The GulfWatch Papers
An international peace movement documentation and analysis of the First Gulf War in Israeli-Palestine and psychospiritual context
by
Alastair Hulbert and Alastair
McIntosh
This material now available as a PDF of the original - click here
Published in the Edinburgh Review, Polygon (Edinburgh University Press), No. 87, 1992, pp. 15-71. The daily GulfWatch Papers upon which the text is based were deposited, with supporting documentation, by Scottish Churches’ Action for World Development (now “Commonweal”) in the National Library for Scotland, Edinburgh. As this is a long text, original page breaks have been preserved within this webpage for ease of academic referencing. Note that it may contain scanning errors.
GulfWatch Index
(this page)
See also related pages on this website:
-
Short summary of GulfWatch, with links, from New Internationalist
-
“The GulfWatch Respones” – controversy over Edinburgh Review's publication and the ethics of war
-
“Let us Gather Blossoms Under Fire” – rationale of nonviolence in the face of war
-
Interview on Islam-Christian relations with the Rev. Prof. William Montgomery Watt
The GulfWatch Papers - Introduction
GulfWatch
was a daily bulletin of news and information about the Gulf War, much of it
differing from or extending what was presented through normal media channels.
Gleaned from the
GreenNet international
computer network, fax messages and even one telephone contact from inside Iraq,
it was mailed out each day of the war to church and peace groups. Through
computer networks and photocopied redistribution by peace groups, it was read
by many thousands of people internationally. Broadcasters used the information
in Chicago and Montreal. Aid agencies as far away as New Zealand had it faxed to
them. Finnish peace activists forwarded it to Swedish bishops. It even touched
countries like Nicaragua and elsewhere in the Third World. Complete sets of
GulfWatch were requested for all the United Church bishops in Pakistan, to help
them show that the war was not a simple Christian versus Moslem issue.
Appreciated by those of many or no faith alike, it was described as ‘A
remarkable service to the Churches at this very critical time’ by the Bishop
of Manchester, and as ‘One of the few bright points in a doomsday scenario’
by Duncan Forrester, Professor of Practical Theology at the University of
Edinburgh. Indeed, what started as a local effort with a Scottish focus, run by
a handful of volunteers in tiny offices in a church belltower and the back of a
suburban garage, became an alternative news service of global value.
The
Gulf War is the first major conflict in which such high technology has been used
internationally to link those concerned with building peace. Here, the Edinburgh
Review carries an edited summary of the GulfWatch papers, with a commentary
placing this unique documentary work in the context of war and the
peace-building community by which it arose.
Alastair
Hulbert is Secretary of Scottish Churches Action for World Development (SCAWD)
and was the main editor of GulfWatch. He has recently taken up a new position in
Brussels sponsored by the Church of Scotland to join the staff of the European
Ecumenical Commission for Church and Society. Alastair McIntosh is Development
Director with Edinburgh University’s Centre for Human Ecol-
16 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
ogy and honorary Business Advisor to the lona Community. He was the
ideas, research and technology person of GulfWatch.
We
arrived feeling desolate, frightened, disbelieving, awestruck, powerless. We had
gathered as the Steering Committee of Scottish Churches Action for World
Development (SCAWD). The log fire at Peace House near Dunblane spluttered to
keep our bodies warm against a snowy night. But within, each was touched by the
icy numbing of prescient shellshock.
Donald
Briggs. Yvonne Burgess. Kathy Galloway. AlastairHulbert. Kate Houston. Alastair
McIntosh. Meredith Somerville. Helen Steven. Also Marlene Anderson and Tony Robb
(apologies, but with us). Similarly, Ellen Moxley and Kay Shanks, not on the
Committee, but cooking in the background — like us — caring and stirring.
And so the meeting opened. A reading from Janet Morley’s ‘Reproaches for
Good Friday’:
I
brooded over the abyss,
with
my words I called forth creation:
but
you have brooded on destruction,
and
manufactured the means of chaos…
I
made the desert blossom before you,
I
fed you with an open hand;
but
you have grasped the children’s food,
and
laid waste fertile lands…
I
have followed you with the power of my spirit,
to
seek truth and heal the oppressed:
but
you have been following a lie,
and
returned to your own comfort…
Long
silence. Coloured flumes spurting from logs — beautiful —cozy. But too hot
inside. Too hot for children’s touch. Too hot to spray down on humankind. Even
if they are soldiers, damn them (damn us!), they are still children at heart.
Sons and daughters of mothers and fathers. Too human, too REAL to burn.
‘War
in the Gulf: Not in My Name’, said the 20p badges on the table. And when the
UN meets in an atmosphere like Peace House, alternatives WILL be found to war.
But the agenda! Back to our agenda. Listening time on the agenda. Each now
speaks to where she or he is at. More silence. Community. Tears. Holding. Yes,
holding. ‘Hold on world! World hold on! It’s gonna be all right! You gonna
see the light! (Ohh) when you’re one! Really one! You get things done/ Like
they never been done! So hold on’ (John Lennon).
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 17
‘Where
better to be at this time? ‘Who better to hold on with? Powerless, perhaps:
disempowered — never! But the agenda…
Review
of the Economics and Debt conference. Planning meetings for One World Week.
Reflection on the SCAWD organised church leaders’ visit to IsraeL/Palestine.
Arrangements for the visit of London Representative of the PLO, Afif Safieh ...
arrangements made, knowing it would be off if war broke out. But what stereotype
busting it would be for Scots to learn he is Christian! On to Islam-Christian
relations. Before we can think about a conference on this we need to learn much
more: agreed — watch Rana Kabbani’s ‘Letter to Christendom’ video at
our next meeting. Ongoing programme on the relationship between cultures and
development — Ivan Illich might come to our 1992 event. Link it in with our
Latin America concerns. Finally, planning the spring conference on
‘Enchantment and Liberation’ —and yes; Yes! We WILL hold on to that theme.
Even war will not stop us from singing, dancing and celebrating our inner
freedom.
Back
to the Gulf. Was there anything SCAWD could do? somebody wondered. We’ve
been doing it all these years, and failed, bemoaned another. An older voice: ...
the first task of the peace movement is not necessarily to succeed, but to bear
witness to truth. We agreed, feeling the oppression lift somewhat.
I
[Alastair McIntosh] had spent waiting time earlier that day in Gatwick
airport’s supposedly interfaith chapel. I had been aghast to see ‘Onward
Christian Soldiers!’ scrawled across the prayer book. Could we do anything to
counteract the crusader mentality? Helen had been a peace worker since her
relief work days in Vietnam, and voiced concern about how truth gets lost in
war, so even the focus of witness and prophesy becomes obscured. Then it was
suggested that we use access to international computer networks, fax and telex
to establish an alternative news service. GulfWatch was born.
The
rest of the evening we felt so excited we forgot to crack open the bottle of
whisky. A statement of purpose and method was drawn up by the following morning.
Dated 15th January 1991, the eve of war, it said:
Disinformation
has already started. The reported defection of 6 Iraqi helicopters was an
American setup which the media was taken in by. Our government is recruiting the
services of PR consultants to handle the media, as they do not consider the
usual civil service channels appropriate to how they want the conflict reported.
SCAWD
is concerned that disinformation and censorship means that key representatives
within the Scottish churches may not always have access to adequate information
on which to base public statements, pastoral letters, etc. arising out of the
need for
18
EDINBURGH REVIEW / 87
an
ethical critique of war developments. Accordingly, we are setting up an
emergency information service to provide daily short digests of material coming
in from uncensored sources within the international church, peace, environmental
etc. networks. To achieve this:
·
We will use
existing office communications technology at our disposal to access the regular
immediate Gulf updates coming in from non-governmental organisations on GreenNet.
GreenNet is an internationally networked (50 countries) computer conferencing
facility used by organisations such as churches, peace groups, human rights
organisations, etc..
·
We will use
existing telex, fax and telephone contact numbers to augment GreenNet.
·
We will draw on
SCAWD’s experience since 1984 in building understanding within the churches of
Middle East issues (organising study tours, conferences, etc), to identify
where the news we collect differs from or extends what is being presented in the
mass media and summarise it in a daily digest.
·
We will mail or fax
this out late each afternoon to a manageably small list of key church decision
makers and policy advisors, to provide them with information they might not get
from the mass media. (The value of this can be appreciated if, say, there was a
nuclear attack or radiation fallout from bombing Iraqi nuclear plants. Chernobyl
experience showed that GreenNet sources in countries like Sweden fed in
information which, it subsequently became apparent, had been kept low key within
Britain.)
·
The above is
necessary because in a war, and particularly in one which certain elements of
the media might try to distort into a Holy War, the voices of church leaders may
be amongst the few which can speak freely and express ethical concerns within
their congregations and beyond.
·
The service will
last only for the duration of any war and will commence tomorrow, Wednesday 16th
January. The SCAWD Steering Committee has arranged for editorial, management and
other tasks to be conducted on an unpaid basis. Computer access, postage, fax
etc. costs will run at around £60 a day. Help will be needed to cover these
costs, but we are proceeding without identifying finance due to the utmost
urgency of the situation and having this morning consulted by telephone with
contactable church leaders.
GulfWatch No. 1 came out on the afternoon of 16th January. There was no news in it not available elsewhere. But there were some powerful statements from concerned church and peace organisa-
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 19
tions,
so we reproduced these. The following day GreenNet went wild, as war launched
the international peace community into frenzied orbit. Each day’s two-page
Gulf Watch thereafter became a distillation from some 40 or 50 pages of selected
material, accounting for some 90 hours of computer network access time within
two months as well as hundreds of pages of fax and other hard copy. This
distillation service backed by research was what GulfWatch readers most
appreciated. Jewish peace worker, Margaret Phillips, living in St. Louis, USA,
wrote, ‘I provide printed copies for the organizers of anti-war activities
locally. For that, having it all together is useful.’ Alison Burnley of
Edinburgh remarked, ‘It may not improve my breakfast but it does improve my
knowledge!’
Much
of our inspiration had come from the 3rd January Statement on the Gulf Crisis,
signed by some 30 leading representatives of church and society in Scotland.
This group remained our editorial focus, while the mailing list, notwithstanding
efforts to curb it, grew to over 200 direct from us, and many thousands
indirect. US activist Rich Winkel said, ‘I post Gulf Watch to an internet
activism list with about 700 direct subscribers and about 15 re-distribution
points. From there it gets posted to the alt.activism group on Usenet
—probably several thousand readers there. I’ve gotten very positive feedback
on it ... please keep it coming!’
What
follows is a condensation of the main themes covered in GulfWatch. The GW number
indicates the issue of GulfWatch from which the passage is extracted. Source
referencing is given for all but the earliest inputs (when we lacked
sophistication). For instance, igc:ckruger mideast.gulf Mar 11 could be checked
in the GreenNet user index to show the input came from Cynthia Kruger via the
USA’s PeaceNet system, at an address with phone number in San Francisco, and
indication that her main area of activism is Latin America. Mideast.gulf is the
name of the particular conference (out of many hundreds) in which the full text
of the original material may still be active for responding to, or archived for
reading only. The date facilitates location. Our own material is either
referenced ‘GulfWatch’, or ‘aldopacific’ — our GreenNet account name.
In
these ways we were able further to check certain stories — either by
telephoning, faxing, or most usually, by e-mail (instant electronic mail)
through GreenNet. Since active material in a conference can be publicly debated
by subscribers adding their responses to it, any items of questionable
authoritativeness pretty quickly get shot down as some 7,000 users in 50
different countries have the opportunity to scrutinise. Similarly, fresh
insights quickly get added.
This
is the power of electronic networking with satellite computer telecommunication
links. Wartime media censorship applied to a
• 20 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
particular affluent country can never be the same henceforth. Some of
the same satellites that bounced down bombing schedules, albethey scrambled,
also carried messages of love, unscrambled, freely open to the interception we
know takes place. In this small way, perhaps, the oppressor’s tool can help
dismantle his fortress.
As war was about to break out, the government took PR control out of the
hands of Whitehall civil servants and into those of a private PR company. Media
control was subsequently enforced by restricting the supply of reporting permits
for Saudi Arabia, causing, for example, Scotland’s leading left-of-centre
tabloid, the Daily Record, great
difficulty in getting a reporter on the spot. Hours before the war started it
became clear that attempts would also be made to control public opinion.
[NB. Bold type indicates material quoted from GulfWatch daily bulletins.
GW2, for example, is GulfWatch Bulletin No. 2.]
BBC AND IBA OPPOSE ‘UNDESIRABLE’ MOD CENSORSHIP RULES (GW2)
GulfWatch.
‘Information
is the currency of democracy’ Ralph Nader. At 9.28 pm today (16 January) as
the very last item of its evening news, BBC1 TV reported that they and the IBA
considered aspects of MOD reporting requirements to be undesirable.
In
case of war breaking out, information will be controlled by an Information
Committee, comprising John Wakeham (Chair), Chris Patten and (Chris?) Ryder.
Daily briefings would be given to MPs. PR ‘problems’ would be limited if the
war is short, but could become troublesome if the war is protracted.
The
report said that the media have today accepted reporting ground rules. These
involve no reporting on troop numbers, nothing on future operations, and
‘care’ to be taken in reporting on casualties. They want the media to
‘consult’ with them before reporting on: opposition to the war, and scenes
of death and injury. The BBC and IBA consider this restriction to be
‘undesirable’ and are currently having discussions with the MOD about it.
The
onset of war activated an array of informal networks as peace workers in various
countries anxiously sought to communicate news of war opposition.
PROTESTS IN GERMANY CONTINUE (GW2)
University of Hanover SRC, 3:41 and 4:28 am Jan 17, 1991
In
contrast to the information spread by German television and the Innenministerium
(Home Office) German cities are not quiet tonight.
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 21
On Wednesday again some 200,000 people all over Germany gathered in
demonstrations, prayers etc. to protest the Gulf war. In Hamburg and Hannover at
12 noon all public busses, trams and underground trains stopped for five
minutes. Passengers were informed by loudspeakers that the reason is the
drivers’ protest against war.
In Berlin some thousands of school pupils missed school to demonstrate.
In Wuppertal since 6 am, Wednesday, the end of ultimatum local time, actors of
the local theatre are reading poems from the Bible and the Koran. They promised
to read day and night till the war is stopped. Trade unionists consider voting
for a general strike to force their government to do everything to stop war.
Eve Sinton, a journalist from New Zealand, reported heavily pro-war
media bias there. But a report from the States said that the Irish government
were refusing to follow Britain’s censorship example. In Italy the media
seemed to be positively encouraging dissent, a 17th January report saying, ‘On
Saturday more than 200,000 people demonstrated in Rome against war. Many local
radio stations are broadcasting John Lennon’s song ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
They propose that the same is done all over the world at 3.00 pm local time each
day. Audiences should be asked to put up the volume!’ (GW3) But the BBC was
coming under criticism for being more circumspect, for the best reasons, of
course.
JOHN
LENNON RADIO CENSORSHIP (GW6) Gulf Watch Jan 20, 1991
Radio Forth reported on Sunday morning at 8.30 am that local radio
stations are coming under pressure not to play peace songs such as John
Lennon’s ‘Give Peace a Chance’. The Sunday
Times (20 Jan) and the Guardian (21
Jan) covered this.
GulfWatch contacted Julia Shipston, London based press officer for BBC
local radio stations, who said there is no ban: what’s happened is that
guidelines have been issued to the 37 English BBC local radio stations, calling
for sensitivity when certain songs are played and giving a list of 67
potentially risky ones, including songs like, Fields of Fire, I Just Died in
Your Arms Tonight, Armed and Extremely Dangerous, and Roberta Flack’s Killing
me Softly. Shipston explained that a song like Killing me Softly is, of course,
completely neutral to war. However, if it was played just after a news report of
local soldiers being killed, it could be very painful.
