IN  THE  NEWS 

all change please

The 2010 General Election in Britain was rightly hailed as being a historic one, in several respects. We are in new and unfamiliar territory, feeling our way and uncertain what will happen or how long this will last. In a sense the political landscape has been simplified, with some of the minor players effectively eliminated from the game: UKIP, the BNP and Respect were all unceremoniously swept aside, and have been shown up as "paper tigers" more adept at getting media coverage than votes (and one surely has to question the motives of certain groups who seem determined to "talk up" the supposed "threat" from the BNP purely for the purpose - it seems - of demonstrating their own ostentatious opposition to them). On the other hand the Green Party scored a notable and historic success in getting veteran MEP Caroline Lucas elected in Brighton Pavilion - possibly a sign of further successes to come, having broken through the glass ceiling of being considered "unelectable". No Quakers incidentally were elected as MPs although several were standing as candidates. It is a moot point whether this says more about the Quakers or about the nature of British politics! Still there is one Quaker, David Shutt, who has at least been appointed Deputy Chief Whip in the House of Lords.

Undoubtedly however the big talking point everywhere has been the unfamiliar spectacle of a Parliament in which no one party is capable of governing on its own. As virtually every commentator has said, this is the first coalition government Britain has had since World War Two and some people are understandably uneasy with the idea. Curiously, the argument most often used against proportional representation was that it would lead to minority governments and coalitions - and yet here we are! Perhaps actual experience of coalition government will give people the chance to decide for themselves whether this is such a fearsome prospect after all? Defenders of the "first past the post" system are wont to say that only this can guarantee what they call "strong government". However after the dismal experience of Thatcherism in the 1980s and then 13 years of New Labour pouring out a seemingly never-ending stream of increasingly incomprehensible legislation aimed at regulating every minute of our waking lives, a lot of people perhaps felt they have had their bellyful of "strong government" for the time being, and that they might be rather happy to have a government that is not going to be "doing" quite so much, and may leave us in peace for a little bit. Typically, even when a government has an outright majority of the seats in Parliament they very rarely had the support of even half of the voters and yet under "first past the post" the rule is that 51% of the seats in Parliament gives you 100% of the power. That cannot be right. It will be be a welcome change for the leaders of the largest Party not to have virtually unfettered dictatorial powers to do whatever they want for five years.

As for the future, in the short term it is not going to be a bundle of laughs of course: we all know there is no money left in the Treasury and we are going to have to get used to living in reduced circumstances for a while. It will be painful and unpleasant, all the more so because we have become used to allowing ourselves a better standard of living than we could really afford. Otherwise, however, the signs so far seem to be rather hopeful. We already know that the costly, pointless and authoritarian system of "identity cards" is to be scrapped, to the relief of many. The ridiculous "Home Information Packs" for people trying to move house have already been consigned to the dustbin. The third runway at Heathrow has similarly been abandoned, and the people whose houses were going to be appropriated and demolished to make way for it must be rejoicing - as no doubt are many others who would have been living underneath the flight paths. Meanwhile the plight of the unfortunate computer-hacker, UFO enthusiast and Asperges sufferer Gary McKinnon, due to be sent to the USA to face years in prison for embarrassing the Pentagon's security people, is going to be reviewed by the new Home Secretary after all appeals to her Labour predecessor had fallen on deaf ears.

It is early days of course, and the big question is undoubtedly: can the coalition hang together? Is this a meeting of minds, or a shotgun wedding? Who can tell? Nevertheless the unaccustomed spectacle of politicians from different parties and coming from different standpoints actually co-operating with each other, working out ways to find agreement on common goals, and having to treat each other for once with respect and courtesy rather than non-stop vituperation, may have a very salutary effect. People may discover that it is not a Law of Nature that politics has to be conducted in such a gratuitously aggressive and unpleasant manner as we have been used to - and who knows, if politicians can manage it, if they can treat each other with decency and consideration even when they disagree, then maybe the rest of can manage it as well?

mirror, mirror  . . .

Government figures released in February 2010 analysing the state of Britain's high streets give rather an ugly picture of the kind of Society we have become. Since 1997 it seems that 196 libraries altogether have been closed, along with 580 hospitals and clinics, some 7,500 Post Offices and 2,380 schools. To compensate for these losses however, over the same period 276 new lap-dancing clubs have opened, along with 1,060 more supermarkets and 1,270 more bookmakers. You can work out for yourselves what this says about government spending priorities, and the direction our society is moving. But does it have to be like this? Is there no better or brighter vision for the way things could be? We are after all one of the wealthier countries in the world. Where did it all go wrong?

big boys' toys

Britain's MPs will soon have to decide whether the Trident submarine-launched nuclear missile system should be modernised and up-graded (although it remains to be seen whether Britain will still have the bare-faced hypocrisy to lecture countries like Iran and North Korea about their own nuclear programmes, as we set about refurbishing our own weapons of mass-destruction).

