Buy Now Slay Later
September 14th
I was a refugee in Erith. For those not familiar with London, Erith is somewhere towards the south east outskirt of the sprawl, and I found myself there with three others, one in a wetsuit, fugitive from a police helicopter chase through a housing estate, our car marked, our safe houses hotter than a snake’s arse in a wagon rut and our eyeballs wobbling with exhaustion to the point where none of us could read a map.
The car was marked because it was pulled the day before on a recce and the person who should have been doing our job was nicked on a warrant he didn’t know had been issued, for an anti-war action, and spirited away to a court somewhere near an RAF base.
There was nowhere for us to go because two other people had been charged with conspiracy under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 for involvement with the same project we were part of (which had nothing to do with terrorism, even for the most wildly paranoid imagination). We knew that quite a few of the people in the paddle boats had been arrested for trying to stop two warships getting up the Thames into East London for the arms trade fair, and as spotters we were liable for a nicking for conspiracy to do whatever the others were charged with. The ships needed to get through the lock-gate during high tide. The plan was to leave them stranded. It almost worked. Next time…
One house was being used as an address for police bail, another was home to one of the people already charged with conspiracy, a third was the base for some preparations; so it went on. We decamped to a pub. I forget the name but its juke box, pints and clean toilets were as the clear, cool, fresh, blue manna of an oasis. There we sat, all four of us, flicking through the phone books of our mobiles, seeking sanctuary: “Are you in London? Oh, you’re away this weekend. No, no problem. See you soon.”
We found one though and worked out a route across the city that took us nowhere near the hellhole housing estates, half built, featureless and labyrinthine, not to mention swarming with police under orders to prevent anyone stopping the warships getting to where dodgy dictators and their generals would, in a couple of days, be shopping for the essential hardware of war and repression.
Tuesday was the opening day of Europe’s biggest arms trade fair – Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) in London’s docklands. Guests included Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, countries with abysmal records of human rights abuse similar to that perpetrated by the Iraqi dictatorship throughout the years Britain and others spent arming it. Both India and Pakistan were in attendance, though they are in conflict with each other.
Syria declined an invitation issued in spite of its designation as part of the axis of evil. Tanzania and South Africa are welcome though their people are without clean water or are dying in their thousands from AIDS and their governments can ill afford to buy arms from British pushers. The British government asserts it has an ethical foreign policy but it is responsible for the invitation list. (www.caat.org.uk and click on DSEi briefing for more info.)
On the Docklands Light Railway, in an immense queue of suits outside the Excel exhibition centre, looking out from the building, they stood clean and smug. My head filled with vivid, raging visions of the Iraqi people I met in the hospitals, the other end of these transactions. The bloody abyss of the wound in Nada Adnan’s thigh sickened me again, the fierce shrapnel embedded in Akael’s forehead, the piece of Moen’s bowel in a bag beside his bed like an indictment of the inventor, the manufacturer, the seller, the buyer, the dropper of that cluster bomb.
The screams echoed in my head, from more hospital rooms than I can count and the ones I never heard from the dark places where people were tortured with instruments sold in previous years’ shows, the dark places in Iraq, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Indonesia. Of course, those were earlier models. This year’s product is more efficient – better interrogative potential, more agony to the ounce.
Munib’s question played over and over and I longed for them to hear it: “What am I going to do? I am a car mechanic. I think I am finished.” Finished by the small square fragments which the anti-personnel weapon exploded into when it was fired at his home in a quiet street beside a girls’ school, which doctors had picked out of his body via an incision from the bottom of his chest to the bottom of his abdomen, and out of his legs, bandaged from the tops of his thighs to the bottoms of his feet and stained with gangrenous pus. The doctors were worried they would have to amputate them.
The next day I wrote: “Why is it considered a legitimate way to live, for a person to get up in the morning, kiss his or her kids goodbye and go and spend the working day experimenting and discussing and planning and building novel and ever-more efficient ways of severing soft, beautiful, living human bodies?” (March 28 2003)
I still don’t get it. Why are the purveyors of these things allowed to exhibit and sell them? Why are governments which kill their own people being invited to buy them? Is it just so we can bomb and invade them later, creating a market for yet more weapons? Why are the police being deployed to protect them?