Fair enough, but amidst reports of disk jockeys being fired or censured
for playing peace songs, none of us heard any throughout the war. We had to sing
our own! One intriguing report was never
22
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
again
repeated. Attempts by GulfWatch to find out why were frustrated by IRN’s
newsdesk. Calls over GreenNet to see if the story had been carried elsewhere in
the world drew a blank.
BOMBING
OF CIVILIAN TARGET? (GW5) GulfWatch 21
January 1991
Independent radio news reported on Sunday 20 January at 10.00 am that
the allies had bombed Saddam’s home village of Takrit, identified as a
‘peasant village’. Because it was his birth place, went the report, he was
expected to be enraged by the action. This is the first report we have of
deliberate bombing of a non-strategic target. Has anyone heard of others? The
report has not to our knowledge been heard again.
Various
reports were telephoned or c-mailed in to GulfWatch about apparent attempts to
frustrate the work of the peace movement, and to minimise public alarm. Where
these could be verified or were first hand, we carried them, such as a 19th
January report that, ‘We understand that in certain English cities civil
defence measures such as testing air-raid sirens have been suspended, so as not
to provoke anxiety amongst the population. A CND advert in a major UK daily last
week was allegedly published with 8 mistaken telephone numbers. The paper
republished, but who was responsible for the errors? Allegations are being made
that certain newspapers have refused to take peace adverts.’ (GW4)
Sometimes
a news report lacked Western credibility — a Radio Havana piece, something
from a student demonstrator in Singapore, accounts from refugees. We were
questioned about reliability, how we could be sure of our sources. In some ways
the processes of verification of computer networks are best compared with those
of psychoanalysis — communication for the sake of self-knowledge and truth,
that eventually, in community and with experience, regularity and immediacy,
provides its own moral vindication: confirmation of the truth, rejection ofthe
unfounded.
As
the war entered its second week the initial sense of disbelief amongst peace
workers wore thin, and a touch of fear set in amongst some of us. The very
effectiveness of the peace movement made it a threat to the war effort. We
learned that CNN and all national TV networks in the USA had carried reports of
Glasgow RC Archbishop Thomas Winning’s outspoken address of 21st January.
GulfWatch had discussions with other computer networkers about the risk that
efforts might be made to close us down. We concluded that this would be such bad
public relations as to be stupid. But for a while the fear was real, especially
as our American partners at PeaceNet were being required by police to provide
information on peace actions. It was
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 23
evident
that stronger censorship measures were in hand should the PR battle start being
lost. For instance, we input a report entitled Sleep Well America — Even
Your Dead Are Censored, stating, ‘A report on BBC Radio 4 at 1745 GMT this
evening, 31st January, said that the U.S. authorities are going to stop film of
dead Americans coming home from being shown on TV. This breaks with previous
custom. The slow-marched, flag-draped coffins are considered to have a
detrimental effect on domestic support for warfare.’ (GW14)
While
most media coverage involved indirect censorship through denial of information
or distraction from relevant issues through incessant focusing on fringe shows,
such as the hyped-up performance of Patriot missiles, there were also shafts
of disinformation and hardcore censoring. The French media was reported to be
heavily muzzled, philosopher Michel Serre remarking that, ‘Our channels of
information, which traditionally used to be profoundly reflective, have been
contaminated by the immediate event and triviality, which is a style typical of
the media serving American society.’ (GW2O) Akbar Ahmed wrote in the Guardian,
6th February, that the media had tried to make it a war between Islam and
the West, frequently featuring Saddam at prayer so that ‘the not so subtle
message is that of the holy warrior’ (GW19). One mainstream American
journal even retouched a picture of Saddam to make his moustache look more like
Hitler’s! The BBC generally seemed to operate as impartially as it could
within the confines of what news was accessible, but restraint was still
exercised in line with the consensus view that this war was being
‘clinically’ executed.
BBC
ADMITS BOMBING SELF CENSORSHIP (GW3O) The Guardian
18 Feb 1991
‘...Film from Baghdad provided those who are anti-war with images of
far greater impact than any verbal argument. The effect was enhanced during the
9 o’clock (BBC 1 TV) News on Wednesday when the announcer explained that even
more terrible pictures had been received but were not being shown.
‘Working at the BBC on Thursday, I found several supporters of the war
angry that the news-reader had mentioned this self-censorship. They felt those
against the war would be able to say: “See, the true horrors of the bombing of
civilians are being withheld...”
‘Had film of the charred victims of the Hamburg fire-storm been seen
in every British home two days later, could the bombing have gone on?
Churchill’s reaction on seeing footage at that time was: “Are we beasts?”
What would the British public have said?’ (Article by Martin Gilbert,
historian and official biographer of Winston Churchill)
Civilian
deaths were referred to by the military and reiterated by
24
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
the
media as ‘collateral damage’ in a carefully orchestrated attempt to keep
public attention away from the reality that real sons of mothers, fathers of
children, were being mercilessly destroyed and maimed. It emerged, as
igc:pfranck put it on 24th January that, ‘It is clear that the battle has
now shifted to the hearts and minds of the US people, and that the media is the
absolute key to that battle.’ (GW9) Where doublespeak wore thin, the
military always had the means to throw up diversionary images. As items on the
use of napalm showed, they also had the crassness to expose their own
inhumanity.
NAPALM
- JUST A DISUSED ‘DEFOLIANT’ (GW33)
igc:aadams
mideast.forum.566.Defoliation of Kuwait ... 4:43 pm
Feb
22, 1991
The ABC 5:30pm (CST) news carried the story of Marine Harrier Jets
dropping napalm. The report went on to say that ‘it was only being used to
clear oil filled trenches’. Then — a mysterious overhead (recon) photo
appeared on the screen, supposedly showing the trenches all along the border.
(For those without access to U.S. media — recon photos have suddenly started
appearing on the tube when they support whatever the administration wants people
to believe.)
Two points here: To avoid having napalm classed as a weapon of mass
destruction under international law, the U.S. managed to get it officially
designated as a ‘defoliant’ back in the 60s. Just how much of that Kuwaiti
forest is still standing anyway? Also, when Jimmy Carter was president, the U.S.
airforce publicly announced that it was removing all remaining stocks of napalm
from it’s inventory, as they felt it was no longer needed. So where did this
stuff come from ... an interservice garage sale?
NAPALMING
UNIFORMS EASIER THAN PYJAMAS -
ADELMAN
(GW33)
mts
mideast.gulf.378.Napalm ... 10:49 pm Feb 22, 1991, BBC
Radio
Interview
Nick Ross (Presenter:) ‘Kenneth Adelman, can I just ask you something
else. We have been getting reports through the day that the Americans are using
NAPALM in the Kuwaiti theatre of operations and, indeed, I gather that U.S.
Officials have now said: “Yes, indeed! Napalm is being dropped behind Iraqi
lines”. Now, to some of us here, that’s been a surprising development, not
for military reasons — because clearly, Napalm can be a very effective weapon
indeed — but for all the emotional connotations that Napalm had with Vietnam
… does it surprise you that it is in use — for political rather than
military means, I mean?’
Kenneth Adelman (former Director U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency): ‘Well, I think the objective was to make sure that
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 25
the,
behind the lines, er, was as wiped out as possible so that we would not risk
American and British boys if we needed to go on the ground war. And I think that
as long as the targets are kept military, it’s proper, as uninviting as it is.
In Vietnam what really caused the stir on Napalm that so inflicted the
“Vietnam Memory” was that we couldn’t tell who was military and who was
civilian. Everybody seemed to be running around in pyjamas part of the time. And
I think that, when you went after villages, quote “villages” that were said
to be Vietcong, with people in pyjamas said to be officers — but no one could
tell the difference between officers and enlisted men and the peasants in the
field — that got you in all kinds of problems. Here, I take it, with the
Republican Guard and back eschelons — military, it’s quite clear, they wear
uniforms, they sit in tanks, they, you know, cook over fire or whatever they do,
they look like military, they are mi1~tary and they’re clearly identified as
such. And so I think that it is proper in that time to kind of weed ‘em
out.’ (Media Transcription Service transcript).
Peg:tribune
in Australia pointed out how in the media, ‘The language describing the war
comes mostly from male voices. They use imagery that domesticates what weapons
are really doing. Phrases like “taking out” targets and “carpet” bombing
sound like getting rid of garbage or fleas ... . (We women) feel that all power
has been taken away from us and decisions are made by generals and the generals
are men.’ (GW2O) Women worldwide played a major role in challenging this
war, albeit one with a low public profile.
WOMEN
IN BLACK DEMONSTRATE IN COLOGNE (GW1O) sysop mideast.action 11:06 am Jan 25,
1991 (From News system)
A society which places strong emphasis on its military strenth and the
heroism of its soldiers inevitably marginalizes women. Rachel Ostrowitz, of
Women in Black writes of the Israeli experience:
‘...The need to understand what was happening in the West Bank and
Gaza increased when we realized that censorship was being imposed on the public,
and that television was not telling the whole story. Women are sensitive to
censorship, direct or indirect, for experience has shown that our stories are
not always told...’
Poster
suggestions from igc:lareader included, ‘Turn off your TV and Think!’ and
‘The Media Is Carpet Bombing our Consciousness!’ (GW13) Others included ‘How
come “our” oil got under their ground’, ‘The price of cheap gas is too
high’ and ‘Stop drilling, start killing, so we can keep spilling
oil.’ (GW12 appendix) Public opinion polls in most Western countries
showed strong support for the war. A System Three survey in the Glasgow
Herald showed that 77% of
26
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
Scots
supported the war. But other surveys suggested that just over 50% of women opposed it. However, the information base on which the
public’s views were established was non-existent or distorted. The Bishop of
St Andrews, Michael Hare Duke, was quoted saying, ‘Stay free — don’t
get caught in the thinking that’s around, the propaganda of war.’ (GW31)
U.S.
PUBLIC MISINFORMED SAYS NEW OPINION SURVEY
(GW3O)
igc:peacenet
mideast.media.126.Public Misinformed! 8:51 am Feb
19,
1991
An important survey of U.S.A. Gulf war attitudes and opinion
manipulation has been carried out by researchers at the Department of
Communication, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. It says, ‘Despite the
months of television coverage devoted to this story, most people, we found, were
alarmingly ill informed. If the news media had done a better job in informing
people, would there be less support for the war? Our study indicates that the
answer to this question is yes.
As
concern about media distortion in Britain grew, a packed meeting of journalists
at Friends House, London, decided to set up an alternative weekly newspaper, ‘War
Report’ (GW17). However, it should be recorded that not all regular papers
knowingly allowed their vision to be distorted. The Guardian was in many ways exemplary; the Scotsman received praise north of the border. But Gulf Watch seemed
to be the only daily bulletin we know of specialising in summarising news from
alternative sources. The response of church leaders, for whom it was primarily
intended, is summed up in a letter from Rev Maxwell Craig, General Secretary of
the ecumenical body, Action of Churches Together in Scotland:
‘I am writing on behalf of ACTS to congratulate SCAWD for the quite
remarkable production of GulfWatch throughout the Gulf war and beyond it. This
was a quite excellent piece of work which made an enormous contribution to all
of us who were so deeply concerned both about the period leading up to the
outbreak of hostilities and about the conduct of the war itself. It was not
simply the information you gave us, though that was important. It was of almost
equal importance that the presence of GulfWatch was a healthy reminder to us to
be both discriminating and sceptical about the information that was given us
through the media. We know that this information was carefully filtered and
subject to censorship either by military sources or by the proprietors of the
media concerned. Gulf Watch was a healthy reminder to us to recognise the
ancient maxim that truth is the first casualty of war...’
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 27
Military
Dimensions and ‘Collateral’ Damage
[Alastair
Hulbert’s voice] On the evening of 16th January, on my way home from taking
the first GulfWatch to the post office, I met Trevor Royle, Defence
Correspondent of Scotland on Sunday. (We
were at school together.) He had just returned the previous day from Saudi
Arabia, after spending several days at the front with a British tank regiment.
He told me what it was like and shared his foreboding that war would inevitably
come soon.
Night
falls early in the desert, he said, at about 5.30. On moonless nights it is very dark. No lights are allowed; it is
bitterly cold and normally there is simply nothing to do but go to bed. When he
was there, however, some of the young soldiers, 20-year-olds, took to crawling
along to Trevor’s tent to talk in the dark. He was as he said ‘a kind of
uncle to them for a few hours’.
These
boys were afraid — of the future, the unknown, the threat of danger, the
disaster and pity of war. Loneliness, the strangeness of the desert, distance
from home, inexperience of life, above all the darkness of night brought out
their deepest dread. Yet these same fellows, come morning, were up and about
their business — determined to go get ‘em, resolute, self-confident, macho
even.
The
pathos of the description affected me deeply. War began, as we discovered, only
a few hours after our conversation. I ‘watched it on TV’, full of dread,
until President Bush spoke to the world at about 2.00 am. Then I switched off.
GulfWatch
was in a sense an attempt to face up to the dread and foreboding which so many
of us, not just those boys in the desert, felt at the onset of war. It was a way
of dealing with the alienation imposed on us by television and the illusion of a
‘clean war’. The statistics were extensive, even when edited.
AIR
WAR (GW15)
igc:greenbase
mideast.gulf.290 5:32 pm Jan 31, 1991
·
Over 10,000 sorties
of all sorts had been flown during the first week of war. The number of sorties
flown to date is now over 32,000, with 2,600 flown on 31 January. ( Six sets of
air war stastics follow, all brief but detailed, culminating in this:)
·
300 sorties per day
flown against Republican Guards ground units: on Jan 26,27 B-52s dropped 455
tons of explosives; on Jan29, 21 B-52s dropped 315 tons of explosives; on
Jan 30, 28 B-52s dropped 450 tons of explosives.
Such statistics are difficult to comprehend, especially when related to the television which would have you believe it was actually reporting something by showing the screen lit up like a fireworks display. More eloquent was the following: ‘Military censors permit no interviews with the B52 bomber-pilots.’ (GW7) Or:
28
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
GREENPEACE
REPORT ON IRAQI DEATHS (GW13)
igc:pnmideast
mideast.media.63 6:30 pm Jan 30, 1991 Greenpeace/ USA
According to a source of mine in the State Department, a B-52 bomber
attack that was carried out this morning that wiped out Saddam’s elite forces
has likely killed up to 150,000 Iraqi troops. That is the number of troops that
were housed in the encampment that was bombed ... Daphne Wysham, Greenpeace
Magazine, Senior Editor.
The
question of casualties was a source of great concern — to everyone (except
perhaps Saddam) but for different reasons. Given the participants, enormous loss
of life was inevitable, as this sum made clear:
SLOGAN
OF THE WEEK (GW1O)
igc:pnmideast
mideast.forum 7:35 pm Jan 27, 1991 Saw this in San Francisco:
1
Bully
+
1 Bully
=l000s
dead
Joel Gazis-Sax
At
the end of the first week of war GulfWatch relayed a horrific report, not
without trepidation as regards its veracity.