With each separate warhead in each Trident missile being eight times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, it is clear these weapons are not intended to be used against armies or tanks or anything that could be described as military, industrial or economic targets. These are city-busters, designed to slaughter thousands of frightened and helpless civilians  - men, women and children alike. The lucky ones will die instantly, but a slow lingering death awaits a similar number again over the weeks, months and years following the attack, just as happened in 1945. How could any civilised country even contemplate doing such a thing again?

Quite apart from the moral case against possessing such weapons, however, had you considered the purely practical objections? We have actually had Trident missiles for many years now, and - thankfully - we have never actually had any use for them at all. They just sit there, sucking up huge amounts of public money until they become obsolete. What is the point of that? It is commonplace to justify this ridiculous situation by saying that they are some kind of "insurance" and to speculate luridly about what "might happen" if we hadn't got them. However if we leave aside these fantasies and try to think like adults for a moment, was there ever actually a time or an occasion when Britain's nuclear deterrent actually made any difference at all to anyone or anything? It did not prevent Argentina from invading the Falkland Islands, and it did not prevent the terrorist attacks in London. When you think about it, there is no conceivably realistic scenario in which Britain is now likely to be threatened with invasion or attack by a foreign power. So coming back to Trident - what is it for? What possible use can it ever be?

To add insult to injury, people all over the country are fighting to save their local schools and hospitals from either closure or emasculation; people who need access to justice are denied legal aid following yet another cost-cutting exercise; local sub-Post Offices have been scythed down right and left because there is no money to keep them open; our public transport system is a mess - and then Parliament is going to propose spending some £25 billion of public money - our money - on this useless heap of death-dealing junk. Strange, how we can't afford proper medical services or local Post Offices, or trains - but there's never any problem getting billions of pounds for missiles we never use. We may not be able to afford to take care of people in need, but when it comes to killing people it seems that money is no object!

credit crunch  -  crisis or opportunity ?

The award for Most Sensible Comment about the financial crisis so far goes to Tony Crofts from Charlbury in Oxfordshire. Writing in the Quaker magazine "The Friend" in December 2008 he said "Britain's strong economy has proved to be a bubble of shopping, funded by debt secured on the constantly-inflating price of houses, and that bubble has now burst". In other words, we have for some time been "running on empty". This is not an inexplicable or random freak event, but the logical and inevitable result of living out-of-step with reality, and we had it coming. However all is not lost: Tony Crofts suggests this could be a golden opportunity to re-think our strategy and to move towards an economy based on what he calls "real work, satisfying real needs, not play-work satisfying wants agitated by fashion and advertising".

It is noticeable that the media these days seem to use the expression "consumers" as being more or less synonymous with "the public" and it is worth pondering how many of the people who are "in work" are actually "producing" anything useful at all. We are indeed all of us consumers, but who produces the things we consume?  We all need food, clothing, accommodation, furniture - but how many people do you know who actually produce any of these things? So where do we expect them to come from, exactly? Most people just expect goods to be there in the shops when they want them. We seldom stop to think how they get there. Take an obvious and critical example: food. Everybody in Britain consumes food every day, but only two per-cent of the population is in any way involved in farming. We now import over 40% of our food, while continuing to bury fertile land under more and more concrete and tarmac, so as to accommodate far more people than we can possibly feed! Does this strike anyone else as being crazy? What will happen if we can't afford to pay for all those food imports any more? What will happen when there simply isn't the oil to bring them here from those far-off places any more, or to transport them all around the country?

The trouble is that, although officialdom is reluctant to face up to it, there is no getting away from the fact that mineral oil is a finite resource. This is not a matter of "market forces" but the stark facts of geology. Experts may argue about exactly how much oil there is left, but at the end of the day there is no avoiding the inescapable truth that, however much of it there is, it is a limited amount which cannot be increased and it gets less every time you fill up your car. For over a century we have been thoughtlessly burning it as fast as we could get it out of the ground, and one day, inevitably, it will be gone. That brief and unique episode in human history which Rob Hopkins (in "The Transition Handbook") calls "the petroleum interval" will be over, never to return. Reserves that were only discovered 40 years ago are being burned now. The USA passed its point of "peak oil" production in the 1970s and of course Britain no longer has any significant oil reserves left to speak of. We blew it in the 1980s on tax cuts for the rich.

You may remember the famine in North Korea in the 1990s when people literally starved. The government there treated agriculture as just another heavy industry, and measured success in terms of the bulk produced, regardless of quality, so that the soil became exhausted and virtually sterile after decades of abuse, and could do little for the crops except hold them upright while the farmers applied a cocktail of chemicals to try and force them to grow. The whole system was entirely dependant on oil at every turn: to manufacture the chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and then to transport the chemicals to the farms and then the food to the towns - and since the country that had no oil of its own it was at the mercy of imports, which were liable to rapid and unpredictable price fluctuations (is any of this starting to sound familiar yet, by the way?)

