Happy Xmas (War is Over) 2015

Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

Maaloula, Syria

Al-Quds University, East Jerusalem, Palestine

 Previous years: 2006, 2007,2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

Happy Xmas (War is Over) 2013

Helmand, Afghanistan

Helmand, Afghanistan

 

Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine

 

California, USA 

Previous years: 2006, 2007,2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

Nottingham Celebrates Mayday with Moazzam Begg

In recent years Mayday in Nottingham has once again become a major celebration with the march from the Brewhouse Yard already something of a tradition. As successful as these demonstrations have been, they have taken place on the nearest weekend to May 1st, with little happening on the day itself. This year, the Mayday Organising Committee (an off-shoot of the Nottingham Refugee Campaign Group) felt that something should be done to mark the day itself and decided to organise a rally addressed by a local asylum seeker and former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg.

The event had originally been intended to take place in the International Community Centre (ICC) on Mansfield Road, but Moazzam Begg is a well-known name and a major draw, so it was felt necessary to move to the New Mechanics on North Sherwood Street. This was probably a wise decision as something like 70-80 people turned up on the day.

Before Moazzam spoke, the meeting was adressed by Amdani Juma, a local asylum seeker, familiar to anybody whose been involved in refugee issues in Nottingham. A refugee from Burundi where he was a pro-democracy activist, for which he was tortured, Amdani came to the UK in 2003 and was granted humanitarian protection. Since finding himself in Nottingham he has busied himself campaigning on refugee issues, raising awareness about AIDS, involving himself in various fora around the city and even became a member of Home Office run National Refugee Integration Forum. Despite all this, his application for Indefinite Leave to Remain was rejected by the Home Office and his appeal against this decision unsuccessful.

Amdani recounted his earliest celebration of Mayday as a child of eight in Burundi. At his instigation a one minute silence was held to remember workers across the world who had died in the struggle for a better world. His talk was wide ranging, but he stressed that he was proud to be an asylum seeker, because it meant that he was a survivor. He described his life as being like living more than one life, with his current struggle for Indefinite Leave to Remain being his fifth life. He also used the talk as an opportunity to promote the sponsored walk he is planning to undertake later in the month to raise money for an AIDS charity.

Moazzam Begg began his talk by musing on the word "Mayday," which he noted is French for "help me." An apposite phrase given his own experiences. Moazzam was one of nine British Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay by the US government. Released in 2005 without charge he has yet to receive any compensation or an apology. Since his release he has spoken widely and published a book, Enemy Combatant, in which he recounts his experiences of extra-judicial detention.

His neatly honed talk explored issues of freedom in the shadow of the "War on Terror." He noted that in surveys of "Britishness," the signing of the Magna Carta was often pointed to as a key event. The document enshrined protection against unlawful detention, a principle which was exported across the world, but which is now under attack. He pointed out that shortly after his abduction at gunpoint in front of his wife and children, his family had issued a writ of haebus corpus in the Pakistani courts. While unsuccessful, it demonstrates the idea's power.

He seemed interested in the way such high ideals had been corrupted and noted with irony the motto which had been plastered across the facility at Guantanamo: "Duty bound to protect freedom." It is this bizarre interpretation of freedom, he suggested, which allowed the US to dub the invasion of Iraq "Operation Enduring Freedom," as if freedom were something which had to be endured.

For someone detained for almost three years, Moazzam was surprisingly fair about his captors. he asserted that, while bad, Guantanamo was not the worst prison on earth. Simply the most notorious. He was clear that there were worse establishments, specifically those where people were killed or forced to see others killed. These, he explained, were what interrogators would threaten recalcitrant subjects with and a number of people being detained by the US have found them shipped to the likes of Egypt for a more thorough going-over than Americans had a taste for. In fact, his relaxed view extends so far that he hopes to tour, later this year, with a young American who had been one of his jailers.

Moazzam argued that the treatment of Muslims in the "War on Terror" with compared unfavourably with that of the Irish Catholic population in northern Ireland at the the height of "The Troubles." He pointed out that even at the height of internment, people were only being held without trial for up to three days. Now the government is seeking to give the police power to detain people for up to ninety days. He clearly saw this as a far broader issue. Noting that even former Secretary of State Colin Powell had called for the closure of Guantanamo he stressed that this would not address the problem of other, less prominent, detention centres (Bagram, Diego Garcia and others).