GERMAN
EX-GENERAL SPEAKS OF 300,000 DEATHS (GW7) sysop mideast.gulf 5:27 am Jan 23 1991
(From News system)
According to German Radio/TV (ARD) Member of Parliament and former
Air-Force General Manfred Opel says there have been more than 300,000 deaths in
Iraq. Opel said US military experts had told him there were over 100,000 deaths
in Baghdad alone. ‘I have no doubt that this information is respectable’, he
said
A
journalist friend then discovered that the Guardian
had investigated the same report and finding it untrustworthy had not published
it. GulfWatch backtracked the next day, a little. In retrospect, and in the
light of the fact that no trustworthy figures of the Iraqi casualties in the
Gulf were ever disclosed, discovered, or even seriously sought by the
authorities, it was probably not a bad thing that the German general’s report
was published. Later reports, especially the transcripts GulfWatch carried of
Ramsay Clark’s press conference ‘Eyewitness Account’ (GW25) and BBC
2’s interview ‘UK Expert’s View re Bombed Shelter’ (GW27), vied
with it for the horror of their message. 300,000 dead? — the enormity of the
numbers, like the details of the bombs dropped, had a dreadful numbing effect. A
telephone call from a Jordanian worker with the Red Crescent inside Iraq
estimated 112,000 civilian deaths, 60% of them children (GW34).
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 29
‘Official’
post-war estimates have settled down in the region of 100,000 to 250,000
combined military and civilian, with presumably several times that number
seriously injured.
But
in fact the numbers of the dead were not so relevant as their dying. (The Bible
incidentally hasn’t a good word to say about the search for body counts. And
in the end, the One Jesus, like Everyman, represents all.) It is rather the
slant, the context, the channel of communication, the do-it-your-self-reliance
and commitment to disclosing reality which matter: the difference, as Pablo
Casals used to say, between playing notes and making music.
GulfWatch
No. 13 began with this little voice crying in the wilderness — a symbolic
protest that is now doubly relevant in the light of Gunter Grass’s outcry at
the Bundeswehr’s use of Picasso’s Guernica for a recruitment
advertisement during the Gulf Crisis (Guardian,
May 23 1991):
GUERNICA’S
CALL FOR PEACE IN THE WORLD AND IN THE
PERSIAN
GULF (GW13)
igc:jgutierrez
mideast.action.386 3:22 am Jan 30, 1991
The Town Hall of Guernica in Spain has issued the following
proclamation: ‘Guernica, a small town in the wake of humanity, cannot keep
quiet when faced with the grave situation in the Persian Gulf. For we, too, have
been the victim of a barbarous bombing — as represented in the famous painting
by Pablo Picasso. Guernica, in valuing human life, expresses its unconditional
rejection of all violence ... Armed conflict is a crime against humanity!’
Ironically
what has just been said about the relevance of numbers appears to find a
parallel in official US reaction to the question of casualties during the war.
CASUALTIES
(GW15)
igc:greenbase
mideast.gulf.290 5:32 pm Jan 31, 1991
Gen. Schwarzkopf in his summary of the ground engagements this week
stated matter of factly that Marines ‘reported severe damage on the enemy, and
great loss of life.’ Yet when asked about Iraqi casualties, the General said
that the US was ‘shooting, not counting… Body count means nothing,
absolutely nothing.’ The military … fail to understand that people are
interested not to keep score, but to gauge the human cost of the war.
GULF
CASUALTIES (GW18)
igc:greenbase
mideast.gulf 7:44 pm Feb 5, 1991
Greenpeace USA
The Pentagon still vehemently refuses to discuss Iraqi casualties. Some
Pentagon spokesmen state that this reluctance simply reflects the lack of
information ... Trying to downplay media and public
30
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
interest,
these spokesmen assert that casualties are not an important measure of the
military success of the war…
US and allied casualties in combat so far number less than 100,
according to the Pentagon. But estimates of Iraqi military and civilian
casualties vary widely, from the few hundreds to the many thousands. The issue
of casualties is one that the US government and the military establishment is
quite sensitive to.
The
point here is that the Pentagon and General Schwartzkopf were not interested in
the human cost to the enemy. They were interested only in winning the war —
and of course in keeping US casualties low for the sake of domestic political
support for the war. This is why there was so much reference to the Vietnam war
with its loss of life and face, and so much triumphalism in the multiple US
post-war victory parades, including their firework displays ‘to recreate the
atmosphere of the first night of the war’.
But
not all the real-life ‘firework’ displays of war went quite as surgically as
did the subsequent ticker-tape parades. As shares in Raytheon, makers of Patriot
missiles, soared as much as $4.50 in
one day (GW17), journalists in Tel Aviv ducked both missiles and, less
successfully, censors.
PATRIOT
FACT & FANCIES (GW27)
igc:nytransfer
mideast.media.113 4:59 pm Feb 14, 1991
(John Whalen)
According to a journalist, Matt Maranz, just returned from Tel Aviv,
Israeli censors have excelled at snuffing reports about Patriot misfires
skimming treetops, scattering debris and injuring civilians. While the Patriots
seemed to be fairly successful at intercepting Scuds, says Maranz, their
low-altitude flying trajectories (often aimed at no apparent target) and their
tendency to boomerang back to earth made them more menacing than the Iraqi
missiles.
Maranz says that Tokyo Broadcasting and other news agencies shot
videotape footage of Patriot missiles, from launch to impact, flying nowhere
near Scuds and slamming into residential neighborhoods. ‘They were clearly
misfires,’ he says, ‘Patriots that were duds. Although the press had asked
the Israeli defense forces about it, they never confirmed it.’
As military censors forge the Patriot’s report card, it’s worth
remembering that Pentagon media managers quickly began marketing their
anti-Scud miracle weapon to divert attention from another forgery, the early
hoopla that the allies had wiped out Iraq’s Scuds.
A
more lasting residual effect of modern warfare is heavy metal contamination and
radiation. GulfWatch research showed that the effects of bombing Iraq’s
nuclear plants would be intense local
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 31
contamination,
but no Chernobyl-like global threat. However, armour piercing shells would
contaminate the region with highly toxic Uranium-238 which, with a half-life of
4.5 billion years, will take forever to transmute to lead.
URANIUM
CANNON SHELLS (GW24)
aldopacific
mideast.forum.445 from 8th Feb
A British TV news programme 10 days ago showed fighter plane cannons
which ‘shoot uranium cased shells’. GulfWatch has discovered the following
information from several sources via international computer networks : ‘One of
the more innocuous by-products of the nuclear weapons/power industry is a lot of
leftover Uranium-238, which makes up more than 99% of natural uranium and is not
significantly radioactive ... What the report was talking about were something
called ‘depleted uranium’ shells. These are cannon shells with a soft metal
outside and a ‘depleted uranium’ (DU) center, which includes the tip of the
shell. When the shell strikes armor, all of the kinetic energy is transfered to
the DU component which then penetrates the armor. They actually MELT/BURN their
way through the object they strike.
‘Technically these shells are below danger standards for nuclear
material but definitely radioactive. The main environmental danger comes from
the fact that in a ground war the desert may be littered with thousands of them
and thus poisoned for generations. Uranium-238 is an extremely toxic chemical,
and, if you survive the wound, the metal will cause kidney failure.’ (Sources
including Occupational Health and Radiation Safety Dept., University of
Pittsburgh).
The March 1991 edition of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists (Vol 47,
No 2) was to reveal just how very far away Iraq actually was from being able to
make its own nuclear device. Presumably the allied forces knew this, but it was
inconvenient knowledge. It would have prevented such posturing as Bush
emphasising the importance of ‘taking out’ Saddam’s nuclear plants, or
Douglas Hurd stating that Britain would reconsider its pledge not to use nuclear
weapons in the Gulf if Iraq were found to have its own nuclear capability (GW2).
Of course, their Dr Strangeloves were blistering to go in and ‘kick ass’.
NEUTRON
BOMBS HUMANE (GW19)
igc.dkeller
mideast.forum.400 8:32 pm Feb 5, 1991
The press in Pittsburgh is hot on the story of the potential of the
neutron bomb to ‘save American lives’. A reporter here showed me a
transcript with Professor Cowan, the ‘father of the neutron bomb’, claiming
it was the perfect weapon for desert war, and that it was at least as humane as
napalm.
32
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
Barbarity
dressed up as humaneness, justice, underwrote much of what the war represented.
This text was to go into the final issue of GulfWatch had there been room.
BARBARISM
Le
Monde Edgar Morin
Thursday, 24 January 1991
The Middle East, so special in relation to the rest of the world, bears
in a unique way the virulent encounter of everything opposed in the planet:
Occident and Orient, North and South, Islam and Christianity (with the Jewish
nation in between), secularism and religion, fundamentalism and modernism. These
oppositions are exacerbated by the antagonism of states with arbitrary
frontiers, each oppressing an ethnic group or religion. That is why the Middle
East is not just a powder keg in the world, it is also the powder keg of the
world…
The barbarity of every war and especially of every holy war, of all
religious fanaticism, of all nationalist anger, of all racial hatred has
returned. The barbarity of technology in the service of death, of a spirit which
is blind to complexity, is on the move. These two forms of barbarity together
make up the face of this century where all the ancient barbarism arising out of
the depths of ages, bringing with it murders, tortures, massacres, has joined
with the modern forms of barbarism — state, bureaucratic, technical,
ideological and mental.
With
these words in mind, it is worth studying Goya’s ‘Desastres de La Guerra’,
an artistic ‘GulfWatch’ of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. They depict all
manner of barbarity — rape, torture, murder, executions, horrible atrocities,
bestiality, theft, betrayal, famine, destitution, despair. There are eighty-two
of the etchings. Some of the later ones are allegorical. No. 77 Que
se rompe la cuerda (If only the cord might break!) shows a bishop doing a
balancing trick on a slack rope above the crowd; No. 79 is entitled Muria
la Verdad (Truth is dead), depicting the burial of a lovely woman; No. 81, Fiero
monstruo (Dreadful monster) is of a colossal dog-like beast lying on its
side disgorging dead bodies from its mouth. Some critics say Goya went mad with
the ‘Disasters of War’; in fact what he was doing was portraying a world
gone mad.
GulfWatch
No. 23 carried two pages of meditations for Lent, including a poem uploaded by
Joel Sax, the US facilitator of the GreenNet mideast conferences. Poetry was a
frequent feature on GreenNet, providing a sanity-restoring medium by which the
war could be felt from the heart’s perspective.
MOLOCH
(GW23 Appendix)
igc:jsax
mideast.forum.279 5.41 pm Jan 16, 1991
The following was written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955. Please read
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 33
it
closely and as much more than an emotional outburst, although the name of the
poem where it is from is HOWL. Naming the demons within us is an age-old
function of poetry, and when Ginsberg writes about ‘Moloch whose love is
endless oil and stone’ ‘skeleton treasuries’ and ‘boys sobbing in
armies’ he is strangely prophetic …
What
sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains
and imagination?
Moloch!
Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming
under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch!
Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the
heavy judger of men!
Moloch
the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and
Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone
of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch
whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose
fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose
ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch
whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the
long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in
the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch
whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!
Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of
sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the mind!
Moloch
in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker
in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch
who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!
Moloch who frightened me
out
of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake
up
in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch!
Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind
capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite
cocks! monstrous bombs!
They
broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
trees,
radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and
is
everywhere about us!
—
from Allen Ginsberg,
HOWL, 1955
34
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
A week before the Gulf war broke out, the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd
wrote in the Scotsman, ‘We do not
want a war and we have done nothing to encourage war. Iraq bears complete
responsibility for this crisis. We have done all in our power to avoid having to
wage a just war for a just cause. But Iraq attacked and occupied Kuwait.’
(‘A Just Cause for Military Action’, 10th January 1991)
These
fine words were accompanied by a principled defence of the use of force based on
the ‘Just War’ theory of the Christian Church, which was much discussed at
the time in England. As with the Government’s subsequent arrangements for the
‘Gulf Reconciliation Service’, Mr Hurd was probably ignorant both of the
differences in church organisation between England and Scotland, and of the
differences in the theological stance of church leaders in the two nations. His
only reference in the article to a stated church position was to one by Cardinal
Hume, who as senior prelate of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has
nothing to do with Scotland.
The
question remains whether Mr Hurd’s words, quoted above, were credible or not.
Was it indeed true that ‘we’ (the Foreign Secretary was speaking under the
aegis of the USA) ‘do not want a war’ and ‘have done all in our power to
avoid’ war? Was he being honest in placing ‘complete responsibility for this
crisis’ on Iraq because it ‘attacked and occupied Kuwait’? The questions
are particularly important because Mr Hurd was doing theology, and using
ethical rather than political arguments for a change. The high moral ground he
occupied in the article (reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Sermon on the
Mound’ to the Church of Scotland General Assembly in May 1988) were
characteristic of the rhetorical build-up to this war.
Ironically,
also on 10th January, Noam Chomsky wrote in the Guardian,
‘As a matter of logic, principles cannot be selectively upheld. As a
matter of fact, the US is one of the major violators of the principles now
grandly proclaimed.’ (‘A Stand on Low Moral Ground’) The proclaimed stance
of President Bush, ‘at peace with himself’ and with his spiritual adviser
Billy Graham on the night of 16th January, rang hollow in the light of the US
record in international affairs. In the Gulf crisis, for once US interests
happened to accord to some extent with human rights concerns and it seized the
opportunity to exploit the moral argument. The British government and Mr Hurd
played the same tune.
GulfWatch
carried many statements by church bodies and NonGovernmental Organisations who
all condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but went on to deny that it was
cause for war. As for crediting the moral stance of the US or Britain, not one
of those quoted did so. The American organisation Witness for Peace is a good
example:
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 35
DOMINANCE
FOR WHAT? - THE GULF CRISIS FROM THE
CENTRAL
AMERICA PERSPECTIVE STATEMENT OF
WITNESS
FOR PEACE (GW36 Appendix)
Witness for Peace, a faith-based, non-violent organisation committed
to opposing war and sharing risks with the oppressed in the struggle for
justice, strongly condemns Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Violent aggression by
any nation to enrich itself at the expense of any other nation must be denounced
and brought to the bar of world opinion. WFP speaks from eight years’
experience in Central America, where the United States itself has too often
supported the forces of violent aggression against the poor majorities of the
area, to raise profound questions about the role of the United States in the
Persian Gulf war and beyond.
In Central America the U.S. has shown time and again its resolve to
maintain dominance through support of tiny economic elites and massive armies of
internal occupation to ensure support of U.S. policies and free access for U.S.
business interests. When tiny Nicaragua stepped out of line, the U.S. reacted
with a many-sided array of force, including the support of a mercenary army, in
order to reestablish the control of the former economic elite. Claiming that
Honduras was about to be invaded by Nicaragua, the U.S. muscled into Honduras
with a huge military presence to serve as a base for power in the region. U.S.
policy continues to support governments dominated by oppressive military forces
in El Salvador and Guatemala. Only after Panama (once a staunch U.S. ally)
became an unreliable player in the U.S. system, did the Bush administration
raise questions about Panama’s repressive government, which was followed by
an invasion of Panama.
Through these eight years the U.S. administration has shown disdain for
multinational negotiation. When twelve nations of Latin America came together
under the Contadora Peace Plan to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis of
U.S. aggression against Nicaragua, the U.S. undermined its every effort. And the
U.S. demonstrated particular disdain for the U.N. and its affiliated World
Court, in ignoring the judgement against the U.S. for mining Nicaragua’s
harbours.
Given this experience and understanding, WFP brings a critical eye to
the response of the U.S. to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and U.S. long term
policy in the Persian Gulf…
Although the U.N. passed a resolution authorizing the use of force in
the Gulf, it is important to note that the impetus for the resolution came most
strongly from the U.S.