Because “If we didn’t do it someone else would”? No. That argument doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for burglars and car thieves. It doesn’t work for accessories to much smaller scale killings. If I sell you a knife, knowing that you intend to kill someone with it, I am guilty of aiding and abetting murder. It doesn’t matter who else might have sold you the knife had I refused. It doesn’t matter how good a price I got for the murder weapon. I’m still guilty. That’s English law.
“I don’t make the bits that go bang” some of them said. Let’s be clear here. When you make the engine of a tank, you contribute to the creation of a deadly weapon. When you build an attack helicopter, or fit it with a radio, you contribute to the gas attack on civilians. When you equip the Iranian secret police with mobile phones you enhance their ability to detain, disappear and torture people.
But we were everywhere. An elderly man from the East End spoke at the end of the Campaign Against Arms Trade march on Tuesday, about the disgust local people felt at having such an event in their neighbourhood which was so devastated by the bombing from 1940-45. Processions, street parties on the access roads, a critical mass bike ride and other mass events were highly visible and accessible to anyone. Their importance lies in dramatising both injustice and our outrage and some of the uncountable victims around the world will see the demonstrations and take small comfort as Akael’s dad and other Iraqis did.
At the same time, catching the Docklands Light Railway, walking near the exhibition centre, up and down the river when they were trying to bring in the warships, even inside the fair, there were activists, people I knew, in suits, in work wear, incognito. Passing without acknowledgement we went about our acts of dissent, a huge, decentralised, moving web of disruption.
The trains which the delegates were travelling on were halted as wave after wave of small groups used their bodies to block their route to the bomb sales. Coaches of BAE delegates were stopped. Delegates were invited onto a complimentary bus which took them to Excel, but halfway there they were invited to make contributions towards paying off the Iraqi debt which they and their predecessors did so much to create. Dealers and buyers on the train were invited to play bingo in aid of the same cause.
Protesters got inside the centre, climbed up a tank and hung a banner. Red paint flew. Diners at the gala evening in a posh hotel on September 11th, of all dates, were showered with confetti saying “If we didn’t do it somebody else would” and “Buy now, slay later”. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other groups made creative use of mischief and their own bodies to interfere, in any way they could, with the preparations for torture and killing.
Organisers Spearhead gave “assurances” that cluster munitions wouldn’t be on display. They were.
Yet again, disgracefully, anti-terrorism legislation was used to harass, intimidate and obstruct legitimate protesters, despite assurances from the Home Secretary that it would not be. Check out www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk I know, all too well, that people in many countries face worse harassment but that doesn’t make it OK. This arms fair we were protesting against is, in part, responsible for their repression and if we don’t demand our rights to fight for theirs then we squander others’ freedom as well as our own.
In the midst of it all, Jenny came back from 3 months in Palestine, quietly telling her stories of working with medical relief teams, trying to get food through to people desperate after days and days of 24 hour curfew, when you can be shot even for being visible in your window. Apache helicopters and tanks, some British made, shell Palestinian homes all night. A baby died soon after birth because the mother could not be got to hospital in time. Jenny, escorting the ambulance that carried the couple and the dead baby back to their village, said the ambulance stopped at a checkpoint. They called out what they were doing and were ignored. The soldiers, after a while, started firing at the ambulance. They searched it, tipped out the bag of baby clothes into the dirt in front of the parents.
The night before she left she was close to the scene of the Jerusalem suicide bombing and, again, went to see if she could give medical assistance and to see for herself the scene at that killing because she’d seen the other side. And it was as appalling as the dozens of killings every day in Palestine.
My arms started to ache with the memory of all the grieving mothers they’ve held since I started all this. No more. No more. I don’t want to cuddle any more women at the bedsides of their children, dead or dying because of the arms trade. Over a thousand children were killed or injured in Iraq between the war’s end and July by unexploded ordnance, according to UNICEF. A moment’s silence, please, for all those killed by this week’s deals; killed but still in waiting, not yet dead but already condemned.
