Yet another anti-war demo
Yesterday the Stop the War Coalition organised yet another of their marches in London against the Iraq war and against any expansion of it (into Iran, for example) (more from the BBC here). While I was always against the war and the thought of its expansion (if it was just another “pull the troops home” demo I might have considered giving it a miss), I also wanted to get a few photos. In the event, I got there late, although there was still quite a queue down Millbank. Unusually the march headed west, down Victoria Street, before turning north towards Buckingham Palace (!) and then west, back towards Victoria, then up Grosvenor Place, down Picadilly and then down Haymarket to Trafalgar Square, where they held a rally. When we got to the former Army and Navy store on Victoria Street, I headed into the store hoping to get pictures from the upper floors, but the windows were inaccessible, so I used the toilet and headed back out, by which time the march had entirely passed.
I actually walked further down Victoria Street, popping into a bookshop along the way, before taking the tube from Victoria to Green Park. When I got there, there was not much of the march there but only stragglers. I was surprised to see that the march was routed down Haymarket rather than Lower Regent Street, because that would have caused less congestion at Picadilly Circus (certainly for people going up Shaftesbury Avenue). There was certainly none of the crush anyone who was with me on the cartoon demo a few weeks ago experienced.
Now, because Nelson’s Column was fenced off, they could not give speeches from under it as they normally do; they gave them from the steps up to the National Gallery. The upshot was that the demonstrators could only congregate in the Square itself, not in the former street area outside the gallery as they normally do. Consider also that the fountains take a lot of capacity out of the square; this leads me to think that the number of attendees was rather less than the 80,000 or more the organisers claim. The square was not packed – it was not all that difficult to get from the back (Parliament side) to the front. The compere, I think it was, told us that the back of the march was still at Picadilly some time after I got there, and if this was true, it could not have been many people given what I saw at Picadilly half an hour earlier.
The speakers included most of the usual people: a mixture of trade unionists (Mark Serwotka, Billy Hayes), anti-war MPs or former MPs (Jenny Tonge, George Galloway, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell Tony Benn), and representatives of the groups behind the coalition (Lindsey German, Bruce Kent of CND, Salma Yaqoob and an unnamed representative of the MAB. There was also Craig Murray, Kat Fletcher of the NUS, Paul Ingram of the Green Party, Elaheh Rostami Povey and an Iranian theatre director whose name, if I remember rightly, was Ekmaleddin Khosravi. What I didn’t see, and the BBC didn’t report but Socialist Worker did, was this:
One highlight of the rally was the appearance of Sheik Zagani, foreign affairs spokesperson for Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Iraqi political leader and Shia cleric.
He spoke of his happiness to see so many British people demonstrating against the occupation of Iraq.
And he made a special point of acknowledging the presence of Military Families Against the War on the platform.
“I send condolences in the name of most Iraqi people to the families of soldiers who have lost their lives in this unjust war,” he said.
“Iraqi people have no hatred against British people. This war is harming both people.
“Do not get tired of demonstrating and protesting. We are the voice of humanity, and we have to continue fighting.”
Now, I thought one reason a lot of people opposed the war was precisely because it would bring out of the woodwork religious extremists, which it indeed has done. Why invite one of their representatives to speak at an anti-war rally (I know it’s against a particular war and isn’t a peace rally as such, despite the many rainbow flags with “peace” on them), and then call it a “highlight”, as Socialist Worker did – and for some inside info on the SWP position on the tactics of some sections of the “resistance”, see here; linked from here)? Do the organisers take the reputation of the movement they lead seriously, or is it a point of kudos to them that the movement’s enemies are able to dismiss it entirely as a bizarre coalition of Marxist lunatics and religious fundamentlists? I can recall one rally where George Galloway exhorted the crowd to shout a slogan of solidarity for Fallujah, and the response hardly matched the sound of his amplified voice.
Of course, there is a reason why people march behind these idiots: because the marches have already been organised, and to organise another moron-free march would result in two weaker demos, one of which would likely be ignored by the media, which would give the (accurate) impression of disunity. But surely there is some way for sincere opponents of misguided wars to oppose, or even prevent, actions by the protest organisers which, besides being wrong in themselves, bring the whole movement into disrepute? As for me, I think I’ll stay away from these protests from now on unless the war policy shows real signs of expanding.