This analysis leads us to consider the U.S. political and economic
dominance framework that has become so obvious in the Central
36
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
American
region. At its root the war in the Persian Gulf is a struggle for dominance in
that vital oil producing region, based on the argument that the U.S. has the
inherent right and chilling force to impose its will on any who cross its
interests.
The struggle in the Gulf is clearly not about defending democracy, given
our commitment to liberate Kuwait to its former state of family dominance. Nor
is this a struggle against communism, given that whatever else Saddam Hussein
might be he can’t be made to wear that banner. Nor given the recent history of
U.S. policy in the region is this likely a principled struggle on the part of
the United States against violent aggression, though given different premises,
it would certainly be that. The U.S. has on too many occasions worked with
violent aggressors to assume the mantle of principle in this case…
The danger at this moment is that the very brilliance of the U.S.
military response will blind us to one of the central principles of U.S. foreign
policy: that the U.S. will do anything necessary — including ignoring the
United Nations or using it — to maintain its military, economic and political
dominance over nations and regions. The losers, as we have come to see
repeatedly in Central America, are the oppressed, poor majorities of the region,
who will be kept in tow by U.S. supported internal armies of occupation…
At
the end of the war, Mick Dumper of the Council for the Advancement of Arab
British Understanding had this to say about ‘Just War’ apologists. (He was
speaking particularly about leading members of the church in England.)
TWO
WRONGS DO NOT MAKE A RIGHT (GW38)
CRAG
Newsletter 28 CAABU Religious Affairs Group, London Feb 28 1991
… what is surprising is the condoning of policies, which will lead to
the destruction of a country and its citizens, as those of a Just War…
It is hard to believe the blindness of those who feel impelled to give
this western assault their spiritual blessing. There are persuasive strategic,
military and political reasons why politicians have decided to enforce UN
resolutions now. The moral reasons, however, are completely bogus, and the
invocation of God’s name and blessing profoundly undermines the moral stature
of the church in this country. Do Iraqi Christians (who make up 10% of the Iraqi
population) and Muslims pray to a different God? Does God really distinguish
between the gassing of Kurds and the bombardment of Baghdad? Now that innocents
have been killed by the anti-Iraq coalition, has not that coalition reduced
itself to the moral equivalence of Saddam Hussein?…
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 37
The
US cartoon character Pogo was quoted as saying, ‘I have met the enemy and
he is us’ — a phrase popularised by the US anti-Vietnam war movement. (GW38)
A theologian, asked whose side God was on, replied, ‘on the side of the
suffering.’
Why
then was this war necessary?
DOUBTS
THAT LINGER BEYOND THE SLAUGHTER (GW4O)
Observer
Janet Watts Sunday 3
March, 1991
‘Questions will be asked — that’s a must, all about this land of
dust,’ wrote Private Martin Ferguson of the Queen’s Own Highlanders from the
Gulf. Will they? ‘The answers you know but cannot say, because of the horrors
which haunt you every day.’ Pte Ferguson was killed by American fire, aged 21.
From
early on, and the jokes about a Kuwait that grew carrots not attracting concern
from the allies, it was well-known that oil played a major part in the rationale
of the war. In fact the Sun gave it
away right at the beginning of the ‘crisis’: on 3rd August 1990 it broke the
news of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait with the front page banner headline: ‘2Op
— Petrol prices set to soar as the Baghdad beast seizes Kuwait.’
But
the oil issue was in fact a complex one. First, it suited the oil companies that
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was seen as a threat to oil resources. Prices rose
and profits soared. The carefully nurtured moral outcry at Saddam Hussain’s
invasion of Kuwait drowned any news about what was happening in the commercial
sphere. Was there any such news in Britain?
US
DOMESTIC POLITICS (GW15)
igc:greenbase
mideast.gulf.290 5:32 pm Jan 31, 1991
On Friday, Senators Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CN)
announced they would introduce a bill to heavily tax the enormous profits reaped
by oil companies as a result of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Senators
introduced a similar bill late last year as an amendment to the overall budget
bill; that amendment garnered 33 votes, 18 short of a majority.
… The American Petroleum Institute in Washington, DC, has closed its
library to the public for ‘security precautions.’ Normally, the open library
is one of the best sources of data about oil company profits and activities.
Secondly,
the battle that was being fought in the Gulf was also over long-term energy
policies of crucial importance to the US and the world. On 20th February
President Bush unveiled the new US ‘National Energy Strategy’. As the
Greenpeace Situation Report
38
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
quoted
in GulfWatch No. 33 pointed out, it virtually ignored renewable energy sources,
energy efficiency, the environmental effects of energy, and public involvement
in energy decisions.
The
National Energy Strategy was challenged by Greenpeace, as recorded in the final
GulfWatch bulletin.
ENERGY
POLICY BEYOND THE WAR (GW4O)
igc:bleland
mideast.forum.332. David Chatfield 8:30 pm Mar 5, 1991
SAN FRANCISCO: Statement by Greenpeace Chairman David Chatfield: ‘...
The war was waged in large part, in George Bush’s words, to preserve American
“energy security”. As long as energy security means access to cheap oil in
the Middle East, the need for US dominance in the Middle East is guaranteed to
continue. It is simple geography and economics: Two-thirds of the world’s oil
is in the Middle East; six of the thirteen largest US corporations are oil
companies that import from the Middle East; the US, with 5% of the world’s
population, uses 25% of the world’s oil.
‘Together with the “new”, status quo national energy policy
—which amounts to a declaration of war on the environment in the United States
— the US victory solidifies our commitment to a petroleum-based economy. Since
US oil resources are slim — despite Bush’s intention to drill on our coasts,
ANWAR, and native lands —this war implies that we are willing to “secure”
other sources of oil.
‘We must now look to the future in this country: we must challenge and
replace the George Bush energy policy, which has no future. What is required is
an energy policy that leads us beyond oil and beyond war...’
But
there was a more sinister if closely related reason for the war. In the final
GulfWatch, an emotional Yasser Arafat was reported as saying:
WAR
‘A STAIN ON THE WEST’ (GW4O)
The
Guardian Yasser Arafat talking to
Isabel Pisano Monday March 4, 1991
‘The Americans had taken a decision even before the Gulf crisis, and
that decision was to strike at Iraq ... The aim was not to save Kuwait, but to
destroy Iraq.
‘This will never be forgotten, either by Muslims or by the Third World
... Baghdad! We are talking about Baghdad! Do you understand? We are talking
about Iraq, about Messopotamia, about the great civilisations of the Assyrians,
the Sumerians, the Abbasids...’
Arafat
was in a position to know, as the following demonstrated:
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 39
THE
PLO AND THE SEARCH FOR PEACE (GW17)
The
Guardian Pierre Salinger ‘Faltering
Steps in the Sand’ 4 Feb
In a detailed article Pierre Salinger, one-time press secretary to
President J F Kennedy and now chief foreign correspondent for ABC News in
London, describes the relentless efforts of PLO Chairman Arafat to find a
peaceful solution to the conflict. Some of the details of the article underline
suspicions that a collision course with Iraq was what the West wanted from the
start (e.g. the participants at the Arab League Summit on 10 August were
presented on arrival in Cairo with a communique already written: Arafat, writes
Salinger, ‘immediately came to the conclusion that it was written in English
and translated into Arabic. Four other delegates to that conference who I have
talked to came to the same conclusion’).
It
speaks volumes that Saddam’s offer in the second week of February to withdraw
from Kuwait was regarded as a ‘nightmare’.
WHOSE
‘WORST NIGHTMARE’? (GW27)
igc:dwysham
mideast.media.1 16 7:33 am Feb 15, 1991
Listening to news reports of the Iraqi announcement about withdrawal
from Kuwait I was struck by how many reporters (USA) stated again and again that
this is ‘our worst nightmare.’ We ask for withdrawal from Kuwait, we get
some inkling of a promise of the same, and this is our worst nightmare? Bush
doesn’t have to say a word. Our press corps says everything for him.
A
major purpose of this war was to destroy the power in the region which above all
others presented a military threat to Israel. Having immensely benefited from
the West’s aid during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had grown too powerful for the
fragile security equilibrium of the Middle East after the ending of the Cold
War. He needed to be cut down to size. The little discussed consequence was
Israel’s elevation to military supremacy in the region.
CAN
BUSH SEIZE HIS OPPORTUNITIES? (GW4O)
Middle
East International Donald
Neff 8 March 1991
Though it has been little noted, the most dramatic strategic change
brought about by the war has been to elevate Israel into the undisputed
superpower of the Middle East. The war finally achieved Israel’s highest long
term military goal of removing Iraq as a potential foe. With Egypt sidelined by
its peace treaty with Israel, this leaves Syria as the only Arab state capable
of challenging Israel. But, without the aid of Iraq or Egypt, Syria is no
serious threat to Israel’s power…
Linkage
is clearly unavoidable.
40
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
THE
WAR’S MESSAGE NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED (GW4O)
Middle
East International Khalil
Barhoum 8 March 1991
Over the past four decades, the Arab Middle East has witnessed six major
destructive wars, including that to liberate Kuwait and excluding the
eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Like the previous five, this last war too has as
primary focus — the yet-unresolved tragedy of the Palestinians who have never
been repatriated or compensated since they were forced out of their homes by the
newly created state of Israel in 1948.
Yet unlike the previous five wars (in which the US confronted the forces
of Arab nationalism via a regional proxy, Israel) this time the US found itself
acting as a deus ex machina in a war
against a nation long perceived by the Israelis as the most credible Arab
challenge to their uncontested regional military dominance, especially its
not-so-secret nuclear potential. This sudden (US-Israel) role reversal was in
fact behind the early outcry by some of America’s conservatives that the only
beneficiaries from a war with Iraq were Israel’s ministry of defence and its
ardent supporters in the US.
Moving
from the regional to a global perspective, there was obvious military-industrial
convenience in finding a new enemy in the Muslim world so soon after the ending
of the cold war. What better way to nip talk of a ‘peace dividend’ in the
bud?
TOMAHAWK
MISSILES (GW24)
igc:greenbase
mideast.gulf.306 7:35 pm Feb 6, 1991
Greenpeace USA
Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCM) have been used in combat
for the first time in the war against Iraq. Over 290 conventional missiles have
been fired so far (Feb 6) in the war, or almost half of the total number of
missiles present in US naval forces in the region. It would cost at least $560
million to replace the missiles at 1992 prices.
There are a number of political and budgetary implications of the use of
Tomahawk missiles in the War against Iraq:
— The submarine community in the Navy had begun to argue before the
war that its expensive nuclear-powered attack submarines were more than Cold War
weapons, and could play important roles in Third World conflicts. On 26 January,
the Pentagon confirmed that Tomahawks had been fired by attack submarines
operating in the region. Since at the outset of the war, some 550
conventional Tomahawks were on surface ships, not necessarily requiring
submarine launches, the use and announcement of Tomahawk launches by
submarines was seemingly made with the intent of scoring big in next year’s
budget rather than in having a significant effect on the tide of events in
Iraq…
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 41
What
these analyses indicate — whether they refer specifically to oil, the need to
destroy Iraq, the US as deus ex machina for
Israel, Cold War surrogacy or the combination of all four — the central issue
at stake is US hegemony over the world and the imposition of the monoculture of
the West, control by Western (‘Christian’) secularism over a destabilized
Muslim Arabism.
Two
commentators, who would certainly have featured in GulfWatch if their work been
uploaded on the e-mail in time or had Gulf Watch still been in business when
they wrote, were first, William Pfaff (writing in the New Yorker, January 28, 1991):
‘What has happened in Iraq, and happened before that in Iran, and the
terrible traumas that have been produced by the struggle between the
Palestinians and the Israelis all arise from the provisional defeat of a people
and a religion by a rival, yet related, civilization. That is what the crisis in
the Middle East is fundamentally about. The grievances (and grief) of modern
Islam, its paranoia and defiance come from that. It follows that the present
conflict cannot settle anything worth settling, except who controls certain oil
sources and who rules a given country. These may be matters that require
settling, but they should be understood as the relatively small matters they
are, and such settlements as they produce should be understood as assuredly
insecure ones, productive of further chains of consequence which are very likely
to leave all those involved worse off than they are now.’
Secondly,
Louise Cainkar, head of the Palestine Human Rights Information Centre (writing
in the Chicago Reader, May 1991):
‘...before, during, and after the war we learned nothing (about the
Arab world). No part of the mainstream media even attempted an honest
educational lesson about Arab society or the history of the modern Middle East.
Anti-Arab racism in American society and other factors has assured us of a void
in this area. It became easy for the US media to limit our information to the
intricacies of high-tech weapons and the actions of Saddam Hussein.
‘I marvelled at how Kuwaitis were invited to testify before Congress
on human-rights violations perpetrated by the Iraqis in Kuwait after three
months of occupation, when to this day neither Palestinians nor human rights
observers who focus on Palestinians nor anyone of Arab descent has been allowed
to testify about Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights during 24 years
of occupation.
‘Perhaps these voids made it easier to get the American people to
support the war venture. But during my post-war visit to the Middle East, I
understood the main reason why we never learned about the peoples and history of
the region: this war was never fought for people for whom culture and history
are integral pieces. This war was
42
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
fought
for multinational corporations, oil companies, military and construction
contractors…
‘The scene in the Middle East is very, very pessimistic, Iraqis,
Jordanians, Palestinians — what’s going to happen to them? Economically,
Jordan is on the skids. They’re being punished for having been neutral in the
war. They’ve been isolated. Malnutrition and the poverty rate are rising
there. On top of that you have up to 200,000 new refugees from Kuwait who are
Jordanian citizens with no jobs — and they were not allowed to take their
money out of Kuwait. I don’t know how they can absorb all these new refugees,
most of whom are Palestinians. It’s a time bomb.
‘Personally, I think that the Palestinians should have the right to
return to Palestine. But obviously the United States government has no interest
in settling problems between the Palestinians and Israelis. If it did, it could
use the UN as it did in the Gulf war. All the resolutions are there. All the
solutions are there. But they’ve chosen not to employ them. They say they
don’t want to push Israel.
‘I think that the most recent talks are really about establishing ties
between the Gulf states and Israel, opening up the Gulf to Israeli investment
and technology. And the few Gulf people that I met can’t wait for Israel to
come there.
‘So the vision you get is Israel on one side, the Gulf states on the
other, and all these people in between — Jordanians, Palestinians, Iraqis, and
probably Syrians and Egyptians in the future — being squeezed and pushed
around. Whether they live, die, or eat will be controlled by the US government
through Israel and the Gulf-state surrogates. That’s what’s happening right
now. This is the New ‘World Order.’
In the light of these analyses, Douglas Hurd’s words with which this
chapter began are just part of ‘the day’s loud lying’. The final GulfWatch
ended with a poem:
BEYOND
THE HEADLINES Patrick Kavanagh, Dublin 1943 (GW4O)
Then
I saw the wild geese flying
In
fair formation to their bases in Inchicore
And
I knew that these wings would outwear the wings of war
And
a man’s simple thoughts outlive the day’s loud lying.
Don’t
fear, don’t fear, I said to my soul.
The
Bedlam of Time is an empty bucket rattled,
‘Tis
you who will say in the end who best battles.
Only
they who fly home to God have flown at all.
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 43
At
a SCAWD conference in Dunblane in June 1990, ‘At the Crossroads between
Curse and Benediction: Searching for A Just Peace in Israel/Palestine’,
Ghassan Rubeiz, Middle East Secretary of the World Council of Churches, warned
of the imminent danger of another war in the Middle East. ‘There has been a
war between Israel and the Arabs every decade since 1948,’ he said, ‘And
there will continue to be wars until there is peace with justice between the
Israelis and the Palestinians.’
