ditched its teenage tantrums and demands and took responsibility for itself.
Organisational things
I’ve been travelling all over the country since I got back speaking to public meetings, school assemblies, universities and peace groups and, apart from thinking the war was a really bad idea, there seems to be one universal theme: frustration with the Socialist Worker Party. I haven’t met a single group that hasn’t had problems with them trying to dominate meetings, foisting their agendas on whole organisations and actively sabotaging things planned without their approval or that they don't agree with.
I’m not trying to alienate anyone – factional fighting isn’t going to help - and there are some good people in the SWP but as an organisation it’s parasitic and drains the life out of a genuine popular movement by forcing people to spend so much time and energy struggling for the right not to be dominated by the party line and even putting a lot of people off coming to meetings and marches altogether.
I’ll leave it there, but if you want to debate and discuss this, there’s an article on this by Mark Thomas and a debate.
Cheers all. La lucha continua. The struggle goes on.