International Peace Conference: Tomb report posted by Meaders

I was a delegate at the International Peace Conference, organised by the UK Stop the War Coalition last Saturday. Tomb comments box habitue Roobin, now blogging at Through the Scary Door, also went, and has excerpts from some of the speeches. Some of these were outstanding, most especially those of the ex-soldiers. Ben Grier’s is worth excerpting:

“Until June this year I was a soldier in the SAS and was serving in Iraq. What’s going on there is like a gold rush town in 19th century America.

“The indigenous people are having a way of life forced on them on the one side, on the other multinational corporations are plundering resources and making money out of the people’s misery.

“Look at what’s happened over the last eight years. In 1997 we were told we would have an ethical foreign policy. Now we have become the lap dogs of US imperialism.

“We are supposedly fighting for democracy, but Tony Blair is ripping apart democracy at home.

“I volunteered nine years ago, but I have to say I was wrong to go to Iraq. I have recovered broken bodies from the battlefield and all for what? It was for the interests of the multinational companies.

“I volunteered for the army. But the Iraqis didn’t volunteer for ten years of sanctions, to be invaded, for the destruction of their country or for production sharing agreements that drain the country’s oil wealth.

“They didn’t volunteer to have thousands of mercenaries roaming the country and doing what they want. They didn’t volunteer for white phosphorous, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

“You face a moral dilemma in the army. You are trained to follow orders, but you also have a moral obligation to do what is right. Standing by while others commit crimes makes you guilty as well.

“And history has shown that using the excuse that you were only following orders is unacceptable.”

Andy McNab it ain’t, thankfully. Kelly Dougherty, from US-based Iraq Veterans Against the War, was also superb, and managed to avoid the slightly apologetic tone some of the US speakers affected. Roobin picked up on this as well: the US delegates don't seem to have quite the confidence yet that they don’t need to keep apologising for opposing the war. Partly this is can be blamed on the Bush regime’s mobilisation of 9/11 to whip up popular bellicosity, and the subsequent squeezing of dissent. Partly, though, given the increasing unpopularity of both Bush and his wars, at least some of the soft-footing results from the long-standing attachment of the US Left to the Democratic Party, and the catastrophic self-inflicted defeat this lead to last November. Cindy Sheehan managed to break some of the consequences of that defeat over the summer, with her Bush ranch encampment, but her own speech was amongst the softest of the day.

Good, also, was Ayatollah Khalisi, from the Iraqi National Foundation Conference. It’s always difficult to know precisely how representative anyone and anything is; the IFNC has been around for some time now, aiming to function as a united, non-sectarian political voice for opposition to the occupation, but how genuinely representative it is inside Iraq is hard to judge. Nonetheless, Khalisi gave a speech that, deficiencies in simultaneous translation allowed for, did all the right things: stressing the importance of unity amongst Iraqis and the need for international solidarity, in particular. (You can get a flavour of it from the short interview here.)

I strongly suspect his views are broadly in line with what Iraqis in general think, and polling evidence certainly points that way, but the structure of the colonial set-up now in place in Iraq functions very effectively to create and exacerbate confessional divisions. Perhaps the biggest challenge the resistance faces is not so much defeating the occupation as such - fighting them to a standstill, as it were - but in creating the necessary conditions by which defeat becomes possible. That means building unity against the occupiers, and so it was important to have a Shi'a leader speaking on the Peace Conference platform. It would have been better still to also have Moqtada al-Sadr’s representative speak, but – in an predictable, and political, move – he was refused a visa by the Foreign Office.

There should, one hopes, be howls of outrage from the assorted colonial “liberals” at the very idea that an Ayatollah would be speaking at a left-wing political meeting. The guy had a turban and a big bushy beard, and not once did he pronounce his support for the Enlightenment- indecency! for shame! Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union, gave the best possible response to this whole faux-Left folderol:

[Hayes] warned that this solidarity [with Iraqi trade unionists] must not come at the expense of opposition to the US-led occupation of the country. “Those who say these links are more important than getting the troops out of Iraq are missing the point,” he said.

“If a country is occupied, sending trade unionists a few typewriters is no substitute for campaigning to get those troops out of that country.”

Nice one, Billy: of all the stupid arguments advanced in support of the occupation, perhaps the most stupid was that the trade union struggle would serenely continue as if nothing untoward was happening in a country occupied by 140,000 foreign troops. It was either stupid, or thoroughly dishonest: an underhanded attempt to undermine the fight for the liberation of Iraq, now given a spurious left-wing gloss.

But what did the Conference achieve? First, rounding up 1,500 delegates from the UK, the US, Iraq, Iran and the wider Middle East is an achievement in itself. There’s no doubt that the anti-war movement, in the UK and internationally, has been given a boost by this. Second, the conference endorsed a call for mass protests on the anniversary of the invasion next year. There’s the real possibility, now, of ensuring that those marching in London and Washington will be matched by those in Baghdad and Basra: that’s real international solidarity. The pressure the occupation exerts on both US and UK governments has never eased. The more we in the movement here can do to bear down on Bush and Blair, the closer we get to ending the occupation. We can chalk up last Saturday’s conference as an unqualified success.

Update: Kevin Zeese was there, too, and his report's a somewhat fuller account. (via)