No more. No more. No more.
For reports on the protests: www.indymedia.org.uk www.squall.co.uk www.schnews.org.uk
For DSEI and arms trade info: www.dsei.org www.caat.org.uk
The car was marked because it was pulled the day before on a recce and the person who should have been doing our job was nicked on a warrant he didn’t know had been issued, for an anti-war action, and spirited away to a court somewhere near an RAF base.
There was nowhere for us to go because two other people had been charged with conspiracy under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 for involvement with the same project we were part of (which had nothing to do with terrorism, even for the most wildly paranoid imagination). We knew that quite a few of the people in the paddle boats had been arrested for trying to stop two warships getting up the Thames into East London for the arms trade fair, and as spotters we were liable for a nicking for conspiracy to do whatever the others were charged with. The ships needed to get through the lock-gate during high tide. The plan was to leave them stranded. It almost worked. Next time…
One house was being used as an address for police bail, another was home to one of the people already charged with conspiracy, a third was the base for some preparations; so it went on. We decamped to a pub. I forget the name but its juke box, pints and clean toilets were as the clear, cool, fresh, blue manna of an oasis. There we sat, all four of us, flicking through the phone books of our mobiles, seeking sanctuary: “Are you in London? Oh, you’re away this weekend. No, no problem. See you soon.”
We found one though and worked out a route across the city that took us nowhere near the hellhole housing estates, half built, featureless and labyrinthine, not to mention swarming with police under orders to prevent anyone stopping the warships getting to where dodgy dictators and their generals would, in a couple of days, be shopping for the essential hardware of war and repression.
Tuesday was the opening day of Europe’s biggest arms trade fair – Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEI) in London’s docklands. Guests included Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, countries with abysmal records of human rights abuse similar to that perpetrated by the Iraqi dictatorship throughout the years Britain and others spent arming it. Both India and Pakistan were in attendance, though they are in conflict with each other.
Syria declined an invitation issued in spite of its designation as part of the axis of evil. Tanzania and South Africa are welcome though their people are without clean water or are dying in their thousands from AIDS and their governments can ill afford to buy arms from British pushers. The British government asserts it has an ethical foreign policy but it is responsible for the invitation list. (www.caat.org.uk and click on DSEi briefing for more info.)
On the Docklands Light Railway, in an immense queue of suits outside the Excel exhibition centre, looking out from the building, they stood clean and smug. My head filled with vivid, raging visions of the Iraqi people I met in the hospitals, the other end of these transactions. The bloody abyss of the wound in Nada Adnan’s thigh sickened me again, the fierce shrapnel embedded in Akael’s forehead, the piece of Moen’s bowel in a bag beside his bed like an indictment of the inventor, the manufacturer, the seller, the buyer, the dropper of that cluster bomb.
The screams echoed in my head, from more hospital rooms than I can count and the ones I never heard from the dark places where people were tortured with instruments sold in previous years’ shows, the dark places in Iraq, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Indonesia. Of course, those were earlier models. This year’s product is more efficient – better interrogative potential, more agony to the ounce.
Munib’s question played over and over and I longed for them to hear it: “What am I going to do? I am a car mechanic. I think I am finished.” Finished by the small square fragments which the anti-personnel weapon exploded into when it was fired at his home in a quiet street beside a girls’ school, which doctors had picked out of his body via an incision from the bottom of his chest to the bottom of his abdomen, and out of his legs, bandaged from the tops of his thighs to the bottoms of his feet and stained with gangrenous pus. The doctors were worried they would have to amputate them.
The next day I wrote: “Why is it considered a legitimate way to live, for a person to get up in the morning, kiss his or her kids goodbye and go and spend the working day experimenting and discussing and planning and building novel and ever-more efficient ways of severing soft, beautiful, living human bodies?” (March 28 2003)
I still don’t get it. Why are the purveyors of these things allowed to exhibit and sell them? Why are governments which kill their own people being invited to buy them? Is it just so we can bomb and invade them later, creating a market for yet more weapons? Why are the police being deployed to protect them?