Any serious analysis of the history of the Middle East region cannot
avoid linking Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait with Israel’s occupation of
neighbouring territory — Palestine (the Occupied Territories and East
Jerusalem), the Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon — not to mention other
occupations in the region. To say this is not to credit Saddam Hussein’s quite
unprincipled exploitation of the linkage argument. But it was precisely because
the United Nations was being used to such an extent as justification for the
war, while the UN Security Council’s Resolutions concerning Israel’s
occupation of Palestine had been so completely ignored for almost half a
century, that the linkage argument was so embarassing to the coalition partners.
Bush, Baker, Hurd and the rest performed quite a turn in the pretended
separation of the issues. The media played ball. And the Palestinians have once
again had to pay the price.
In his article in the Scotsman on
10th January 1991, the Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd assured his readership that
‘The Arab/Israel problem is unfinished business to which we must return once
this Gulf crisis is resolved, once Iraq is out of Kuwait.’ We have now
returned to it and, since neither Hurd nor James Baker seem anxious to put
Israel out (not a hint of sanctions), it is likely to remain ‘unfinished
business’ for the foreseeable future.
It is not the first time the United States has blatently manipulated the
United Nations on Israel/Palestine. It had happened on 29th November 1947: the
partition of Palestine, though then it was the General Assembly. Then, the US
also got its.way and assured victory for its protegees through a mixture of
threat, promise and corruption. History repeats itself.
GulfWatch kept a close watching brief on the Palestinian situation and
the response to the war by Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation
Organisation.
THE
PLO AND THE SEARCH FOR PEACE (GW17) GulfWatch 5
Feb
‘The PLO has shot itself in the foot,’ was how a senior Foreign
Office official described the PLO response in early August last year
44
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
to
the invasion of Kuwait. As the progress of the war strengthens the US-Israeli
alliance, and media coverage of Scud attacks on Israel make international
sympathy for Israel soar, let us recall the stated position of the PLO.
Palestinians must not once again become the casualty of world affairs, nor the
post-war international community allow itself to be held hostage to Israel.
The official PLO position has been from the beginning to uphold ‘the
principle of the withdrawal of the Iraqi forces from Kuwait.’ (‘The PLO’s
Position on the Gulf Crisis’ by Nabil Shaath, Chairman of the Political
Committee of the Palestine National Council, Geneva, 31 August 1990)…
It cannot be denied however that ordinary Palestinians in Jordan and
Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) strongly supported Saddam Hussein. Given the
history of their undeserved suffering at the hands of the Israelis, and the
decades of abandonment by the West, their position was easily understandable on
the principle of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. It was nevertheless much
to be regretted that the Israeli propaganda machine and the Western media could
so ruthlessly exploit it. The painstaking struggle for international sympathy
— represented by three years of Intifada,
with nearly a thousand deaths and tens of thousands of injuries and
imprisonments — had been annulled almost over night. (That the 8th October
massacre in Jerusalem should turn the tables of public opinion was a short-lived
hope.) Long will the Palestinian stance on the Gulf crisis be used as
justification for continued refusal to resolve the Israel/Palestine question. It
is a handy excuse for a political agenda that never really existed — except in
UN Security Council Resolutions.
GulfWatch was late to get detailed news about the Israeli curfew in the
Occupied Territories. It had already been in effect for a week before this
report appeared:
PALESTINIAN
POPULATION UNDER CURFEW (GW1O)
Co-ordinating
Committee of International NGOs (Jerusalem) Fax 25 January 1991
The curfew imposed on the Palestinian population in the occupied
territories by the Israeli authorities has become a serious obstacle that
endangers the life and livelihood of over 1.7 million Palestinians. All
Palestinians in the occupied territories have been under a strict 24-hour curfew
since January 17. Palestinians found outside their homes face severe penalties,
including the possibility of arrest and excessive fines. The entire occupied
territories, excluding parts of East Jerusalem, are designated closed military
zones.
Three critical problems are related to the extended curfew:
inaccessability to medical facilities, damage to the Palestinian economy,
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 45
and
the escalation of human rights violations.
It is unreasonable to argue any longer, as the Israeli authorities do,
that public order must be maintained in the occupied territories by prolonging
the curfew. This curfew has been imposed on a defenseless civilian population
who are not at war and who are not provided with any means of protection against
war.
Though it got some coverage, news about the curfew and the ongoing
atrocities in occupied Palestine never became a main story in the British media,
as did human rights abuse in Kuwait. Even responsible newspapers like the Guardian
denied it headline coverage. The principal source of news on this matter
was Fax from NGOs in Jerusalem, or simply by letter — with the inevitable
delay:
INSANE
WAR WITH INCALCULABLE EVIL CONSEQUENCES (GW21)
Rev
Colin Morton (St. Andrew’s, Jerusalem) Letter to Rev Robin Ross, 22 Jan
‘The important thing is the (occupied) territories information
—there is no news of this in the Israeli media that I can see or hear; and the
danger is that none gets to the world outside. The chief concern at this time is
the continued total curfew for West Bank and Gaza…
‘The special effects are on agriculture — there are no feeding
stuffs for animals as they are not being supplied from Israel proper which is
the one source. Crops and vegetables cannot be sprayed, harvested or marketed.
Some farmers broke the curfew in Jericho and Tulkam areas; they were each fined
2000 Shekels ((£500) and their produce was spoiled. Medical — ordinary curfew
passes are not being honoured, so medical people cannot get to clinics etc ...
It is absolutely inhuman to treat a population of one-and-three-quarter million
this way, and I do hope that strong international pressure can be brought to
bear.
‘There is also the question of any sort of equal protection from
hostile attack. No sirens are sounded in the territories; a few, very few
gas-masks are being distributed, but none for children under 15 (half the
population). Prisoners are not being protected, although international law
demands their protection should come before others. Some prison camps are in
tents and some in military zones. Any argument that Palestinians sympathise with
Saddam Hussein is the equivalent of putting POWs near possible targets in
Iraq.’
Colin calls for ‘prayers for peace and an end to this insane war with
its incalculable evil consequences.’
The State of Israel may be seen as the result of a colonial enterprise.
As the Jewish scholar and professor at the Sorbonne, Maxime Rodinson, put it 25
years ago, the tragedy of the state of Israelis that
46
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
it
was planned and prepared for in a Europe which thought in colonial terms, but
came into being in a world that had rejected colonialism. The Palestinian Arab
people have paid the price of this disjunction. The Intifada
was a sign that the price had become unbearable. Yet even in spite of that
nothing has changed, as the curfew reports indicated. As the Gulf war was
raging, the UN Human Rights Commission met in Geneva:
UNRESOLVED
HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUES CAUSE WAR – UN (GW12)
12:33
pm Jan 29, 1991 by unic in peg:unic.news Central News
The (UN) Under-Secretary-General for Human Rights, Jan Martenson, said
in a opening statement this morning at the forty-seventh session of the
Commission on Human Rights that the effective defence of human rights was an
essential element to the preservation of peace ... The conflicts in the world
today reinforced the understanding that violations of human rights provided
fertile soil for the seeds of war.
A subsequent entry about the same UN Human Rights Commission reported
Amnesty International accusations of ‘serious and widespread human rights
violations in the Israeli-occupied territories.’ (GW25) The Israeli peace
movement was also active, though absent from even mainline media reports.
PROMINENT
ISRAELIS CALL FOR AN END TO THE GULF WAR (GW23)
igc:mappehman
mideast.action.459 6.30 pm Feb 11 (AICIPP Press Release 6 Feb)
At a press conference held today in Jerusalem, a petition calling for an
immediate cease-fire and a negotiated end to the Gulf War was presented, signed
by 126 Israeli peace activists and public figures. Prof. Yeshayahu Leibovitz
maintained that Israel was drawn into this war in the Gulf because of its
government’s unwillingness to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, and
that ‘continued occupation and oppression of the Palestinians must eventually
lead to a full-fledged fascist regime inside Israel and to the unification of
the entire Arab world in a war against Israel.’
Dr. Avishai Ehrlich criticized the chemical business of German firms
with Saddam Hussein. But, according to Ehrlich, as long as Israel itself is
selling weapons to dictatorial regimes all over the world, the Israeli
government’s complaints about the Germans sound somewhat hypocritical.
The Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel were a propaganda windfall, which was
manipulated ruthlessly throughout the world. The Israelis
ALASTAIR
HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 47
had
difficulty suppressing their glee at Saddam’s strategic stupidity.
NEW
APPEAL FROM JERUSALEM (GW28)
peacemedia
mideast.levant.123 6:30 pm Feb 16, 1991
The
great wave of sympathy for the Israeli victims of Iraqi attacks continue. Beside
the lift of sanctions by the European community, money is pouring in from Europe
and the United States. Israelis negotiating $3.5
billion from the U.S. and elsewhere, not only to repair the material damage
to settle the new Soviet immigrants, but to strengthen its military defense. The
Palestinians have lost millions of dollars since the beginning of the curfew and
are losing every day tens of thousands of dollars. Who is thinking of raising
money to help them and forcing Israel to allow financial support to reach the
Occupied Territories? (Nafez Assaily, Palestinian Center for the Study of
Nonviolence, Jerusalem, and Yvette Naal, Beit Noah, Jerusalem.)
Prime
Minister Yitzak Shamir was reassured in his intransigence.
DIPLOMATIC
CHANGES (GW22)
web:greenbase
mideast.gulf.314 10:20 pm Feb 7, 1991 Greenpeace USA
Israeli
PM Shamir is positioning Israel to counter international expectations of a
settlement of the Palestinian question after the war. On Monday, Shamir told the
Knesset he outright rejected an international conference involving the
Palestinian question.
The
whole complex situation was reflected here at home in this astonishing
correspondence with the Israeli Ambassador in London. The rude self-confidence
of the Israeli reply is remarkable and unusual for diplomatic circles.
CORRESPONDENCE
(GW28)
To:
Israeli Ambassador, 2 Palace Green, London W8 4QB. 7th
February 1991
Dear
Sir, I am deeply concerned about the situation of Palestinian people in the
Occupied Territories.
My
information is that they have been under strict twenty-four hour curfew since
the Gulf war began. The Palestinian economy is suffering exceedingly. The
medical health conditions of the people is desperate. The human rights abuse —
and flouting of the Geneva Conventions regarding treatment of occupied
territories — is extreme.
I
wish to express my horror at what your Government is doing. It is reminiscent of
when the Jews suffered under Hitler.
Yours
sincerely, Alastair Hulbert, Secretary/SCAWD. cc Alistair Darling MP
48
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
Reply from the Embassy of Israel, 2 Palace Green, London. 14th February
1991
Dear Mr Hulbert, I am referring to your letter of 7th February.
Is it not a little strange that even at this critical time, when Israeli
civilian population is attacked indiscriminately by a blood-thirsty brutal
dictator, all you have for us is another condemnation?
Does it not occur to you that measures that Israel has taken in time of
war have in fact prevented violent clashes with hostile population that would
have resulted in casualties and bloodshed?
Or is it that you actually sympathize with the tyrant of Baghdad, who is
already responsible for millions of casualties in death and injury and for mass
destruction and human suffering in futile and criminal wars that he initiated
against Iraq’s neighbouring countries and against his own poor Kurdish
population?
Maybe you suggest that Israel should ignore that threat from Baghdad,
applauded by the PLO, to engulf Israel in flames and the promise ‘to liberate
Palestine from the river to the sea’?
All I can say is that I regard your letter, and especially its last
sentence, with nothing but contempt.
Sincerely, Emanuel Gluska, Counsellor.
The rhetoric of Mr Gluska’s letter, in particular his final sentence,
struck one of our GreenNet correspondents in the USA so forcefully that he took
it up with the Israeli Ambassador to the UN! But the matter is in fact quite
comprehensible. In my letter I had committed the unpardonable. I had suggested a
comparison of Israel’s present action with the incomparable — the
‘unique’ event of the holocaust. For Zionists that is taboo; it touches the
nerve system of their whole enterprise. Hence the ‘contempt’.
The correspondence served to underline, if somewhat polemically, the
imponderable sorrow of this Land which is called ‘Holy’: the myth of Cain
who slew his brother Abel, the sins of the fathers visited upon the children,
‘the old, old question,’ as the turn-of-the-century Hebrew poet Chaim
Nachman Bialik put it, ‘The one that never yet has reached to heaven, /And
never will: Why? Why?’ A later Gulfwatch carried an appendix which
reflected on the terrible message for Israel and Jewry of Bialik’s poem ‘In
the City of Slaughter’, written after the Kishinev pogrom of Easter 1903 in
Bielorussia.
BIALIK
& SHAMIR (GW38 Appendix)
Gulf
Watch
Biahik speaks of a God humiliated by his chosen people, who longs for
their curses instead of their prayers. His prophesy of a lasting change in the
Jewish people is dreadful. It is here quoted at
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 49
length
in a translation by Helena Frank. The poet is speaking to the companion who
accompanies him throughout the city of slaughter.
‘And
hear, thou son of man!
When
next the reader cries upon the platform,
“Arise,
0 God, avenge the slaughtered victims,
Avenge
thy holy ones, the pious greybeards,
The
suckling children, God, the little children!”
And
all the people cry with him together,
And
when, like thee, the very pillars tremble,
I
will be cruel to thee, very cruel
For
thou shalt have no single tear to shed;
And
should a cry arise in thee, I’ll choke it,
And
between thy teeth, if need be, I will choke it.
I
will not have thee mourn as do the others.
The
tear unshed, that bury in thyself,
Deep
down within thy heart, and build a tower
Of
gall and hatred round it; let it lie
A
serpent in a nest (and men shall suck
And
pass its venom on),
With
thirst and hunger still unsatisfied.
And
when the day of retribution comes,
Then
break the wall and let the serpent out,
And
like a poisoned arrow shoot it forth
With
hunger raging and with thirsty fang,
And
pierce thy race, thine own race, through the heart!’
The Jewish experience of the pogrom reached a point of no return in 1903
in terms of the psychological trauma that resulted and that is expressed by
Bialik. Elsewhere, in an earlier, more compassionate poem, he speaks of sitting ‘at
the crossroads of curse and benediction,’ though eventually choosing the
curse. Here he can offer only a form of nihilism — corporate, not
individualistic, racial.
Looking at the complex character of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
through the lens of Bialik’s ‘In the City of Slaughter’, bearing in mind
that as a child Shamir endured the desolation and humiliation of the holocaust,
there is little room for optimism as regards his willingness to cooperate
internationally or come to terms with the Palestinians. He and his government
would seem to have built ‘a tower/Of gall and hatred round’ their own
experience of desolation, and it represents a trauma from which they and their
people will not lightly recover. Indeed Bialik in the poem counsels madness for
his ‘son of man’
Like Shamir — who, having suffered the unthinkable and lost all his
5O
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
family
in Auschwitz, now treats others exactly as he was treated —‘Israel’ seems
to have abandoned its calling and lost its soul.
It is a nerve-racking enterprise to go public on this issue, especially
in church circles. We could attempt it only because of the witness at the SCAWD
conference last summer of a great American Jew: the outstandingly courageous
theologian, Marc Ellis. His brave call for a Jewish liberation theology that
recognises contemporary Jewish experience to be no longer experience of weakness
and suffering (the holocaust of an earlier time), but rather of power and
domination (the US-backed State of Israel): and his consequent challenge to
Israel and Jewry to embrace the Palestinians, as an act that would liberate both
parties; this gives the lie to men
like Counsellor Emanuel Gluska, and closer to home to the Church of Scotland
clique who would defend a Zionist reading of ‘the Law and the Prophets’,
come hail or high water.
