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CND IN THE NEWS
CND in the News: 20-26 February
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1
Asylum ruling enrages tabloids
February 20, 2003 The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/thewrap/story/0,1188,899285,00.html
If anything could annoy the tabloids more than Mr Chirac's perfidity,
it was the High Court's decision to throw out a new law preventing asylum
seekers from making late claims for state benefits. Leaving them destitute,
the court ruled, was in contravention of the Human Rights Act.
The Mail, which is particularly irate, devotes half a page to the judge
responsible, Mr Justice Collins. "He may comfort himself with the
thought that he is becoming a bigger nuisance to the Establishment than
his father before him," says the paper. Andrew Collins is the son
of Canon John Collins, of St Paul's Cathedral, who helped to found CND
in the 1950s and campaigned against apartheid in South Africa. (Readers
who might be tempted to admire him are reminded that "his efforts
also brought finance and help to Robert Mugabe" - a pretty disingenuous
claim by the Mail, the Wrap can't help but observe.)
The home secretary, David Blunkett, who criticised the ruling yesterday,
also has the support of the Sun. But not most of the broadsheets. "It
is the job of these courts to interpret the law, not to agree with the
government of the day," observes the Telegraph. (Not for much longer,
if the paper's lead story is accurate: it says Tony Blair wants to limit
the ability of judges to intervene in such matters.)
"Making the procedure as nasty as possible is not going to deter
refugees," says the Guardian. The home secretary was "not
just undignified, but plain wrong".
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2
Threat of ban gives Chirac sense of déjà vu
February 22, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/o,,1-37-586648,00.html
JACQUES CHIRAC, the French President, has been threatened with a boycott
of French goods before.
In 1995, his refusal to end the nuclear weapons tests at Mururoa Atoll,
in French Polynesia, angered environmental groups and brought a general
boycott of French goods.
Chirac, then enjoying his first term as President, was clearly more
“American” in his outlook in those days.
“You only have to look back at 1935,” he informed his critics. “There
were people then who were against France arming itself and look what
happened.”
Sounds familiar? By the time the tests were abandoned in 1996, more
than half a million people had signed a petition from the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) calling for a boycott of French
goods. CND believed that the consumer protest played
an important part in persuading the French to reduce the tests from
eight to six.
Sales of French wine were hardest hit. Off-licences in London reported
sales fell by 10 to 20 per cent, with an increase in sales of non-French
wine. The Atlantic Bar and Grill used the rumpus to raise some money
for charity, adding a £5 surcharge for a bottle of French wine
and an extra £1 per glass. The initiative raised at least £4,000
to a Tahitian environmental charity.
The Liberal Democrats called on its members to boycott French goods
in protest at French nuclear testing.
One suspects that the French simply laughed the whole thing off. Exports
of French wine rose 2 per cent by volume and 13 per cent by value in
1995-1996, spurred by big gains in Japan and South-East Asia. Scandinavia
delivered the biggest snub. Imports fell 56 per cent in Sweden, 34 per
cent in Norway and 30 per cent in Denmark.
Boycotts can be effective, as seen with South Africa in the 1970s and
1980s. Kodak and IBM were among multinationals to withdraw from South
Africa in the face of protests in America and Europe. In the UK, Barclays
was singled out on university campuses for punishment. It ultimately
bowed to pressure, selling its local interests to a new entity, First
National.
The irony was that divestments by foreign players made millionaires
out of white South African businessmen who snapped up the assets for
a song.
Boycotts of South African goods simply encouraged the wily Boers to
come up with ingenious ways of tricking Western consumers. Cape wine
was shipped in bulk to eastern Europe where it was purportedly blended
with local fare from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
Any trip to a UK supermarket provides ample evidence that South Africa’s
winemakers suffered no long lasting damage as a result of the boycott.
During the 1970s, the Arab League tried to use its oil-rich coffers
to pressure Western companies into isolating Israel. It drew up a blacklist
of offending businesses and threatened to deprive companies of Arab
raw materials. Metal Box sold its stake in an Israeli canning company
under indirect Arab pressure.
