Part 8 - DW062 001 020 008

1 digital image

8 Commissions of Inquiry were established in over 20 countries. The British Commission of Inquiry, of which I had the honour to be Coordinator, aimed to take the opportunity the Tribunal provided to give a voice to the many people in Britain who considered the war against Iraq to have been a crime - to give a voice to those whose voices are not normally heard. From small beginnings, based on the work of the Hands Off Iraq Committee which was active during the crisis and war period, we were gradually able to attract the support of growing sections of the peace and solidarity movements, particularly from among the communities in Britain most directly affected by the war, including the Arab, Pakistani, Turkish and other communities, so that we were eventually able to assemble over a thousand participants for our London Public Hearing at the end of 1991, which was presided over by Sheikh Mohammed Rashid, former Deputy Prime Minister of Pakistan, and addressed by Ramsey Clark and Tony Benn MP, and which heard over twenty testimonies on the criminality of the war. During the following months further successful Public Hearings were held in Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford, and follow-up events and activities were conducted in Nottingham, East London, Oldham and elsewhere. Everywhere we propagated our basic conception that if a government embarks on a criminal course of action, then according to the Nuremberg Principles it is the responsibility of the citizens of that country to take all possible action to prevent those crimes, being themselves ultimately responsible for crimes being committed by a government acting in their name. It became clear to us in the course of our work that the struggle to expose the truth of the Gulf war was far from being a soft option or academic exercise. Some of Ramsey Clark's hearings in Turkey took place under conditions of military siege, and indeed our hearings soon became integrated with the bitter struggle against racism and prejudice in Britain. Having made every effort to hear the voices not normally heard in the media, we heard testimony such as the following: We heard of Asian children intimidated at school, or taunted if their name was Hussein. We heard of households in outlying council estates in the Manchester area who had to lay in stocks of food because the racism they faced during the crisis period prevented them from shopping for days on end. We heard a whole catalogue of attacks on mosques, gurudwaras and other holy places. We met Asian taxi-drivers whose car-windows were smashed by racist passengers, and restaurant workers who had been harassed. We met sixth-form pupils who were intimidated and whose views were suppressed in school debates We met Arabs snatched from their families and taken off to be interned for weeks on end. This full force of racism faced by the Muslim and other minority communities during the crisis period was clearly a result of the policy of the British government which, as our Commission of Inquiry came to see, was intentionally set on a path of war.

full_reference_code