Meanwhile:
ISRAEL
QUIETLY DESTROYS HOMES, SEIZES LAND (GW38) Intifada
(Tunis) Vol.111, No. 9 28 February 1991
Israeli troops last week demolished or sealed the homes of ten
Palestinian families, uprooted hundreds of olive and citrus trees belonging to
Palestinian farmers and confiscated several acres of Palestinian land. The
continuing destruction and seizure of Palestinian property came as Israeli
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir reaffirmed his government’s intention to keep
the occupied Palestinian territories in defiance of Security Council
resolutions.
Shamir made the announcement in a BBC interview on February 18. Two days
later, the U.S. administration announced that it approved $400 million’s worth
of loan guarantees for Israel, to help it house the hundreds of thousands of
Soviet Jews flowing into the country — many of whom are being sent to illegal
settlements in Jerusalem and other parts of the Occupied Territories ... The
approval of the loan guarantee also follows Shamir’s appointment of Rehavam
Zeevi as a Cabinet minister. Zeevi, of the Moledet Party, openly advocates the
expulsion of the Palestinian people from the Occupied Territories to Jordan.
In the Jerusalem district, a group of armed Jewish settlers guarded by
Israeli troops raided the groves of the village of Bait Sounk last week and
uprooted 600 trees, including 200 ancient olive trees ... In the Nablus
district, the mayor of the village of Kasra has been notified that 250 acres of
the village’s land were marked for confiscation. The notification, dated
January 12, 1991, states that the village has the right to challenge the
confiscation order within a period ending December 15, 1990— a month before
the order was served. The stolen acres are to be given to an illegal Jewish
settlement near Kasra.
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 51
The
Role of the Peace Movement
In
the 1980s in Britain justice, peace and ecology still tended to be seen as
separate issues. But as the decade wore on awareness grew in the more radical
organisations that these are inter-related themes, breaking common ground
between groupings which had previously taken a more sectoral view of their
remit. When referring to the peace movement here, we shall generally mean the
broad coalition of pacifist, environmental, church, human rights, development
and labour groupings which often found themselves sharing a common platform in
peace work. We do not include political groupings which viewed opposition to the
Gulf War as a means rather than an end.
For some, the issues posed by war were new: others had long seen war as
the bottom line contingency by which our consumption-oriented, wealth-importing
society is underwritten. While many individuals were devastated that a war like
this could actually come about, the positive side was the extent to which PEACE
emerged as a broad issue, which, like a natual ecology, could no longer be seen
separately from its many constituent parts. To be for peace in the deep sense
also means being at least open to human rights, feminism, spiritual expression,
political reform, ecology, etc. And to be for any of these calls for peace work
within ourselves as well as outwardly in our societies. This represented a
starting point far better developed than in any previous war.
As the weal of war raised its awful presence, news came in to us from
across the world of demonstrations opposing war. 100 people held a silent vigil
on Shetland. Roads in New York city and the Golden Bridge in San Francisco were
blocked. Students in all but one German university were on strike, their slogan
being, ‘It’s war time: boycott your usual routine.’ (GW7) 75%
of Spanish schoolchildren and teachers skipped classes as PM Gonzalez called
for parliamentary support for the coalition. As limitation of the war and
minimisation of casualties became the peace movement’s main objective, links
were drawn between war and our lifestyle. The peace movement successfully
communicated the point that this war was not about defending democracy in
Kuwait, but about oil, and in various parts of the world groups pledged to lobby
for future energy conservation strategies and review their use of private cars.
A cadre of Vietnam veterans played invaluable roles in teaching from past
experience.
GREENPEACE/USA
GULF REPORT (GW1O)
web:greenbase
mideast.gulf 8:25 pm Jan 25,
1991 Excerpts
The image of Vietnam anti-war protests — tie dye, long hair, antigovernment
youth overtaking buildings and streets — has hung over the heads of those
protesting the war against Iraq since demonstrations began. Yet today’s
protestors are different.
52 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
The first important demonstration against the Vietnam War, according to The
Power of the People (1977) took place in New York on December 19, 1964. It
was attended by 1,500 people. The first demonstrations against the War against
Iraq took place before the war began. The protests against this war have been
diverse and international in a way that the Vietnam protests never were. The
picture emerging is that of young and old, parents and children, peaceniks and
veterans, conservatives and liberals, and particularly family members of service
men and women, expressing their opposition to this war.
In the first week of protest, over 250,000 people came out against the
war in the United States, another 2.5
million overseas in 38 countries. After several years of building anti-war
sentiment, on November 15, 1969, more than half a million people came to
Washington for the biggest anti-war demonstration in U.S. history. Yet two days
after the outbreak of war against Iraq, San Francisco police arrested nearly
1,000 people protesting the war — more than were arrested on any single day
during the Vietnam protests.
Our greatest regret was not having space at the right time to use the
following piece. Input to the mideast.gulf conference by Vietnam veteran
igc:hmuskat on January 17th, it comprises the text of an anonymous leaflet
distributed on the streets of San Francisco at 16th January demonstrations.
WAR IN IRAQ: OUR CHANCE TO
DIE FOR OIL
WE CAN AND MUST RULE THE
WORLD
All hail our glorious leader, George Bush! Winner of the Cold War, King
of the Cocoa fields; multi-national, multi-faced, multi-macho!
It’s time to get behind President Liver Lips and support his quest for
world domination. Although some might perceive it as collective madness among
our ruling class, the war in Iraq is necessary for survival. In an economy with
nowhere to go but down, and like the empires of old (Roman, Turk, British, Nazi,
what-have-you) we must conquer or die! In a system that clearcuts people with
the same relentless market savvy that it does forests, a new crop is needed
right now for the security and continued growth of the Military Industrial
Complex. Let’s tap the vein to come to their aid. Now’s your chance to gird
your loins, and step up to the front lines to do battle for Bush-And-Big-Oil’s
wildest dreams of grandeur yet.
IT’S TRIAGE TIME IN PARADISE
Look at it this way: if the U.S. doesn’t take over the world now, mass
peace and freedom might breakout from Boston to Beruit. Your equity will
plummet, your stocks will deflate, your power will
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 53
diminish.
What? You have no equity, stocks or power.? Then you get the window seat as a
galley slave on our ship of fools. While Arabs may die for Allah, you’ll be
dying for the Dollah! Our battlecry will be the ‘Three Ons’: Exxon, Chevron
and Hard-on.
Our mystic marketplace, which can make five billion dollars disappear in
a days trading, will have no trouble sacrificing your future, should you choose
not to offer it freely. (Much like the pusillanimous congressional approval for
the war.)
Ask the boys who brought you Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Granada, Panama,
Nicaragua and El Salvador, among others. They’ll tell you that now is the time
to try out those cool-as-shit weapons we invented.
MASS INSANITY? WHO CARES?
You may think that it’s totally ridiculous for any American to die to
keep the price of oil high. But you’re wrong. If Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil were on
the market right now, the price of oil, already suffering from a tremendous
glut, could hit a low of $10 per barrel. Saddam Hussein, the mad fool, himself
suggested lowering the price of oil. Think of how Chevron, who just announced a
billion-dollar increase in revenues for the 4th quarter, would feel if they were
forced to supply gas at the pumps at a price of 60 cents a gallon? Surely we
can’t let this happen. Is giving up your kid, husband, or whatever too great a
price to pay? (As far as you kids go, the importance of your lives pales in
comparison to that of the GNP.)
If you’re still squeamish, realize that what now appears as insanity
will soon be perfectly normal in a world driven mad by depression and greed.
You’ve aped the mores of the Rich and Famous, now die for them! THE
GREAT SATAN WANTS YOU.
The
night war started President Bush went back to the White House ‘at peace with
himself’ having prayed with Dr Billy Graham, his spiritual adviser. But such
succour was a far cry from the predominant voice of the churches and spiritual
groups of various faiths. Often seen as representing the voice of conscience in
national psychologies, churches must henceforth be seen by western nation states
as a threat to any future war plans. The Episcopal Church in Japan condemned
financial backing for the war. Moslems and radical Jews made common cause with
Christians, stating that this was neither jihad nor crusade, but just plain
wrong. And the Pope prayed, ‘Hear the single-hearted cry of your children,
the anguished plea of all humanity: no more war, an adventure without return, no
more war, a spiral of death and violence; no war in the Persian Gulf, a threat
against all your creatures in heaven, on the earth and in the sea.’ (GW17
Appendix)
Peace News reported that the limited anti-war response in the
54
EDINBURGH REVIEW /87’
Netherlands
was probably due to church leaders there being not convinced that the war was
unjust (GW21). But the pro-war efforts of a number of English clergy
notwithstanding, many churches largely abandoned attempting to resurrect just
war theory. Some magnificent anti-war statements emerged.
WORLD
COUNCIL OF CHURCHES, CANBERRA, STATEMENT (GW3O)
GulfWatch
Fax WCC/EPS 1235 GMT, 20 Feb 1991
‘By a substantial majority, the Seventh Assembly of the WCC called (20
Feb) for an immediate ceasefire in the Gulf war, to be followed by the
immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
The assembly called for church actions consistent with “the biblical vision of
peace with justice for all”. It called on the UN “to reassert your role as
peacemaker, peacekeeper, conciliator and negotiator”. It called for “the
initiation of a Conference on Peace, Security and Cooperation in the Middle
East with the equal participation of all interested states and peoples”.
Finally, it expressed refusal “to be separated from brothers and sisters of
other faiths as a result of this war, and to reject especially any effort to
divide Christians, Muslims and Jews”.’
SCOTTISH
CHURCH LEADERS AND OTHERS SPEAK (GW7) Gulf Watch
‘The obscenity of this war, quite apart from brutalities which are
endemic in any war, can also be seen in the vast sums of money poured into
preparing for, and sustaining the war effort.’ (Thomas Winning, RC Archbishop
of Glasgow)
‘In speaking against war, I am in the company not only of my fellow
Bishops in Scotland but also of our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II. Perhaps we
should remind ourselves of his words used at Coventry on his visit to Britain
eight years ago: “Today, the scale and horror of modern warfare — whether
nuclear or not — makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling
differences between nations. War should belong to the tragic past, to history;
it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.” (Keith Patrick
O’Brien, RC Archbishop of Edinburgh)
‘Let us look around for allies in our own society. It was so very
heartening to find the overwhelming support among every part of the community
when we spoke out for peace on 3 January. Those networks need to be
strengthened.’ (Michael Hare Duke, Scot. Episc. Bishop of St. Andrews)
‘We appeal to all the parties concerned to end armed hostilities and
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 55
to
begin the process of dialogue and negotiation.’ (Quaker Peace & Service,
London)
‘My feelings are summed up in the words of our great Scottish
Socialist anthem:
“Nae
mair will our bonny callants march to war when our braggarts crousely craw”.
While
the statesmen are sending others to their deaths, in most of the countries
concerned the wives and mothers do not even have a vote.’ (Maria Fyfe, MP)
BISHOP
JOSEPH DEVINE (GW24 Appendix)
Catholic
Bishop of Motherwell, Rutherglen Peace Rally 9 Feb (Summary)
‘Some, perhaps many, who have watched this rally for peace today will
be unsympathetic, seeing in it an act of disloyalty to our forces in the Middle
East. They would be wrong. It is in the name of those forces, and in the name of
humanity, that we come together today. The military do not make war. It is the
politicians and dictators who make war for others to fight.
‘Saddam’s aggression cannot go unpunished. But the issue lies in the
means used to deal with that aggression. I have heard many claim that the war is
a just war because our cause is just. But it takes more than a just cause to
justify war. Saddam’s intransigence was balanced by our readiness to abandon
sanctions. They were taking too long to work, conveniently, as it turned out,
just at the point when our forces were in a maximum state of readiness. I am
even willing to cede the point that negotiations were fruitless. But more than
the breakdown of these is needed to justify war. There are two further
conditions needed to justify a war. Once they were able to be validated. Now it
is difficult, even impossible, in the context of modern warfare. The first is
the awesomeness of the firepower, even “conventional” firepower, available
to the West. It seems equivalent to the power of tactical or theatre nuclear
weapons. Such firepower, the kind of firepower which dismembers a country,
taking it back for a generation in terms of development and progress, cannot
be justified.
‘That is not the only reason which outlaws the validity of this war.
For a war to be just it must be based on the certainty or the high probability
that the outcome will be better than the situation preceeding the outbreak of
hostilities. I can find little evidence to support that conclusion. There is
every likelihood that we will have a whirlwind for years to come in reprisals
and ongoing hostilities from peoples outraged by our humiliation of Iraq. I do
not find encouragement in looking to a more permanent solution of a lasting
peace based on a sense of justice, the justice primarily appealing to the
nations in the
56 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
Middle
East from the present hostilities. That is why they must stop and stop now.’
As an indignant report of military chaplains to the General Assembly of
the Church of Scotland was to show in May 1991, such condemnation had a
demoralising effect on allied forces unused to questioning of their role as
instruments of foreign policy. While such a direct effect was not intended, the
indirect message to politicians regarding future wars is clear. Moral unease was
shared by families waiting at home, one officer’s wife telling me that in the
Falkiands War they all felt their husbands were upholding human values, but this
was not so clear where a dictatorship’s oil was being fought for.
MILITARY
FAMILIES SUPPORT NETWORK (GW5) igc:peacenet
mideast.forum 5:24 pm Jan 18, 1991
A network of families of American military personnel in the Gulf,
‘patriotic citizens ... who support our troops and love our country’ has
been established nationwide. They support President Bush’s appeal to the UN
but oppose the American military offensive. ‘We want any peacekeeping force in
the Persian Gulf to be truly multinational and purely defensive. We want it to
be under UN control. We want to see diplomacy used to resolve this crisis.’
The political effect of questioning the war became manifest in the
stushie which blew up over the war thanksgiving service for Great Britain held
in Glasgow Cathedral, 5th May. The service ended up as what Scotland
on Sunday described as ‘far from a triumphalist occasion as some critics
had warned ... with Falklands-style rejoicing at a great victory. Instead, the
whole tone was sombre and restrained, characterised by the Archbishop of
York’s sermon questioning why the innocent always seemed to suffer more than
the guilty ... (and referring to the war as the) ... whole wretched business’.
So, had the critics of the service got it wrong? No — rather they had
swung the proceedings. Attended also by Prime Minister John Major, Mrs Thatcher,
members of parliament, gold-braided military, and gold-chained wives
accompanying ranks of the men in grey suits, the service had been sufficiently
modified from its original intent to enable radical church leaders to lay down
initial plans for an alternative service. Both the Moderator of the Church of
Scotland and the RC Archbishop of Glasgow made changes to the prayers they had
been asked to read better to stress the need for repentance and the healing of
all nations involved.
Writing in the Guardian the
day before the service, Falklands War veteran and military author, Hugh
McManners, in an article entitled ‘Onward to church, Christian soldiers’,
criticised the questioning sown by the peace movement. He said it was unfair
that troops
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 57
‘should
return to endure moral censure from the anti-war lobby. To the troops, debates
at home on the morality of the war seem very disloyal — a betrayal of the
sacrifices they are preparing to make.’ Significantly, he went on to admit
that, ‘The anti-war lobby was able to affect fundamentally the way the Gulf
war was fought. Allied military commanders were put under tremendous pressure
not to use nuclear or chemical weapons regardless of what the Iraqis might do,
not to enter (“invade”) Iraq, and to keep the Allied body count to a
minimum.’ McManners concluded, ‘The Church of England should at least be
able to close ranks in support of the troops during future wars.’