After the speakers, the discussion was opened up to the floor for questions and contributions. There was also an announcement about plans to mobilise against the BNP's Red White and Blue festival. The event is being held between 15-17 August in Denby, Derbyshire with campaigners planning to mobilise on Saturday 16 August from 9am.

All in all, this was an impressive, well attended event. The organisers are to be congratulated and there's something to build on for next year, but first there's the actual Mayday demonstration: 12 noon, Saturday May 5 starting at the Brewhouse Yard. Hopefully I'll see you there.

Bhutto RIP

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is clearly a very big deal. I worry that we may look back on this attack as the moment Pakistan became a failed state. Many Pakistan People's Party supporters are asking questions about the Musharraff's failure to protect Bhutto, perhaps even holding him personally responsible. This can only compound widespread anger at the regime. Attempts to remove chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry from office in March drew hundreds of lawyers onto the streets, indicating that resentment had reached well into the middle-classes.

Bhutto's assassination is hardly an unusual occurence in modern-day Pakistan. Islamist fundamentalists are engaged in a bloody, and apparently growing insurgency, particularly in the regions bordering Afghanistan and Musharraff himself has been the target of attacks on a number of occasions. Such groups can only be empowered by Bhutto's death, although they will likely have to weather some kind of military response. One only has to look across the border to Afghanistan to see how difficult it is to beat such groups in territory they are intimately familiar with.

There's nothing inevitable about state failure, but the country is surely standing on the precipice and it's a hell of a long way down. The consequences for the people of Pakistan of an upsurge in conflict are obvious enough, but the ramifications for the wider world of a nuclear-armed state in disarray ought to be troubling.

Perhaps predictably, this atrocity has encouraged the more dimwitted islamophobes who hold that Bhutto's murder demonstrates the fundamental brutality and inhumanity of Islam. The reality, of course, is more complex. What this shows is rather that the real conflict is not between Islam and the West (Christianity?), but rather within Islam. This is more complicated than the simplistic conflict between secularists and fundamentalists envisaged by many liberals, encompassing a wide range of interpretations, traditions and movements, but will shape in very important ways the world we live in over the coming years and decades. Provided, of course, we manage to survive that long.

Happy Xmas (War is Over) 2007

Um Salomona, West Bank

Baghdad, Iraq

Kabul, Afghanistan

"'[T]errorist' is a word so debased and loaded by political use that, if it has any meaning at all, it is counterproductive. There is no such objective thing as a terrorist. A criminal is a person who has been convicted of a crime. We can examine a person’s records and make an unemotional determination of whether or not they are a criminal. But a terrorist is, in practice, a person who fights for a cause we do not believe in using methods that we do not approve of. Calling someone a terrorist is a value judgement." - Nature

Where did it all go wrong?

"To understand the significance of this, it’s worth reminding oneself of who Sadr and his supporters are. While generally portrayed as violent anti-Sunni and anti-American extremists (the first charge is certainly true of many of them and the second is silly – being anti-American in Iraq is not extreme), Sadr and his supporters were also among the biggest victims of Saddam Hussein. Sadr’s great-uncle, great-aunt, father, and two elder brothers were murdered by Saddam’s regime. His followers, largely the poor, uneducated and downtrodden among Iraq’s Shi’a majority, were, along with the Kurds, Saddam’s biggest victims – especially in 1991, when Saddam put down their uprising with the aid of our current president’s sainted - or perhaps merely beatified - father.

"Nobody, except possibly the Kurds, should have felt happier about the removal of Saddam. Nobody should have been easier to win over to the Americans’ side if the slightest attention had ever been paid to ordinary Iraqis and their desires. Instead, nobody but the constantly brutalized residents of al-Anbar province in Western Iraq is a more implacable enemy of the United States."

-Rahul Mahajan

Tell me about it

This (via) was taken at the United for Peace and Justice demo in NYC on Saturday.

March into March

Saturday's demonstration against the occupation of Iraq and the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile system was a nice day out. Particularly because I'd decided to go down by train rather than coach which meant I didn't have to get up at some godforsaken hour. Estimating numbers at these things is notoriously difficult. Jim puts the figure (albeit tentatively) at or near 100,000, although I suspect that's a bit high, but there were certainly a lot of people, as you can see:The march followed the traditional route, running from Speakers' Corner, down Park Lane, up Piccadily to Piccadily Circus, down Haymarket and then into Trafalgar Square where people congregated for speakers and assorted stalls. I've been to lots of these things and long ago stopped paying much attention to the speakers, most of whom simply recounted the reasons why I was there. Which I already knew. Mark Thomas, however, was very good as you can see for yourselves courtesy of MyTube:

I took various photos, most of them not very good, some which you can find over on my Flickr acount. There also seem to have been a surprising number of bloggers present, not that I ran into any of them, including Davide Simonette, Jim, Lenny and Rachel, all of whom have written up their experiences in case you're interested.