Mankind is part of Nature, much as we try to pretend otherwise, and we can only live for a limited time in violation of the natural laws that govern the universe (or, as George Fox called it, "Gospel Order") before Reality kicks in. At the moment only 3.4% of British farmland is registered as officially "organic" - i.e. using natural rather than chemical methods of fertilising and nurturing crops and livestock. This produces food that is more nourishing and tastes better than chemically-grown food, but most important of all, it is a self-perpetuating system that can keep on going indefinitely. Chemical farming is not.

NB reality alert: food does not actually grow in supermarkets!

when will they ever learn  . . .

Unbelievably, President Barack Obama went to collect his Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 as the news was still echoing in the world's press that he was sending another 30,000 American troops to escalate the war in Afghanistan! It took the Soviets ten years to realise they couldn't conquer the country, and now eight years after the Nato invasion, history seem to be repeating itself. Obviously. Why would it not? As the saying goes, "if you do what you have always done, you will get the results you always got". 

The eminent Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor , writing about that curious episode known as "the Crimean War" remarked that there was one lesson to be learned from that fiasco: "if you want to perpetuate the fruits of a military victory, you have to perpetuate the balance of forces that produced that victory." In other words, supposing that another  30,000 American troops succeed in defeating the Taliban: what happens when those troops go home again? Are the Taliban just supposed to pretend that the American soldiers are still there? Or is it more likely that they will grab hold of their rifles and rocket-launchers again the moment the last American has gone?

There are some people however who have been considering alternatives to the path of brute force backed up with more brute force. One of these is a medical practitioner called Richard Lawson. Writing in "Green World" (the magazine of the Green Party) in the Autumn 2009 issue, he pointed out that, for want of viable alternatives, the sale of opium currently accounts for something like half the Afghan national economy - much to the distress of western nations where much of this finds its way onto the streets as heroin. Since the crop is illegal it is mostly purchased from the farmers by the Taliban, with the result that the poor farmers support their Taliban customers for purely financial (rather than ideological) reasons, and the writ of the official Afghan government simply does not run in the opium-producing areas.

The solution proposed by Dr Lawson is that the World Health Organisation should pull the economic rug out from under the Taliban's feet by buying up the opium crop themselves and turning into medicinal morphine - which is in fact badly needed, especially in the southern hemisphere where some 6 million cancer patients die every year without the relief that this pain-killing drug provides for sufferers in the wealthier north. This tactic would not only provide the much-needed medicine for terminal cancer patients but would simultaneously remove 90% of illegal heroin from the streets of western nations and also switch the allegiance of the heroin producers in Afghanistan away from the Taliban to their new "best customers" in the United Nations. Sounds like a win-win situation! So how did the British foreign office respond when this proposal was put to them by MEP Caroline Lucas? Wait for it: they said it would be too dangerous because "some" of the opium crop might then leak onto the black market! That is of course as opposed to the current situation when all of it is "leaking onto the black market" as it cannot by used for anything else!

It may well be that economic forces will win this war far more effectively - and with less bloodshed - than the increasingly desperate military efforts are likely to do. The news is that wheat is now fetching twice the price of opium on the Afghan market, and the farmers are starting to defy their Taliban "protectors" and are growing wheat instead.  We will see.

take a running jump   . . .

Is there anybody out there who really thinks it is worth paying £9,000 million pounds of our money for the privilege of holding the 2012 Olympic Games in Britain? Is this just simple lunacy, or is there some rationale behind it which isn't apparent to ordinary people? It is blatantly obvious by now that the original bid put forward in 2005 was so far adrift of reality as to be little short of fraudulent. As usual, you can bet that a small number of people are set to make a huge amount of money out of this exercise in flag-waving, while the rest of us will be left to foot the bill. And make no mistake, one way or another we will pay. Wait until you hear about the next hospital unit being closed, or more cut-backs in legal aid or housing benefits, and then remember that £9,000 million of your money went on hosting the Olympic Games. The irony is that whoever wins what at the London Olympics will become totally irrelevant four years later (and in fact most people will probably have forgotten it four weeks later) but you will feel the loss of your local school or hospital for much longer than that.

lest we forget

It should not be forgotten that the 2008 Olympics showed the whole world the unedifying (and rather un-Olympic) sight of China riding roughshod over the protests by Tibetans and their supporters about the longest on-going military occupation of any country by another. However the riots in Tibet and the demonstrations in London and Paris did at least put an end to the pretence that Tibet is just another province of China. We need to keep Tibet in our thoughts now that the fuss over the Olympic Games is over: the Chinese are evidently furious that the Tibet issue threatened to spoil their big moment, and now that the eyes of the World's media have turned away the Free Tibet Campaign is already reporting a virtual military lock-down in towns where protests were held, monks and nuns being expelled from monasteries, and the forced resettlement of traditional pastoral nomads into urban housing estates. You may not be able to see it, but the suffering goes on.