Norway, Iceland and Japan have all faced calls for boycotts over their
support for commercial whaling. Greenpeace, the environmental pressure
group, threatened boycotts of Norwegian fish products in the mid-1980s.
Chilean grapes felt a similar backlash from consumers. On the corporate
front, Exxon faced boycott calls over the Exxon-Valdez tanker spillage
in Alaska, while Shell suffered a backlash over the proposed sinking
of the Brent Spar oil platform.
As for France, lingering resentment continues in the UK over the banning
of British beef. Nick Brown, the former Agriculture Minister, launched
his own personal boycott of French products. He told farmers that he
would not be eating any French food or drink any French wine until they
accepted imports of the meat.
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3
Bleary eyed coach parties invade London
February 16, 2003
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/o,,1-523-579359,00.html?gavalid
PAUL TATE climbed bleary-eyed from his bed in Durham at 3.30am yesterday
to make his way to London. Shivering in the bitter cold, the 34-year-old
researcher at Durham University was eagerly anticipating the day of
protest ahead. But history had to wait.
Tate’s 4.45am GNER train was delayed by two hours after fire broke out
in the smoking carriage. Then the points froze outside Doncaster and
his group of dedicated protesters were forced to change trains.
“It was a hell of a journey,” said Tate. “We thought we’d never make
it.”
All over Britain people were stirring under the wintry skies, wrapped
in woolly scarves and hats. Barbour-wearing country folk happily rubbed
shoulders with “traveller” types clad in misshapen jumpers and Doc Martens
boots.
At 6.30am a family of Anglo-Iraqis huddled outside the West Yorkshire
Playhouse in Leeds, awaiting one of 32 coaches to London. They knew
the realities of life under Saddam Hussein but were still determined
to register their protest.
Mussab Al-Khairalla, 21, a second-year computing student at Leeds University,
and his three cousins said they have relatives in Iraq while others
have been killed by Saddam.
“They live in terror but if the purpose of American policy is to get
rid of Saddam they should have supported the Iraqi uprising in 1991,”
he said. “Everyone is against America and Saddam at the same time.”
At last everybody was aboard the coach, glad to be warm again. Steve
Johnson, a history teacher, tried to rouse his comrades with a tambourine,
but most fell asleep. Outside, bright sun failed to melt the thick frost
on hedges and fields.
When the 8.40am train left Bristol Temple Meads, nearly every seat sported
a reservation ticket. The marchers, stashing “Stop the war” and “Bye
bye Blair” placards above the seats, munched bacon sandwiches.
“We are the middle England marchers,” said Luisa Scott, 47, a seasoned
Countryside March protester from Wiltshire.
Leon Tikly, 39, a lecturer at Bristol University, and his wife Ursula
were taking their children. Samora, their eight-year-old son, said:
“I’m worried the children in Iraq won’t be able to get to school.”
By 11am protesters dressed in fur-lined hats and woollen pashminas,
tweed and pearls were aboard the London-bound train at Guildford. Dropped
off from Volvo estate cars, Surrey’s finest were going to stop the war.
Most were well-spoken and marching for the first time. Some traditional
supporters wore CND badges and had dusted off “Say no to nuclear arms”
banners last used on peace marches in the 1980s.
As the train sped through the suburbs Maggie Ryan, 52, said she had
decided to join the march on Friday night. “I have never been on one
in my life,” she said. “But I was so appalled by what was happening
that I could not sit in my armchair and do nothing.”
At Waterloo the Surrey contingent joined the river of humanity that
snaked towards Southwark bridge. As she walked along the Embankment,
Tessa Cockett, 62, from Guildford, declared that democracy should be
home-grown, not imposed from outside. “I have some nice French cheese
and bread and a cup of coffee to look forward to when I get to Hyde
Park,” she added.