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

The whole Islamic-terrorist-beheading plot seems to have got the media very excited. Predictably the dubious (i.e. vastly exaggerated) nature of past "plots" (the ricin plot, the red mercury plot, last year's explosive liquids plot, Forest Gate etc.) has been forgotten or ignored by the bastions of objectivity in the corporate media. Why demur about the details or even existence of any plot when you can have an exciting headline about beheading? If it all turns out to be nonsense later you just ignore the fact and everyone can carry on cowering in fear before the awesome threat to our very bodily fluids posed by Islamic Fifth Columnists.


This isn't to suggest that this has necessarily all been made up. There might have been a terrorist cell. They might have planned to kidnap somebody. They might have wanted to lop that person's head off. They might have intended to post the video on the internet. It's just that when somebody's cried wolf as many times as the British counter-terrorism establishment, simply taking what they say at face value is the height of naivete.

Things become particularly murky when we turn to the leaks which have populated various articles in the media following the raid. According to the Grauniad (via), police investigating the alleged plot "expressed growing anger yesterday at a series of leaks and briefings which they say are hampering their inquiry":

Whitehall officials briefed journalists early on Wednesday before all of the suspects had been found, with the result that lurid details of the alleged plot were broadcast while one suspect remained at large. At least one tabloid newspaper had even been tipped off the night before the dawn raids, and its reporters put on standby to race to Birmingham...

Paul Snape, vice chair of West Midlands Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said: "The police force is asking the question, where did it all come from? There may be political reasons for it, such as what was going on at the Home Office and at Downing Street."

The timing is indeed convenient with the Cash for Honours and BAE scandals, the problems in the Home Office and, as Davide Simonetti points out, John Reid's renewed campaign to get support for holding terror suspects for more than 28 days without charge.

Whatever the truth or otherwise of the various claims made about the plot, there is little question that raids such as this don't play well in the Muslim community who feel persecuted. A sentiment which can't be helped by the mainstream media's eagerness to run with any story about Muslim intransigence, no matter what its basis in fact (recall the niqab/pantomime horse story). Insofar as the "War on Terror" is synonymous with the struggle against militant Islamic fundamentalism (as opposed to simply an excuse to invade other countries), it cannot be won without the support of the vast majority of the Muslim community. We won't get that if our default settings instruct us to accept every bad thing said about them. Scepticism is your friend.

The Big Comeback

Bush's troop "surge," which will see a further 22,000 US troops dispatched to Iraq, has attracted a great deal of attention. I've been particularly surprised with the finality which commentators have described the plan. The gambit is, the corporate media tell us, "one final effort to pacify Baghdad and the western Sunni badlands"; a "last-ditch" plan; Bush's "final gamble." Somehow I'm not convinced.

Does anybody honestly believe that when surging fails to stem the insurgency (as it almost inevitably will) Bush is simply going to turn around and say, "OK, I was wrong, let's go home now"? This has the same degree of finality as a Kiss Farewell Tour. You know full well they'll be back in a year or two, looking slightly worse for wear - perhaps with one less member of the original band (or coalition), but still wheeling out the big hits.

I suppose hoping it's almost over is rather less depressing.

Happy Christmas (War Is Over)

Kabul, Afghanistan

Kandahar, Afghanistan

Basra, Iraq

The War on Shampoo

Way back when, during all the hoopla about liquid explosives on UK-US flights I commented,

This all strikes me as slightly bizarre and I can't help recalling earlier threats from other terrifying tools in the terrorist arsenal such as ricin and red mercury. I wouldn't be surprised if this supposed threat is forgotten about pretty quickly, who now remembers the tanks patrolling Heathrow? Then again, maybe I'm just being a cynical whatnot and this time it's for real... the government have cried "wolf" so many times people don't know whether to believe them or toss them the finger.

It looks increasingly like my cynicism wasn't misplaced. Perhaps it really is time to stop believing anything and everything they say.