From the same corner of the world meanwhile another Buddhist country not far from Tibet is experiencing unimaginable suffering at the hands of its military rulers. The Burmese generals have not only proved themselves to be vicious and oppressive, but since Cyclone Nargis in May 2008 and the disastrous flooding that followed, the generals have also been exposed as quite simply incompetent to run a country - which is hardly surprising, since there is no reason to suppose that a military background is good training for a career in statecraft. It is however good training for killing people, and so the Burmese generals are doing what they do best: locking people up, torturing them, and assassinating them if they dare to challenge the authority of the government. The rightful leader of the country, Aung San Suu Kyi (daughter of the hero of Burmese independence) has been under house arrest since her election victory in 1990 and frankly it is not hard to guess what would have happened to her by now if she were not so well known in the West. 

Meanwhile it is hard to avoid the impression that the generals simply don't care what happens to their country just so long as they stay in charge of it, even if it is falling apart in their hands.

anybody want to kill somebody ?

Much to the shame of the British people, in September 2009 London once again hosted the bi-annual DSEi arms fair, the biggest weapons market in Europe. Tanks, mines and even warships and cruise missiles are on offer to anyone who can pay for them, with no questions asked about how they are going to be used, or against whom, though the list of guests invited to come shopping for weapons include some governments with very dubious antecedents indeed. Weapons of course can only be used in very few ways: either to kill people, maim them, or terrify them. So which of these do we find most acceptable? Because they have no other purpose.

The British government argues that this is all OK because it is a nice little earner for our weapons industry. We may suppose that it is. But does that make it any better? Some people can make a lot of money by peddling hard drugs on the street, and do very nicely out of it. But what do we think of such people?

The owners and organisers of the arms fair, bizarrely, are Clarion Events - better known for organising the Baby Show! News of Clarion's involvement has already led to the Baby Show being boycotted by the mother-and-baby group Mumsnet and also by baby products company Bounty, while Unicef (which was to have received a share of the proceeds from the sales of Baby Show tickets) has announced that it will not accept any donations from Clarion.

For more information about the weapons business, see the website of the Campaign Against Arms Trade at  www.caat.org.uk

Britons never, never, never shall  . . .  go home

On 22nd October 2008 the House of Lords handed down a legal ruling to say that a group of British citizens should not be allowed to return to the homes they were evicted from by deception and force 30 years ago, when their land was taken over by a foreign power with the full blessing of the British government. Confused? Read on . . .

In brief, some years ago, the entire population of the Chagos Islands archipelago, a British owned territory in the Indian Ocean, was deported so that the British government could lease Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands in the group, to the USA for use as a military base. In return Britain received a large discount on the price of its Polaris nuclear submarines. It was an ideal location for the Americans, and indeed they found it very useful for bombing Afghanistan and Iraq, and later for imprisoning and torturing "terror" suspects far away from prying eyes. However there was one snag: the 1,800 or so people who already lived there. The British government, being anxious not to let such a detail stand in the way of a good deal, decided simply to evict the lot of them. But no formal announcement was made: the decision was implemented by stealth and by trickery.

The islanders had been in the habit of making occasional visits to Mauritius to stock up with goods and supplies, but in 1966 without any warning the ship they travelled in refused to take them back! The Chagos Islanders were left stranded with no property, no jobs, and no way of communicating with their friends and families back home. The remaining islanders, unaware of what was happening, continued to come on the ships to Mauritius, and suffered the same fate. It was effectively an act of silent and gradual mass-kidnapping. By the time the first American servicemen began to arrive on the island in 1971 the population had been pared down to just 830. At that point all pretence was abandoned: those people who still remained were simply deported and dumped on Mauritius with the rest. By 1975 when an American journalist broke the news story to the rest of the world, 1 in 40 of the exiles had already died from starvation, disease, or suicide. 

It is hard to take on board the enormity of what was done to these people. These are actually British citizens, exiled by government decree to a foreign country (Mauritius became independent in 1968) simply to suit the Americans.  When they finally managed to organise themselves and get a sympathetic lawyer to take their case to the High Court in London, the Court made a dramatic ruling against the government and announced that the islanders must be allowed to go home. Now most of us have to obey Court orders. However as G. K. Chesterton once observed, "those who are powerful enough to make the law have no need to break it." So in 2004 the then foreign secretary Jack Straw (you remember him? The one who protected General Pinochet from extradition? The one that you mustn't heckle, because you will be arrested as a terrorist if you do?) responded to the Court's judgment by passing an Order in Council simply overturning the Court's ruling - not by way of appeal or argument or reasoning, but by government decree: "Because we say so". By means of this Order in Council  - a little used government "perk" which requires no reference to Parliament  - the inhabitants of the British Indian Ocean Territories were forbidden ever to go home.

The following year the Islanders launched Court proceedings contesting the legality of the government's Order and in May 2006 the Court once again ruled in their favour. It accepted that they could not return to the island of Diego Garcia itself, but could see no reason why they could not be allowed to return to the other islands in the Chagos archipelago, which the Americans have no use for. The judgment of the High Court included this ringing declaration: 

"The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an Order in Council, exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant."