Future wars! Without even qualification of the word, ‘any’! Little
wonder ordinary people felt despair at the build-up to war to such an extent
that some were moved in a symbolic action bodily to place themselves between
opposing armies. To the west of the Euphrates/ Tigris valley some 100 women and
men had gathered to form an International Peace Camp in Iraq, about 15 miles
closer to the Saudi border than the Iraqi army. GulfWatch carried several
reports about them. After a frustrating period of inaction, the protesters found
a role accompanying relief convoys which had previously suffered allied air
attack.
GULF
PEACE TEAM’S ‘CORRIDOR OF PEACE’ TO~Q (GW27) igc:mideastdesk
mideast.gulf.346 3:01 pm Feb 15, 1991
Saturday 16 February the Gulf Peace Team will escort a convoy of
emergency medical supplies from Amman to Baghdad, intended for the civilian
victims of war in Iraq and Kuwait. The convoy is being organized in cooperation
with the Jordanian Red Crescent. Recent bombings of civilian targets along the
Baghdad-Amman road have made this route perilous for civilians fleeing the
conflict.
The Gulf Peace Team intends to create a ‘Corridor of Peace’ by
accompanying civilian convoys. They plan to return to Amman on Monday February
18 where the 16 nation Peace Team is continuing its work having been evacuated
from their border encampment on January 27.
… Pat Arrowsmith regards the camp as a precedent-setting action:
the
most international non-violent team ever assembled for a peace camp right at the
border in a situation of overt warfare.
Meanwhile the Stairheid Dynamite Ceilidh Band played for Scottish Friends of Palestine to raise relief funds in Glasgow; Indonesian students were beaten up by police for demonstrating outside British, American and Japanese embassies; Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua launched a non-aligned peace campaign; the Prime Minister of Pakistan did likewise as anti-war demonstrations threatened instabil-
58 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
ity
in many Moslem countries; Moslem theologians said that jihad (holy war) was
being misinterpreted; prominent Israelis demonstrated in Tel-Aviv, with
slogans such as ‘The Patriot can save our skins — only peace can give us
a future!’ ... ‘Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait, we Israelis from the
Occupied Territories!’ (GW16) And daily GreenNet was filled with pages of
protest information, only selections of which we could download, even smaller
amounts making it into Gulf Watch. Thankfully, even at a time like this peace
work was not without its hallmark dynamic of humour and profundity.
PEACE
TEAM DIPLOMACY! (GW12)
f.soethe
mideast.action 5:30 am Jan 30, 1991 University of Hanover
When
the German activists from the Peace Teams found the German embassy in Iraq
deserted, they sent a fax to Mr. Genscher, our minister of foreign affairs.
Since, as they argued, the Peace-Teams and their peaceful action represent a
majority of the German people, they’d gladly fill in for the diplomats as long
as the crisis lasts and reopen the embassy in Baghdad. So far there’s been no
reply from Genscher.
QUEEN
VICTORIA SPEAKS! (GW2O)
peacenews
mideast.action.430 8:16 pm Feb 7, 1991
A press release from Queen Victoria in Belfast states: ‘Belfast
statues have come out forcefully in favour of a nonviolent resolution to the
conflict in the Gulf. Things have changed since my day and the British empire is
dead. So I’m not amused at the fact that Britain is still behaving as if it
was just sending in a gunboat. Give sanctions a chance!’ A covering note to
the late Queen’s press release, which also quotes other famous local statues,
explains that the way to speak to statues involves one saying ‘Do you deny
that you said ...‘ If you receive no denial, then that can be taken as
confirmation.
INTERNATIONAL
PEACE DRUM DAY - SATURDAY (GW36) igc:ppav mideast.gulf.223.Peace Drums 12:58 am
Feb 25, 1991
On January 13, a Peace Drum ceremony was begun by Quiet Spirit and
others of the Sioux nation. They had come due to a ‘vision’ to establish
what came to be known as ‘the heartbeat of the people.’ On January 16 the
bombing began. Massive numbers of people began to maintain the drum beat on a
24hr basis in the park near the White House. George Bush was quoted in the New
York Times as saying, ‘Those dammed drums are keeping me awake all
night.’ Naturally, as nothing else seemed to be getting his attention, the
Peace Drum Circle grew even larger and louder. On February 5 in a White House press conference, Bush bragged (and prompted the
reporters to listen for the drums) that the ‘drummers have been moved out of
there.’ The
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 59
drums
could be heard and one reporter commented, ‘We hadn’t noticed,’ to press
corps laughter. The whole White House Press Corps streamed straight out of the
press room to Peace Park.
One report of a demonstration outside the UN headquarters concluded, ‘Even
if the war ended tomorrow Bush would have radicalised a whole generation;
thousands of people made their first political statement in the last two weeks.
Once war stops they won’t go back to passively putting up with the lies and
bad government they’ve been used to.’ (GW12) Indeed, linkages between
diverse areas of concern are one of the few helpful effects of the war. In a war
pledged to protect the rights of Kuwait, human rights issues figured
prominently. As a UN Under-Secretary-General attributed war to unresolved human
rights issues, Amnesty International launched a powerful full page advert.
Dennis Healey had said on BBC TV’s question time that, ‘If Saddam is a demon
he is one of the West’s own making’. Amnesty’s campaign helped show that
the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’ was by no means our only ‘demonic’ familiar.
WITH
ALLIES LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES? Amnesty International (UK) (GW33)
aldopacific
mideast.gulf.376.Important ... , Feb 22, The Guardian 21 Feb 1991
A man is half-suffocated, tortured, beaten senseless and his bruised
body is dumped in the desert. Is this Iraq? Occupied Kuwait? No, the venue is
Saudi Arabia and the victim is a citizen of neighbouring Yemen. His crime is
his government’s pro-Iraqi stance. A woman is tortured to death because she
owns a Shi’a prayer book and a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini. The victim,
Zahra Habib Mansur alNasser, has been killed by the Saudi police. But when we
call for an inquiry into her death the authorities do not even reply. Amnesty
has evidence that Saudi Arabian security forces have tortured and ill-treated
hundreds of Yemeni nationals since the Gulf crisis began. Common Saudi tortures
involve falaqa, beating the soles of the feet; tas-hir, sleep deprivation; and
ta’liq, hanging by the wrists and beating all over the body. Syria, another
member of the anti-Iraq coalition, systematically employs rape, forcing objects
into the anus and threats to sexually abuse prisoners’ families. During the
1980s, Amnesty reported human rights abuses not just from Iraq but from every
country in the Middle East. The world’s governments had the opportunity to
deal with these issues, but they did not.
Similarly powerful critiques emerged concerning relationships between
rich and poor, racism, men and women, interfaith relations and the environment.
Yet, as war priorities trampled over decades of
60 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
campaigning
efforts, it was hard not to lose hope.
THE
GULF CRISIS - THE FRIENDS OF THE EARTH RESPONSE (GW14)
foe
mideast.gulf.283 11.02 am Jan 31, 1991
FOE Director, David Gee, has issued a statement which points out:
(1)
that the Western dependency on oil leads to serious environmental damage
globally and can heighten conflict in the Middle East and therefore should be
reduced;
(2)
that the authority and the budget of the UN should be enhanced to deal with the
longer term environmental threats to security (Mr Gee draws attention to the
potential loss of an area the size of Saudi Arabia from soil erosion if the UN
plan for halting such erosion is not implemented. Territory that is lost through
environmental damage is as much a loss as that lost through invasion);
(3)
that all wars but particularly those involving potential oil fires, chemical
weapons etc have serious environmental consequences which should be given
considerable weight in the overall evaluation in the political options facing
governments;
(4)
that Friends of the Earth raised these issues with the government on 7 January
and is still awaiting a response;
(5)
beyond that, Friends of
the Earth, as an environmental pressure group can not get involved in any
discussion of the wider political options facing governments.
PENTAGON
WINS WAIVER OF ENVIRONMENTAL RULE (GW16)
igc:mstein
mideast.gulf.283 1:51 pm Feb 1, 1991
Concerned that war efforts could otherwise be hampered, the White House
has waived the legal requirement for assessments on the effect that Pentagon
projects have on the environment. The White House action allows the Pentagon to
test new weapons in the West, increase production of material and launch new
activities at its military bases without the elaborate public review normally
required.
The agreement to waive the requirements of the National Environmental
Policy Act, enacted in 1970, came last August in meetings between the Pentagon
and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, after Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait. Details of the agreement were disclosed by the National Toxic
Campaign Fund, a national environmental group based in Boston.
Within the near future, the administration may also attempt to exempt
war-related activities from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA — covering hazardous waste storage,
treatment, and disposal), and Hazardous Materials Transportation Uniform Safety
Act.
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 61
DISASTROUS
PROSPECTS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (GW23)
Scottish
Catholic International Aid Fund. From an Indian partner, FAX 11 Feb.
‘It is terribly upsetting to find the extent of violence being let
loose by the international community in the Middle East. The prospects for the
developing countries are going to be disastrous. It is going to further
deteriorate the lives of the poor, because of the ruining of the economies of
these countries. Even for common people, it is obvious that it is pure insanity,
which prevails in many of the heads of the states of this globe. Even remote
villagers are already feeling the pinch due to the war. Even ordinary vegetables
are two to three times more costly now. Public transport facilities are cut to
half, lorries do not bring in essential goods from the places of production.
Worse days are not very far off, if the war continues. I hope the concerned
become little bit more sensible to take right, peaceful decisions before the
whole world becomes another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.’
Hope was not entirely lost, however. If nothing else, the war has raised
awareness of the interrelated circumstances which prevent us from living in
peace. The peace movement’s role in this was, indeed, a cause for joy and
celebration. Celebrate, we did.
PHANTOM
TREEPLANTERS’ CEILIDH (GW38) Gulf Watch
To celebrate the peace movement, all welcome on Sunday afternoon, 24
March for some phantom treeplanting in the Pentland Hills by Edinburgh to create
peace groves on tree-less land owned by the army ... Followed by a
bring-and-share meal, music and song at Alastair McIntosh’s house. ‘In this
interconnected, interrelated living system, dependent upon diversity, all life
has meaning ... ‘(Beyond War message from Jane Stavoe).
[NB.
In August 2000 I made one of my occasional revists to the two groves we planted.
Some of the trees are now 14’ (4 metres) high. The army had previously been
dumping building rubble here, and where we’ve planted they stopped, and the
original marsh and a pond has been saved. Nearby the army had also planted a lot
of new trees. The capacity to destroy on this Earth is exceeded only by the
capacity, in the fullness of time, to regenerate. Life goes on, and the trees
grow. – Alastair]
Psycho-Spiritual
Aspects of the War
The
outbreak of war threw our Scottish justice and peace community into a state of
shock and outrage. Just a year earlier a report of the lona Community, with
which several of us on the SCAWD Steering Committee are associated, had
proclaimed, ‘1989 was an “annus mirabilis” for many hundreds of thousands
of people in Europe and in Southern Africa ... . We have seen the cause of
justice and peace advance on so many fronts ... . Let us not allow anyone to
cheat (the peace movement) of some part of the credit for all these changes.’
But
62 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
the
report went on to warn that ‘Peace has also to be built, slowly, lovingly and
through quiet perseverence ... . The British government is pressing on with the
Trident missile developments at a cost equivalent to £30,000 a day over the
next 1,000 years. Mandela has been released, but apartheid has not been
dismantled. We cannot relax our vigilance or our campaigning.’
But war — war in a theatre so much of our own making —was a body
blow unbelievable in its unswerving inevitability. Many of us felt that our
remaining hope for humanity, even our confidence in ourselves, had been wrenched
from our hearts. The same appeared true of the peace movement worldwide.
Commenting on the protest suicides of two US Vietnam veterans, one angrily
responded:
US
SUICIDES AGAINST THE WAR (GW34)
igc:hmuskat
mideast.media.124. Brokaw ... 5:14 pm Feb 20, 1991
This vet, is pissed off each time another one of us takes their lives.
They have no right! And at the same time they have every right to take this
drastic action. Michael is another victim of not only Bush’s war, but of this
war the American people seem to want fought — at least by youth. Michael
won’t be the first Namvet who can’t handle this, and you don’t need to be
‘disturbed’ to possess enormous emotional feelings.
Over 65,000 American GIs lost their lives in Vietnam. 20,000 by
so-called ‘friendly fire’! Yes, I know that’s 1/3! A million Vietnamese
died. And since the war has ended over 150,000 veterans have died as a result of
violence, either self inflicted or otherwise. The Vietnam War, while ‘over’
15 years ago is clearly not over for too, too many of us.
Mutual
encouragment was important. Some of us drew great stength from a short statement
networked the day war broke out by a Catholic environmental educator, Jane
Stavoe in the US.
Topic
266 peace igc:rstavoe mideast.forum 7:10 pm Jan 16, 1991
When
others ask you, ‘what can I do now?’ The answer that keeps coming to me when
I ponder that question is ... still yourself. We need to treat ourselves, and
those we see day to day with gentleness… peacefully. Yes, continue the actions
on the outside. But, we need to renew ourselves on the inside too. Being gentle
with ourselves and with those we come in contact with in the days ahead will
help us gain needed energy and courage to face the challenges in the days ahead.
Peace my friends. Jane Stavoe.
We also reflected deeply on inputs which commented on the psychological,
cultural and spiritual backdrops to war. Exploration of these areas helped save
the sanity of some of us: others, literally, lost their mental footing in an
insane world, became ill or depressed.
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 63
Informal
on-line therapy groups emerged through GreenNet as some peace campaigners worked
out personal lives in the context of the global psychosis war so starkly
exposed. The work of Dr Alice Miller (e.g. For
Your Own Good: the Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, Virago, 1987) is
deeply relevant here: Saddam, like Hitler, like most warmongers, like some of us
peace workers, had an abused childhood based on a ‘poisonous pedagogy’ of
breaking the will and making love conditional upon conformity with authority.
The dictator reperpetuates the authoritarian response on an entire people, who
must ‘love’ him or suffer ‘for their own good’.
THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR (GW33)
igc:fmayer
mideast.forum.573. Malcolm X msg 11:50 pm Feb 22, 1991
The late Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘The
Denial of Death’, wrote: ‘Many people may feel deeply guilty if they violate
long-standing and deep-felt moral codes on his (a national leader’s) behalf.
Yet, ironically, it is just this that puts them even more in the leader’s
power, makes them even more willing putty in his hands. If... the group comes
ready-made to the leader with the thirst for servitude, he tries to deepen that
servitude even further. If they seek to be free of guilt in his cause, he tries
to load them up with an extra burden of guilt and fear to draw the mesh of his
immorality around them. He gets a really coercive hold on the members of the
group precisely because they follow his lead in committing outrageous acts. He
can then use use their guilt against them, binding them closer to himself. He
uses their anxiety for his purposes, even arousing it as he needs to; and he can
use their fear of being found out and revenged by their victims as a kind of
blackmail that keeps them docile and obedient for further atrocities.’
This explains the fact that we saw no significant shift in polling data
following the televised aftermath of the incineration of women and children in
Baghdad. (Malcolm X Day message, read at N.Y. student rally)
Neither is the peace movement exempt from authoritarianism. As peace
workers felt righteous indignation surge through them, and marches were
disrupted by the contributions of violent political groupings, there was helpful
discussion of how to hold fast to nonviolent principles.