Most of the Bristol group, descending at Paddington station, opted to
walk to Gower Street or Embankment, the two starting points. As noon
approached and the crowds began to inch forward, Naimah Tikly, Samora’s
four-year-old sister, was showing impatience.
“When are we going to sing?” she asked. Obligingly, some university
students began to chant to drums: “Blair is a poodle, Bush is a noodle.”
An hour later the march had moved about 25 yards.
Among the thicket of banners were some reading “Make tea, not war” that
had been distributed by Karmarama, a group of self-proclaimed “race
of late galaxy ecologists” originally from “a misshapen planet that
looks from orbit like a series of throw pillows with pinholes in them”.
The placards were handed out by group members who claim to be “extremely
laid-back and easy-going”.
By 2pm the organisers claimed the crowd had reached 1m. The most disparate
people were making common cause. Clobin Wilson-Cott, a former public-school
boy wearing a waistcoat and cravat, glanced wryly at the Socialist Worker
placard that he carried.
“I was going to fly to Paris to see my girlfriend but I decided to do
this instead as it is far more fun,” he said. “I am not a socialist,
but I am opposed to double standards. If they can’t have nukes neither
should we.”
Other protesters were stirred by their personal experience of conflict.
“I know the horrors of war and that’s why I am here,” said Ian Clark,
78, a veteran of the battle of Normandy.
Not everyone sang from the same hymn sheet. Jacques More, 44, a writer
from Croydon, south London, mounted a lone counter-protest, holding
a placard proclaiming his support for military action.
At 4.30pm some protesters finally reached the edge of Hyde Park and,
finding it full, sat under their banner and drank coffee from flasks.
“I always find these occasions inspiring,” said John Morris, leader
of the Surrey coalition. Then they began the trek back towards Waterloo.
That they had made tea — and coffee — rather than war was borne out
last night by Scotland Yard which praised the marchers’ behaviour. It
said there had been just seven arrests, less than one for every 100,000
marchers.
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4
Tale of the century
23 February 2003 Observer
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,900873,00.html
Diary of an Ordinary Woman 1914-1995
by Margaret Forster
Chatto £16.99, pp403
Margaret Forster's latest novel takes the form of a diary. Its 'author',
Millicent King, patiently confides everything to a series of journals
which become not just an account of her inner life but a record of the
twentieth century. This mingling of the private and the public is what
makes her diary extraordinary, according to Forster, who explains in
an introduction how she came to 'edit' the diaries after Millicent's
death.
She was invited to look at the journals, she says, towards the end of
Millicent's life. 'I saw a thread running through it which captivated
me,' she explains, and decided to try and 'make something' of the raw
material.
Millicent's life may be 'ordinary' but it encompasses two world wars,
the birth of CND, the women's movement and the Greenham
Common protests. Her story starts inauspiciously, when she is forced
to leave college after her father's death, but she eventually manages
to train as a teacher and then a social worker.
She experiences bereavements, a miscarriage and a relationship with
a married man who is unable to get a divorce. She adopts her sister's
young twins when their parents are killed by a wartime bomb, and supports
another sister when she returns from occupied France with marks of torture
and an illegitimate child. All of this makes Forster speculate, as others
have done before her, about whether there is such a thing as an 'ordinary'
life.
Even so, she is not an uncritical editor of Millicent's jottings. Her
own comments, inserted to clarify the entries and explain some omissions,
are not always sympathetic.
After the very first entries, for example, she offers her opinion that
the 14-year-old Millicent is 'outspoken, quite selfish, restless, ambitious
and inclined to self-pity'. She also suggests that 'during the rest
of 1915, the self-pity gets 'a little out of hand' as the servants leave
and Millicent has to spend more time helping her pregnant mother.
This judgment could seem harsh, until the reader remembers that Millicent
is an invention and that Forster is playing games here - as she does
throughout the novel - with her fictional character. The device seems
to be designed to make the book more 'authentic', creating a context
for the diary's existence and allowing Forster to acknowledge some of
Millicent's shortcomings as a writer. In fact, these lie squarely at
the door of her creator, who has endowed Millicent with a fluctuating
and premature feminist consciousness.