It was one of those moments that make you proud of the British legal system - but less proud unfortunately of our politicians. The "repugnant" British government appealed against this judgment, lost in the Court of Appeal, and appealed again to the House of Lords, where in October 2008 by the narrowest of margins the majority of the Court decided that they had no power to interfere with the Order made by the government in 2004.  Goodness only knows what these repeated appeals by the government have cost in taxpayers' money just to prove how anxious the government is to kow-tow to the USA rather than protect the rights of British citizens. Meanwhile the Chagos Islanders can only kick their heels and think about home. 

In an interesting twist to this tale, in March 2008 two former high-profile Greenpeace activists Peter Bouquet and Jon Castle decided to challenge the American occupation and the use of the island to aid the CIA in torturing terrorist suspects, by sailing a small boat to Diego Garcia in an action reminiscent of the classic Greenpeace campaigns against whaling or nuclear weapons testing. The men were arrested off the coast of Diego Garcia by the British authorities and have been prosecuted and fined. Jon Castle, a Quaker who now lives in Devon, referred to the importance of the Quaker principle that one should bear witness to a crime being committed even if one is unable to prevent it. He was given a suspended prison sentence and ordered to pay a large fine with the threat of having his boat impounded if he fails to pay.

For further information and up-dates on Diego Garcia, visit their support website at:  www.chagossupport.org.uk

if that's justice, then I'm a banana

Ian Hislop's famous 1989 soundbite came to mind upon reading the news in May 2007 that David Keogh, a former civil servant, and Leo O'Connor, a political researcher, were sent to prison for 6 months and 3 months respectively by a Court in London. Their "crime" was to leak a memorandum describing a discussion which took place between George Bush and Tony Blair about a year after the invasion of Iraq. The judge conceded that the leak had caused no actual damage to the national interest at all, only embarrassment to the parties concerned. Clearly it is a very serious thing to embarrass certain important people these days! Perhaps we should all feel embarrassed about this, though. As Peter MacKay pointed out in the Daily Mail, it is a strange world indeed where politicians escape scot-free for starting a war costing thousands of innocent people their lives on the basis of blatant lies, while ordinary citizens get jailed for telling the truth.

in  remembrance

On 6th January 2006 almost unremarked by the world, a former American soldier and a hero of the Vietnam War died of cancer, aged 62. His name was Hugh Thompson. You may be surprised to see an American soldier described as a hero in these pages, but Hugh Thompson's story is different from most. A helicopter pilot in the Aerial Scout Unit, Thompson got his chance to show his mettle on the fateful day of 16th March 1968 when he touched down outside the village of My Lai, to find American infantry in the very act of carrying out the notorious massacre of some 500 unarmed civilians that was to make the name of this remote village known throughout the world. Hugh Thompson was outraged at what was going on. He saw an American lieutenant  preparing to blow up a hut where 11 wounded Vietnamese had taken refuge. Thompson landed his helicopter in front of the hut and told the American soldiers he would fire on them if they harmed the people inside, even though there were officers among them who actually outranked him! He then radioed for other helicopters to come and evacuate the wounded.

The rest, as they say, is history. Despite attempts at a cover-up, and an "official" investigation that whitewashed the whole affair, the truth leaked out after about a year amid world-wide revulsion. Only one person was ever convicted of any crime in respect of the massacre - a young lieutenant called William Calley. His superior, Captain Ernest Medina, also stood trial but was acquitted although Hugh Thompson himself had seen Captain Medina shooting helpless villagers who lay wounded on the ground. It gives some satisfaction to record that almost 30 years later Hugh Thompson and his flight crew were awarded the Soldier's Medal for bravery. Now he is gone. It would be nice to think that the stand he took had made some impression and led to some heart-searching among the American military, but as news comes in from Haditha and Abu Ghraib in Iraq it seems there are still more Calleys than Thompsons in the American army of today.

up to their old tricks . . .

A dismal sense of foreboding surrounds the news from West Papua. This distant land, which comprises the western half of the island of New Guinea, is currently being ruled as a province of Indonesia. However the native tribal peoples there have little in common with their Javanese masters, and the territory has been treated simply as a colony ever since Indonesia took it over in 1963. Attention is currently focused on exploiting the land's mineral wealth,  and the tribal people are being harassed and persecuted in a manner which has a ghastly familiarity, for those who remember the killing and destruction by Indonesian forces in East Timor just a few years ago. The pattern is much the same: crops and villages are burned, local leaders murdered, and people driven into the jungle or the mountains to survive there if they can - or not. Survival International, the charity which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples, estimates that over 6,000 people are now hiding out in the bush. This is hardly surprising though when you realise that the chief of police installed in the province by the Indonesians is Timbil Silaen, their former chief of police in East Timor, who by rights should be facing a War Crimes Tribunal rather than policing West Papua. 