Because “If we didn’t do it someone else would”? No. That argument doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for burglars and car thieves. It doesn’t work for accessories to much smaller scale killings. If I sell you a knife, knowing that you intend to kill someone with it, I am guilty of aiding and abetting murder. It doesn’t matter who else might have sold you the knife had I refused. It doesn’t matter how good a price I got for the murder weapon. I’m still guilty. That’s English law.
“I don’t make the bits that go bang” some of them said. Let’s be clear here. When you make the engine of a tank, you contribute to the creation of a deadly weapon. When you build an attack helicopter, or fit it with a radio, you contribute to the gas attack on civilians. When you equip the Iranian secret police with mobile phones you enhance their ability to detain, disappear and torture people.
But we were everywhere. An elderly man from the East End spoke at the end of the Campaign Against Arms Trade march on Tuesday, about the disgust local people felt at having such an event in their neighbourhood which was so devastated by the bombing from 1940-45. Processions, street parties on the access roads, a critical mass bike ride and other mass events were highly visible and accessible to anyone. Their importance lies in dramatising both injustice and our outrage and some of the uncountable victims around the world will see the demonstrations and take small comfort as Akael’s dad and other Iraqis did.
At the same time, catching the Docklands Light Railway, walking near the exhibition centre, up and down the river when they were trying to bring in the warships, even inside the fair, there were activists, people I knew, in suits, in work wear, incognito. Passing without acknowledgement we went about our acts of dissent, a huge, decentralised, moving web of disruption.
The trains which the delegates were travelling on were halted as wave after wave of small groups used their bodies to block their route to the bomb sales. Coaches of BAE delegates were stopped. Delegates were invited onto a complimentary bus which took them to Excel, but halfway there they were invited to make contributions towards paying off the Iraqi debt which they and their predecessors did so much to create. Dealers and buyers on the train were invited to play bingo in aid of the same cause.
Protesters got inside the centre, climbed up a tank and hung a banner. Red paint flew. Diners at the gala evening in a posh hotel on September 11th, of all dates, were showered with confetti saying “If we didn’t do it somebody else would” and “Buy now, slay later”. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other groups made creative use of mischief and their own bodies to interfere, in any way they could, with the preparations for torture and killing.
Organisers Spearhead gave “assurances” that cluster munitions wouldn’t be on display. They were.
Yet again, disgracefully, anti-terrorism legislation was used to harass, intimidate and obstruct legitimate protesters, despite assurances from the Home Secretary that it would not be. Check out www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk I know, all too well, that people in many countries face worse harassment but that doesn’t make it OK. This arms fair we were protesting against is, in part, responsible for their repression and if we don’t demand our rights to fight for theirs then we squander others’ freedom as well as our own.
In the midst of it all, Jenny came back from 3 months in Palestine, quietly telling her stories of working with medical relief teams, trying to get food through to people desperate after days and days of 24 hour curfew, when you can be shot even for being visible in your window. Apache helicopters and tanks, some British made, shell Palestinian homes all night. A baby died soon after birth because the mother could not be got to hospital in time. Jenny, escorting the ambulance that carried the couple and the dead baby back to their village, said the ambulance stopped at a checkpoint. They called out what they were doing and were ignored. The soldiers, after a while, started firing at the ambulance. They searched it, tipped out the bag of baby clothes into the dirt in front of the parents.
The night before she left she was close to the scene of the Jerusalem suicide bombing and, again, went to see if she could give medical assistance and to see for herself the scene at that killing because she’d seen the other side. And it was as appalling as the dozens of killings every day in Palestine.
My arms started to ache with the memory of all the grieving mothers they’ve held since I started all this. No more. No more. I don’t want to cuddle any more women at the bedsides of their children, dead or dying because of the arms trade. Over a thousand children were killed or injured in Iraq between the war’s end and July by unexploded ordnance, according to UNICEF. A moment’s silence, please, for all those killed by this week’s deals; killed but still in waiting, not yet dead but already condemned.
No more. No more. No more.
For reports on the protests: www.indymedia.org.uk www.squall.co.uk www.schnews.org.uk
For DSEI and arms trade info: www.dsei.org www.caat.org.uk