Jo Wilding's Website
Welcome
This website sets about to counter feelings of disempowerment spread by
governments, party politicians and the media. We as individuals and
collectively are immensely powerful, despite Parliament, despite political
parties: our power comes not through the vote but through action. This
website contains my stories and those of friends I've met along the way.
I went to Iraq in August 2001 to break
the sanctions and meet ordinary Iraqi people and find out what was going on
for them and bring back their stories. Five of us went from the UK, taking
medical, educational and other humanitarian supplies without applying for a
licence as required by the sanctions order (SI 1990/1768). We took medical
training CD Roms, medical journals and textbooks, IV needles, vitamins,
painkillers, clothes, books, kids’ toys, pencils, etc – just ordinary things,
but things that people there can’t buy.
We brought back things bought from ordinary Iraqi shopkeepers and sold
them over here - dates, musical instruments, artwork, clothing, again without
applying for the requisite licence (which is impossible to get).
I went because I’d been campaigning against the sanctions for a while and
felt that I had to actively break them and to see what was happening so I
could speak from experience, not just reports. I was in court in March 2001
for throwing fruit at Tony Blair in an Iraq protest and journalists kept
asking "But how do you know this is true?" I wanted to put names and faces to
the figures: I would talk about 4-6000 children dying every month, but now I
talk about Ahmed and Saif, Alia, Abbas, Fadma - a stick-child who, at 9
months old, only weighed 3lbs. She was the first child we met when we went to
the children’s hospital to deliver medicines. She rattled with the effort of
every breath.
We tried to hand ourselves in at Charing Cross police station when we got
back, but they refused to arrest us.
"I don’t think we can arrest you."
"Oh no, it’s fine - you can. Look, it says here: ‘arrestable offence for
the purposes of PACE’" (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984).
He disappeared to seek further guidance. "Can you come back in a few
hours? We haven’t got enough officers to arrest you."
Despite promising to come quietly, they eventually kicked us out and
instead I wrote to customs telling them what I’d done. They came to Bristol
and interviewed me, confiscating the two boxes of dates I took in as
evidence. They then had to formally seize the dates, which meant I had the
right to appeal and did so, forcing Customs to take "Condemnation
Proceedings" against me.
It was the first time a British court had had to consider the legality of
the sanctions. The magistrates accepted the
legal argument that sanctions would be
illegal if they breached the Geneva Conventions Act and/or the Genocide Act.
They ruled that the evidence as to the situation in Iraq caused by the
sanctions was irrelevant, and then made their finding on precisely that
point, deciding that the sanctions don't restrict the flow of civilian goods
into Iraq so as to breach the Geneva Conventions Act. An appeal has been
lodged with the Crown Court and will be heard in Bristol Crown Court on
Friday April 11th: I’ll try again to have the evidence listened to. We also made a
href="http://www.bristolfoe.org.uk/wildfire/iraq/leaving.htm">press release.
I’m going back to Iraq in February 2003. I think it’s more important than
ever to let the people there know there are people here that care. I want to
be able to report on what’s going on for people now. I want break the
sanctions again because they’re wrong and they’re illegal under UK law. I met
a man called Gazwan last time with a fourteen year old son, Ali, and Gazwan
said "One day, your children will have to explain all this to ours." To me,
that’s what a lot of this is about. Journalists often ask what my parents
think about the things I do, but it’s my kids who will have to live with the
consequences of what we do in the world.
I firmly believe that human rights belong to all of us, both to enjoy for
ourselves and to uphold for each other. They’re not the exclusive preserve of
governments, NGOs and big international bodies, they’re the responsibility of
us all. The group of us that gathered in the carpark in
href="http://www.bristolfoe.org.uk/wildfire/palestine/index.htm">Bethlehem was like a
united nations of ordinary people and that’s how I see the trip to Iraq. I’m
doing what the UN should be doing.