Prominent local leaders and pro-independence figureheads are being systematically picked off and murdered. In 1984 the popular musician Arnold Ap was arrested, interned without charge, tortured, and then shot. The leader of the independence movement Theys Eluay was murdered by Indonesian special forces in 2001. Most disturbing of all is the news that Eurico Guterres, the former pro-Indonesia militia commander in East Timor, is recruiting and training local Muslim civilians (mostly Javanese immigrants) into militias to attack and terrorise the Papuan population. In East Timor these tactics led to a blood bath on a scale comparable with Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia. How did Britain react then? Well, almost the first thing the New Labour government did following its first election victory in 1997 was to sell dozens of Hawk attack aircraft to the Indonesian government, at the very time when the massacres of the East Timorese were going on. Can we find some better response this time?

For up-to-date information visit the website of the Free West Papua Campaign at  www.freewestpapua.org           

let my people stay . . . .

The concept of "Ethnic Cleansing" has become familiar through news stories from the killing fields of Bosnia and East Timor, but more recently reports of new horrors started to reach us from one of the remotest places on earth: the Kalahari game reserve in Botswana. The government there was effectively seeking to wipe out the local culture of the native "Bushman" tribes by relocating them to distant areas where they cannot carry on their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life, but would be permanently dependent upon inadequate government handouts. Some were forcibly deported, others were constantly harassed by government troops and even had their water supplies cut off. It is generally believed that the motive behind the evictions is that large deposits of diamonds are believed to lie beneath the ground of the reserve. The giant diamond merchant corporation De Beers in particular were interested in prospecting in the territory, and of course the government could demand a handsome fee for granting the concession.

The charity Survival International, which is the major organisation working to protect the rights of tribal peoples world-wide, circulated the testimony of one tribesman Mogetse Kaboikanyo who was deported to a resettlement camp in February 2002 and died 4 months later. It is worth quoting an extract here:

"They sweep us off our land and dump us on the rubbish pile, far from our animals and plants and spirits of the ancestors. That is what you do to rubbish, but not to people. Once the officials came and said someone had hunted an eland, so they killed one of us and castrated another. That is not what you do to human beings."

The Bushmen however with the help of Survival took the government of Botswana to Court to establish their legal right to live and hunt on the land where their ancestors have always lived - not a lot to ask, you might have thought. In December 2006 after the longest Court case in Botswana's history, the Bushmen won. The Court ruled that they were wrongfully evicted from their ancestral lands and that they had the right to return home and to hunt there as they always used to. The government however is still harassing the bushmen and preventing them exercising their rights, by saying that the Bushmen who return to their lands cannot take their herds of goats back with them, and cannot hunt game in the reserve. Most seriously of all however, the Botswana government refuses to allow the Bushmen access to water - this in one of the driest regions on earth. When the Bushmen were initially evicted, the government capped and concreted over the main water borehole in the Kalahari reserve, and even now they refuse to restore the water supply or to permit the Bushmen to do so themselves. To get water from the nearest alternative source now means a round trip of 300 miles. So the Bushmen are legally entitled to live there, provided they do not eat or drink! Numerous Bushmen have already been arrested and even beaten by Botswana police for "illegally" hunting for food, and in desperation they have gone back to the Botswana High Court to demand the right to their water. The Court has heard the case and has reserved judgment. The decision is now anxiously awaited. Watch this space! This is not over yet.

bye bye, Bob

Robert Hunter, journalist and environmental activist, died on 2nd May 2005 at the age of only 63. He will be remembered as one of the "movers and shakers" who first set up the fledgling Greenpeace organisation in Vancouver back in 1971 and was in the thick of all the early campaigns, against nuclear weapons testing, against whaling, and against the clubbing of baby seals for their fur. His book "Warriors of the Rainbow" (also published under the title "The Greenpeace Chronicle") describes the history of the organisation throughout those early years, and it stirs the blood as much as any tale of swashbuckling adventure on the high seas - but the difference is that this is all true, and it happened in our own day and age, right under our noses. And here's the twist - according to his obituary in The Independent, Bob's own inspiration was the Quaker tradition of "bearing witness". A sobering thought, that. Can we live up to this heritage? Have we still got what it takes? Let's try. For Bob's sake.

terror comes to town

London, 7th July 2005. A roar, a flash, the shock-wave, then screaming and panic among those lucky enough to be still alive. The authorities are confused - what was it? A power surge? The dreadful truth quickly became apparent. Now we know what it was, though its significance is still perhaps not fully appreciated. It was chickens coming home to roost. Every death is a tragedy to those who have lost a loved one. Considered as a whole 52 deaths in London seems small fry compared with the 25,000 killed when Britain and America invaded Iraq. Still, now we know what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

The Chatham House Organisation, a respected independent think-tank of academics and former civil servants specialising in foreign affairs, have already published their conclusion that the atrocity in London was a form of pay-back for Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. They add for good measure that there is no doubt that the invasion has helped to recruit more volunteers for Al-Qaida.