The other problem with an invented diary is hindsight. In 1933, Millicent
records that her friend Percy 'is worried because Adolf Hitler has been
made Chancellor of Germany' and asks whether this is 'such a bad thing'.
Forster's nervousness about what her character should know about historical
events is evident, leading her to comment a few pages later that 'it
doesn't help matters that in March Hitler annexes Austria and even Millicent
cannot go on being so sure that there will not be a war'.
Forster has clearly done a great deal of research, describing the poverty
that Millicent encounters in London between the wars in great detail.
In that sense, the book hovers somewhere between documentary and fiction,
with Millicent as a not entirely successful bridging device.
This is especially evident in the second half, in which Millicent gets
depressed, ostensibly by the disappointments of her later years but
more credibly because of the weight of events she has to carry. It is
simply too much of a burden, both for an 'ordinary' woman and this over-ambitious
novel.
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5
Human shields take up position under the gaze of the dictator
24 February 2003
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2003%2F02%2F24%2Fwirq124.xml&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=64734
A banner glorifying Saddam Hussein's "Mother of all Battles"
against Kuwait adorned the entrance of the makeshift dormitory where
British peace activists bedded down beside an Iraqi power station yesterday.
Inside the spacious room, above 15 beds arranged in two rows, the walls
sported various images of the Iraqi leader as the 15 "human shields"
- including four Britons - unpacked their belongings a stone's throw
from Baghdad South power station.
They claim independence from the regime. They are equally at pains to
blame the West for Saddam's excesses. When this argument was questioned,
one peace activist became aggressive.
"Use this and I'll have you," spat Ube Evans, a British human
shield from Hay-on-Wye, when asked which American president he blamed
for getting Saddam to invade Iran in 1980. He stalked off in a temper.
The British human shields say Tony Blair's government is responsible
for more deaths than the Iraqi regime. They believe that Saddam's invasion
of Iran, which sparked an eight-year war and cost a million lives, was
a western plot.
They think the same about Iraq's attack on Kuwait in 1990. One activist
believes that Saddam's well-documented destruction of Iraq's southern
marshes was partially the fault of Turkey.
The first group of human shields to camp at a possible target in Baghdad
had travelled from London on two double-decker buses.
Joe Letts, from Shaftesbury, Dorset, owns both vehicles and drove one
to Iraq himself. He called Mr Blair a warmonger, adding: "There
were more crimes against humanity that we have committed than have been
committed by Saddam."
Mr Letts, 51, who wore a CND badge, said Saddam was
"misled" into invading Kuwait. "As far as an Arab is
concerned, all the borders here are things that we westerners created
and are entirely artificial," he said. "The same families
live on both sides of the Iraq-Kuwait border."
Another human shield, Dave Howarth, 36, from Lincoln, acknowledged that
the occupation of Kuwait had been "clear aggression". But
he added: "Our governments are killing more people around the world
than the Iraqis have ever done."
Godfrey Meynell, 68, said he had never joined a peace campaign before.
A supporter of foxhunting, he described himself as a "Church and
Queen Tory squire". He won an MBE for gallantry - calling in RAF
air strikes against Arab insurgents - during his time as a civil servant
in the British protectorate of Western Aden in the 1960s.
"It was a great mistake to give them their independence,"
he said. "I think that was a just war."
He described Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, as a "horrible
man".
He believes that the destruction of 90 per cent of the marshes in southern
Iraq, where Shia Arabs rose up against Saddam's regime in 1991, was
"partially down to Turkey." Mr Meynell added: "No dictator,
however bloody, could do the harm to the world that America is doing
by failing to take global warming seriously."
The human shields will inform the Ministry of Defence and the Pentagon
of their locations. They hope this will influence British and US targeting.
Bemused Iraqis watched them move into their new abode. Asked where he
would go if war began, Sabah Hassan, a power station worker, said he
would go home, adding: "These people are like volunteers. Nobody
asked them to come here."
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