OPEN
FORUM: HOW TO WAGE PEACE (GW11 Appendix)
Steve
Freedkin, Director, Peace Resource Centre, Santa Barbara CA
USA
2:31 am Jan 17, 1991
The peace community faces a number of critical tasks in the days
64 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
and
weeks ahead, only one of which is attempting to stop the war at the earliest
possible date. Let us begin discussion on these points:
1.
STOP THE WAR. Goes without saying. HOW we can achieve this is more difficult.
2.
MAINTAIN A PEACEFUL MOVEMENT. Already violence has begun to break out in some
street demonstrations. We must find ways to channel the sudden, massive public
outpourings into NON VIOLENT, effective action.
3.
MINIMIZE SOCIAL DIVISION AND HEAL OUR OWN
COUNTRY.
The emotional pitch of people’s concern about the war (on all sides of the
issue) has risen steadily in the last two weeks, and will leap now that the war
has become real. We must find ways to honor the pain of those for and against
war, and to avoid the painful schisms that tore us apart, individually and
collectively, during the Vietnam days.
Let’s together work to develop ideas we can share with others in the
peace community so that we fight fire with water, wage peace against war, rather
than waging war against war and against each other, magnifying the pain caused
by President Bush’s decision to begin bombing.
We must recognise that there is a place for political argumentation and
a place to lend a sympathetic ear. A good indicator: anyone who approaches us in
anger probably should be listened to, not argued with. Arguments seldom change
minds, whereas honest listening sometimes prompts a reciprocal response. We must
recognise that many people will react to peace activists in anger because they
are transferring their fears onto us. They may have loved ones in Operation
Desert Storm and fear for their lives. To rationalise their sacrifice (and
living in fear is a sacrifice) they may not be able to bear thinking about the
possibility that this war is wrong. Let us not try to force them to think
otherwise; we cannot. Let us recognise that they are emotionally blaming US for
the risk to their loved one, and let us listen to their pain. if we show
ourselves to be compassionate rather than argumentative, we are far more likely
to win hearts and minds.
Yesterday we had someone come in to our office to argue against us. Our
volunteer listened for quite a while, and it turned out that this gentleman was
homeless. He could not find a job that paid enough for rent, and he saw the
military as the only option. To him, war represented a chance that the military
might ‘hire’ him. In his mind, the war might give him a home. So his anger
at us was really anger about being homeless
I encourage peace activists at this time of great crisis to allow
themselves to grieve among friends, because we must heal ourselves so we can
better heal our world; to read and reflect upon the writings
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 65
and
philosophy of the greatest and most effective nonviolent activists in history
(Thoreau, Gandhi, King ... .), whose guidance we desperately need right now;
and to WAGE PEACE: to engage in a peace movement that acts in full accord with
Ghandi’s admonition that ‘the means are the ends in the making’. May God
be with us.
At a time when we were looking somewhat despondently for support in the
peace effort, this message came in from California. It was news with the quality
of gospel. We made it the focus of that day’s bulletin, including the full
text as an appendix, drawing the attention of people around the country and the
world to these wise words.
AN
OPEN LETTER TO ALL THOSE WORKING FOR PEACE IN
A
TIME OF WAR (GW11)
igc:Anonymous
mideast.forum 12:58 pm Jan 24, 1991 by Robert McAfee Brown
In an open letter to all those working for peace in a time of war,
Robert McAfee Brown, Professor Emeritus of Theology and Ethics at Pacific School
of Religion in Berkeley, Ca., writes:’ ... Some of our actions will grow out
of frustration as well as cool, rational analysis. But all of them must make
clear to our policy-makers that they do not have a docile and willing people at
the grassroots…
One of America’s leading theologians, Bob McAfee Brown’s Scottish
connection dates from his years as a post-graduate student at St. Andrews
University in the late 50’s.
‘Let us insist on keeping alive the agendas we have for the future,’
he says, ‘by living them out now ... As part of the peace movement, we are
committed to the ultimacy of love and are trying to align our lives with it.
That is basically what prayer is — not so much words as a fusion of words and
deeds. To pray for peace is hollow if we are not working for peace, and working
for peace frequently needs the infusion of a new empowerment that words of
prayer can sometimes channel ...
Psychological insights extended from the personal, through the range of
political issues, touching on feminism, racism, sexuality, and the ‘need’
for greed. What does cheap oil really represent? What crass public relations
games did our leaders play to psyche us up for a megascrap? What positive
attributes in other peoples do such mental fortifications cause us collectively
to ‘forget’?
PSYCHING
OUT THE WAR MACHINE (GW14)
igc:lbensky
mideast.media.68 7:41 pm Jan 31, 1991
The
Los Angeles Times (31 January) carried an article, ‘Is This Any Way to Wage
Peace?’ by John E. Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, a Professor of Psychology at Tufts — both members of a
group called ‘The Interna
66 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
Their basic argument is that ‘the actions and decisions taken by the
United States after August 2, while having the appearance of diplomacy for
peace, were in fact the result of deliberate choices toward a very different end
... (they) moved us inexorably along the path to war.’ The main steps along
the path were
1.
‘We demonized and dehumanized our adversary
2.
‘We denied our own contribution to the problem
3.
‘We relied exclusively on the threatened use of force
4.
‘We disregarded the other side’s stated grievances, and claims, while
demanding unconditional surrender
5.
‘We took no account of
cultural differences
6.
‘We offered a response that was disproportionate to the problem
7.
‘We overcommitted
ourselves to a course of action
8.
‘We used public presentation of conditions in order to intimidate the other
side
9.
‘We paid lip service to efforts at diplomatic solution
10.
‘We derogated the other side’s conciliatory gestures
11.
‘We insisted that the conflict be regarded as zero sum...’
The
final GulfWatch ended with this profound and disturbing reflection.
WHAT
DOES THE WORD ARAB CONVEY TO YOU? (GW4O Appendix)
Erskine
Childers (quoted in L Grollenberg, Palestine
Comes First, SCM, 1980)
Suppose that ordinary Westerners were asked, ‘what does the word Arab
convey to you?’…
I often wish to make a TV film in Britain standing in Trafalgar Square,
about the Arabs. It would shock a British — indeed I think any Western —
audience to its foundations. I would point out that the name of the square was
Arab; that the cheques passing through the banks around the square were named
from an Arabic word and from Arab commercial innovation, and the numbers on them
Arabic; that the drains running under the square had been developed in Baghdad
and Cordova at a time when London and every city in Europe were squelching
nightmares of mud and refuse; that the key stars in the heavens above Trafalgar
Square are still called by the names given to them by Arab astronomers who
discovered them at Arab observatories; that the techniques of navigation used
by Nelson to reach the place called Trafalgar were first refined and codified by
Arab navigators; that Nelson’s very title, Admiral, is an Arabic word; that
the water flowing out of the fountains beneath his statue is pure
ALASTAIR HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 67
because
of a science of chemistry and chemical analysis first properly organized by
Arabs; that every time some learned lecturer in nearby museums or university
halls refers to ‘our Greek heritage’, he means ‘our Greek heritage as
preserved, codified, interpreted and spontaneously enriched and then handed on
to us by the Arabs’; that the very disciplines of arithmetic, algebra and
trigonometry with which it was possible for Englishmen to construct a square
called Trafalgar were acquired by their ancestors from the Arabs; and that the
very health of the citizens of London who today walk through this square that is
a central symbol of Western civilization owes its origin to Arab medical
scientists like al-Razi who died in 923, and Ibn Sina, the author of the
veritable medical bible of the West for centuries. Finally, when Englishmen
think of the very concept of organized history, when students buy texts of
sociology in bookshops just beyond this famous square with an Arabic name, they
are unknowingly bearing witness to the work of one Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun.
It is surely an incredible story — but the most incredible feature of
it in the context of my subject is the almost total ignorance of the
overwhelming majority of Westerners today that Arabs ever had anything to do
with the very seeds of our civilization…
As the overt aspects of war drew to a close, the peace movement turned
its attention to post-war healing. The Fellowship of Reconciliation launched a
Civilian Casualty Fund. Other thinkers questioned the nature of Bush’s New
World Order and attempted to sow seeds for deeper ways of establishing peace.
A
DIFFERENT KIND OF PEACE CONFERENCE (GW34 Appendix)
Ron
Beasley 7 February 1991 (Excerpts)
For a Peace Conference to achieve some positive success it seems that
the following criteria may be useful as guidelines:
1. All parties should have an equal involvement in the planning of the
Peace Conference itself, under the absolute control of the United Nations.
2. As far as is humanly possible we should not fall into the trap of the
occasion being billed as a dialogue between the victorious and the defeated.
Such a dialogue would be a dialogue of the deaf. In an ultimate sense there are
no victors in modern war. We will all be defeated in one sense or another.
3. Care should be taken to ensure that no nation should be represented
entirely by politicians and members of the military. There is no evidence that
they have particular skills in creating the fabric of peace, nor do they have
any monopoly of wisdom.
4. To ensure a deep process being genuinely initiated, women and
68 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
men
with a spiritual perception who are steeped in the discipline of dialogue with
sensitive listening, should be included in the delegation of each nation.
5.
A Peace Conference is an
appropriate occasion to implement skills of conciliation, reconciliation,
conflict resolution and open encounter. Here in the U.K. we recognise the
importance of A.C.A.S. in industrial disputes within commerce and industry and
in the public sector. Likewise counselling is increasingly recognised as a
therapeutic tool in enabling estranged and tormented individuals to come to a
new perception of their condition and of possible new ways ahead in the pursuit
of wellbeing. These skills and disciplines reflecting an inter-professional
range are no less required within the international Peace Conference framework.
Indeed without them, we can say without doubt any Peace Conference will be
unsuccessful.
6. Those authentic groups and agencies who have given a lifetime or
longer to the study and practice of peacemaking should be invited to be present
at the Peace Conference in the capacity of consultants and advisers. There will
be a need for some to have the precise responsibility of an overview of the
whole Peace Making Process, not being distracted by the subjective concerns of
any nation engaged in the Peace Conference itself.
7.
To undergird this sixth
criterion, the authentic peace organisations, such as Amnesty International,
the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), Pax Christi, the
International Conference of Religion & Peace, the War Resisters’
International, and other such groups representative of the Islamic, Buddhist and
Humanist persuasions should have membership of the consultant and advisory
group. A small corps of women and men long experienced in hard bargaining and
difficult negotiating, who have demonstrated gifts of impartiality and
objectivity should be drawn together as a secretariat and convenor/presidium to
have over-all responsibility for guidance and fairness of opportunity for all
the constituent members of the Peace Conference. The N.G.O.s attached and
affiliated to the United Nations will themselves be key advisers in formulating
the whole process on which such a Peace Conference will be established.
…We need today a different kind of Peace Conference. So let’s start
making this a real possibility now. There is no time to lose.
There has been no different kind of peace conference. Not yet. But nails
are being added daily to the coffins of worn out and corrupt political
processes. Will they be enough to help humankind make the transition to ways of
Being based on peace, justice and living within the carrying capacity of the
Earth? Will we learn, perhaps helped by so-called ‘primitive’ and
‘pagan’ cultures, about the importance of
ALASTAIR
HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 69
ensuring that every child is affirmed in their intrinsic value, freedom,
and ultimately, ... divinity? The only good thing possibly to have come out of
this war is that many people have been conscientised by it. Dare we hope that
our society now has a wider appreciation of for whom the bell tolls? We carried
this in our last GulfWatch. It seemed to vindicate all we had been doing and
those who upheld us.
BULLETS, BULLETINS AND WAR’S TERRIBLE TOLL (GW4O) Scotland on Sunday Review by Kenneth Roy March 3, 1991
‘Do
not be shy,’ said the commander of the British forces on Thursday’s Nine
O’Clock News. ‘I have a message for the people back home. Ring your church
bells.’ In the same bulletin there was an estimate of the number of Iraqi
soldiers dead ... One hundred thousand had died, said Martyn Lewis. This
stunning figure — a matter for deep lamentation if even half right — was not
considered worthy of elaboration or comment. Remember, this was our ‘moment
of triumph’.
So
powerful was the crude, militaristic imagery of this news bulletin that, long
before the end of it, I was half expecting the church bells in our small seaside
town to be ringing Out the joyful news: two countries laid to waste, the biggest
oil slick in history, a tyrant still in his bunker, American arrogance reborn,
the slaughter of innocents, environmental catastrophe. The bells stayed silent.
But if they had rung, for whom would they have tolled? Ask the Moderator of the
General Assembly. Ask Archbishop Tom Winning. Ask any of those decent and
honourable Scottish Christians who have stood out against the carnage of the
Gulf. They would have tolled in mourning for 100,000 Iraqis; for the young Scots
killed by ‘friendly’ American fire. God knows, they would have tolled for
us…
[Voice
of Alastair McIntosh] As I write now, close to midnight, I hear sharp bursts of
machine gun fire outside. The army is exercising in the Pentland Hills…
getting
ready for the next time Yes, the next time Only those who will work, now, for
future peace ... only they can curb the inevitability of more wars by striving
to understand and then remove the causes which give rise to violence.
A
year before the Gulf crisis, eighteen British companies had exhibited at a
Baghdad arms fair. British trade credits had doubled following the gassing of
Kurdish villages. Now, even rueless Western politicians have been forced to
acknowledge the suffering and environmental devastation left in the war’s
wake. I discussed this with Dr Reza Sabri-Tabrizi, a Middle East scholar at
Edinburgh University. It was heartwarming to learn of his love for Scotland and
the acceptance he has experienced here. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘we are
looking at a common history.’
70 EDINBURGH REVIEW /87
They handed over to the snipe
the land of happy folk,
they dealt without humanity
with people who were kind.
Because they might not drown them
They dispersed them overseas;
a thralldom worse than Babylon’s
was the plight they were in.
They reckoned as but brittle threads
the tight and loving cords
that bound these freemen’s noble hearts
to the high land of the hills.
The grief they suffered brought them death
although they suffered long,
tormented by the cold world
which had no warmth for them…
What solace had the fathers
of the heroes who won fame?
Their houses, warm with kindliness,
were in ruins round their ears;
their sons were on the battlefield
saving a rueless land,
their mothers’ state was piteous
with their houses burnt like coal…
(lain Mac a’ Ghobhainn, ‘Spiorad a’ Charthannais’ (Spirit of
Kindness), in D. Thomson, An Introduction
to Gaelic Poetry, 1974.)
The Highland Clearances; hard recruiting sergeants for Scottish
regiments to fight English battles; potato famine; later economic depressions.
Half a million Scots, not to mention the Irish, directly or indirectly driven
from their land over the past 200 years. As in Iraq, so it was here. And then
injustice re-perpetuated in the colonies: offspring of poor emigrants fighting
native Americans, hunting Aborigines, indenturing Africans ... oppressed turned
oppressor. And England! Carver-up of nations for perpetual advantage! Yes, you
too, England, dear England, you too were deprived of your soul — much further
back, perhaps in Roman times. Jerusalem England! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in parks! Moloch! Demonic industries! Granite cocks! Monstrous bombs!
Moloch! Moloch! Moloch! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees, radios, tons!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch who frightened me out of my
natural ecstasy! Moloch who grasped the children’s food
ALASTAIR
HULBERT AND ALASTAIR MCINTOSH 71
and laid waste fertile lands! Moloch who aped the mores of the Rich and
Famous! Moloch, the Great Satan!
Light
streaming out of the sky! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up America, Even Your Dead were
to be Censored! Wake up Saddam! Bush! Major! Shamir! You! Me! World!
‘Hold
on world
World
hold on
It’s
gonna be all right
You
gonna see the light.’
You
gonna see the light. Moloch! Moloch. Moloch, whom I abandon.
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