This is so obvious it hardly needs to be said - especially after the bombing of Madrid; yet the British government had the effrontery to deny that there is any connection. The Spanish government did the same of course - and were turned out of office soon afterwards, you may recall! There comes a point where it goes beyond a matter of merely lying to us, and becomes a positive insult to our intelligence.

Then two weeks after the bombings, another outrage stunned London when a police officer, armed but not wearing uniform, followed an innocent young Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, into an underground train and emptied a gun into his head at point blank range. So now Londoners not only have to face the risk of being blown up by terrorists, but also the chance of being pounced upon and executed by armed and trigger-happy police. And the government's reaction? Incredibly, rather than taking measures to reassure us that this would not happen again, our government's response was to introduce legislation into Parliament for any future inquests involving police shootings to be held in secret, so that they would never again be embarrassed by having the evidence released to the public! 

Tony Blair said that he took us to war in order to make the world a safer place. How much safer do you feel now?

chaos  theory

So what sort of a country have we made of Iraq, after toppling Saddam Hussein? We went in spraying bullets and bombs everywhere in the name of freedom, and overthrew the Ba'ath government at the cost of up to half a million Iraqi lives, because we had decided we could show them a better way to run their country. So what have we achieved?

Well it is true that Iraq does now have an elected parliament. Unfortunately it has become completely irrelevant, since the country is now virtually ungovernable. Iraqi civilians are still being killed every day, while millions have fled the country to find safety abroad, creating a massive refugee problem in the region. Violence, instability and a state of undeclared civil war: these have been our gifts to Iraq. Well done, Britain and the USA!

Meanwhile, how have we been demonstrating the superiority of Western values to the Iraqi people? Well first there was the invasion itself of course, when in the words of the American writer Anne Lamott we "set about killing the desperately poor on behalf of the obscenely rich". Following the glorious victory of the most powerful nation on earth against a third world banana-dictatorship, came the occupation. News of the torture and sadistic humiliation of prisoners in American hands at the Abu Ghraib prison shocked critics and supporters of the invasion alike. Then we started hearing about prisoners being flown to military bases abroad (including the British territory of Diego Garcia) so that they could be tortured in secret. In November 2004, some 18 months after George Bush announced to the world that the war was over (!) American forces using chemical weapons and cluster-bombs virtually destroyed the city of Fallujah, causing thousands of deaths among insurgents and civilians alike. A year later US Marines carried out an appalling massacre of 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha, shooting men, women and children at close range, in what were described as "execution" type killings. On 16th September 2007 American mercenaries (a.k.a. "security consultants") working for the Blackwater corporation opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in a market place in Baghdad, killing eleven people. And while all this was going on of course hundreds of "terror suspects" were in effect kidnapped and transported half-way round the world to America's concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned for years without any charges being brought against them and denied access to lawyers or to their families, for the sole purpose of enabling the American authorities to evade the rules of their own legal system! What was that about spreading democracy around the World?

It is not just the Americans running amok, though. In September 2003 British soldiers "raided" a hotel in Basra and kidnapped several of the employees, including the 26 year old receptionist Baha Mousa. (They also, it was alleged, helped themselves liberally to cash from the hotel safe). Four days later Baha Mousa's father was called to the British military barracks to identify his son's dead body. He had been hooded, battered about the face and body and then left to die of his injuries without medical treatment. And then they had the audacity to put Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against the Iraqi people!

Wasn't it a good job the armies of Democracy defeated the barbarous forces of despotism!

and why did we go to war exactly ?

Following the publication of the Butler Report, was everyone supposed to be clear about the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq? If so, would anyone who understood it please care to explain it to the rest of us?

There were various excuses made to justify the war of course. The  "9/11" gambit is a favourite: for this one you just need to make a passionate denunciation of the attack on New York in 2001, skating quickly over the inconvenient fact that there was not a single Iraqi involved. A popular alternative is the "evil tyrant" approach, with the emphasis on what a bad person Saddam Hussein was, and how much better off the Iraqis are now that he has gone.  That sounds rather hollow these days to people in Iraq, following their actual experience of life as a western military colony, with bombings and shootings continuing every day, news of atrocities committed by the occupying soldiers, and refugees pouring out of the country any way they can. The charity Oxfam has already said openly that a third of Iraqi people are worse off now than they were under Saddam's rule.

However none of those reasons were put forward at the time we went to war. There was one reason, and only one, that we were told made the invasion necessary: this was the "serious and current threat" posed by Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, which Tony Blair declared could be launched within 45 minutes. Everybody knew of course that the United Nations weapons inspectors had found no evidence of these before the war started, and as the invading western armies conspicuously failed to turn up any evidence of such weapons, only Tony Blair still talked as though he believed in them long after everybody else had given up the pretence. As Jesus said, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed"! On the other hand, as Abraham Lincoln once remarked, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time". It was the end of 2009 before Tony Blair himself - with not a hint of shame or apology for lying to the country and to Parliament - finally admitted what most people already knew: that the question whether Iraq had "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was pretty well irrelevant since Tony Blair was already set on the invasion anyway.

As it happens, back in 2007 Alan Greenspan, the respected veteran Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, had already come out and said openly what many of us suspected all along: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil". The USA of course is the biggest consumer of oil in the world: with just 5% of the world's population, they seem to need 20% of the world's oil to keep themselves going. Despite their own large deposits, the Americans have actually been net importers of oil for the past 50 years. Clearly the oil-rich territory of Iraq would be a useful acquisition for the USA at the best of times, and invaluable if America's increasingly rocky relationship with Saudi Arabia should come unstuck. The personal and family connections between George Bush and the oil industry (which largely financed his election campaigns) are well known. And as if to confirm all our worst suspicions, the USA is now trying to force the "Hydrocarbon Law" through the Iraqi parliament, which would hand over two-thirds of Iraq's oil reserves to a gang of (mostly American) oil corporations. Suddenly, the whole thing becomes horribly easy to understand. There never were any "weapons of mass destruction". There never was any desire to "liberate the Iraqi people". It was just a smash-and-grab raid. We have mugged Iraq for its oil, that is all.

The trouble with lying to people of course is that this trick only works once. In April 2003 David Aaronovich  wrote in The Guardian: "If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government or that of the U.S. ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere." Well, there you are!

Thinking back again to the sayings of Jesus, he did of course have some very hard words to say about hypocrites. As we all know, Britain and America are both positively bristling with "weapons of mass destruction" themselves. So one wonders why is it OK for us and our friends to have them, and not OK for anyone else?

so was the invasion legal ?

The arguments whether the attack on Iraq was legal or illegal may appear to some people as an irrelevance: the real point is simply that it was wrong, whatever the law may say, since laws can easily be changed at the stroke of a pen to ensure that important people are not caused undue embarrassment - as G. K. Chesterton put it, "those who are powerful enough to make the law have no need to break it". Nevertheless the issue raises some interesting questions, and casts a long shadow over the prospects for establishing any meaningful system of international law.

The most worrying aspect of the war is that it was a blatant act of aggression. There was no invasion of our territory, no attack on our citizens, nor on any other country or people to justify it. The British government has given its official backing to the principle that a superpower may attack and overturn any government it happens to dislike, regardless of the weight of World opinion. Who will be next? Syria? Iran? Cuba? How safe can anyone feel? Does the whole world now have to go around on tip-toes for fear of offending the Americans? And not just the Americans: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Before the war started, the North Korean government commented: "Pre-emptive strikes are not the exclusive right of the U.S.A." Quite so! The day may come - given time it certainly will - when we and our friends are no longer strong enough to kick everybody else around, and some other Superpower will arise. What happens if they decide that they don't approve of our "regime", or our "weapons of mass destruction"? Then it may be our turn to get a taste of our own medicine. Such is the Brave New World we have now created.

It is incidentally worth recalling that in 1946 the surviving members of the Nazi government were put on trial by the USA, Britain and Russia on charges which included "crimes against peace", defined as "preparing for and waging a war of aggression". Seven of the various German politicians and generals who were on trial at Nuremberg were sentenced to hang for that offence alone - including the Foreign Minister. Do you suppose Jack Straw knows that?

free at last  . . .  oh, no you're not

Mordecai Vanunu, jailed in 1986 for blowing the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme, was at last released in April 2004 - though this is no credit to the government of Israel, which made him serve the full 18 year sentence he received after he was drugged and kidnapped in Rome by Israeli secret service agents. He spent 11 years of his sentence in solitary confinement, and for 3 years the light in his cell was never turned off, day or night. Even now that he has paid the full price demanded by Israel for his principles, he is still not allowed to leave the country which treated him so badly, to make a new life elsewhere. He is forbidden to use the Internet, or to approach any foreign embassy (in case he should try to seek asylum). He has already been re-arrested at least twice since his release - once on Christmas Eve, for trying to travel to a Christmas service in Bethlehem (as he is not permitted to visit the occupied territories). Some of us may be puzzled about these restrictions: after all he has served his sentence, hasn't he? So now he's a free man, isn't he? Well, apparently not.

in the money . . .  or at least, on the money !

Since August 2002 the Bank of England has been putting a picture of Elizabeth Fry, the 19th century Quaker prison reformer, on the new £5 notes (after the fiasco over the erasable numbers was sorted out!) This recognition of her work is certainly  welcome and well-deserved. Starting off with the women's prison at Newgate, Elizabeth Fry literally cleaned up the place, brought in clothes and bedding for the prisoners and their children, established schemes for education and training, and travelled widely in Europe spreading her ideas and methods. Friends House launched an appeal requesting everyone to consider donating their first "Fry Fiver" towards the work Quakers are doing with prisoners today.

RETURN  TO  TOP  OF  PAGE

Links to other pages: