Following the emergency demon-sation against the occupation of
Iraq and torture of Iraqi detainees on the May 22, Betty Hunter of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign urged people to march down Whitehall to protest against the Zionist assault on Rafah.
Several hundred did just that and police became very confrontational, in contrast with their behaviour on the large demonstrations over the last two years.
The tone was set when a Muslim man knelt down to pray on the pavement at Horse Guards Avenue. Police said they found his behaviour suspicious and proceeded to search him, laying his possessions out on the pavement.
Once everybody assembled across the road from Downing Street, police began literally penning us in with fences. Vanloads of officers arrived closely followed by a vanload of workers with more fencing, deliberately confining us in far too small a space. The barrier was being pushed back and forth and insults were being exchanged between campaigners and police.
Members of the PSC and International Solidarity Movement managed to break free and lay down a huge Palestinian flag on the road, encouraging people to sit on and around the flag. A very noisy demonstration ensued, with Betty Hunter announcing to the police over the megaphone that we would remain until 3.30 and then leave.
However, police were not happy with this and began lifting people, often with an arm under the throat, and carrying them to the pavement.
When two young women attempted a sit-down protest in the street they were dragged by the ankles onto the pavement so that their t-shirts rode up and their bare backs were scraped along the ground.
The result of this clumsy, heavyT
handed policing was to create a fierce atmosphere of 'them and us, with police being called bootboys and thugs, while the more macho elements of the cops insulted protesters and challenged men to fights. In the end the
demonstration was brought to an end by the SC ful-amers who deary iet things were gerong our of hand and persuade:
more miicart eements to ge nome
Tres leats us to quescion the actios and
strategy we want the movement to have We may have built the biggest anti-war A clear split could be seen between those who wanted to see the movement turn towards direct action and those favouring symbolic marches that simply register discontent. .... movement in history and put 2 million on the streets, but so far we have simply marched, listened to speeches from the great and good, and quietly shuffled home. At a meeting on imperialism recently, a clear split could be seen between those who wanted to see the movement take a turn towards direct action and those who favoured symbolic marches that simply reg ister discontent.
Tariq Ali explained that there will always be a gap between those who favour and those who oppose more militant action, drawing comparisons with the Vietnam war, when liberals simply chose to march and the revolutionary left opted for confrontation and civil disobedience.
t seems a criminal waste of potential
for this movement to have so many
newly politicised people the streets, angry, and active, and not to go beyond the narrow confines of standing in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square.
The Left has to take the initiative in leading the most committed towards direct action and a more confrontational approach. The events in Whitehall are a classic example of this. The majority of people present were members of PSC and ISM, groups that take a 'Ghandlist' approach to protest, i.e. 'bearing witness' and pleading with governments to change their minds, or hoping the UN will see sense.
If a majority of people present had been
of a more militant viewpoint we could have
called comrades to come down and swell
the numbers and the confrontation could
have gone on inco the evening, creating an
evert that the media would almost certainly
have covered.
Those in the Palestine movement who favour mass direct action are generally based around two groups - Victory To The Intifada and the Che-Leila Brigades. They are primarily identified with the picket outside Marks and Spencer in Oxford Street every Thursday. These groups rightly see the intifadas in Iraq and Palestine as being in the tradition of other national liberation revolutions in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua.
They do not believe that the PSC can be brought over to a more militant or politicised position, finding it necessary to instead build a separate movement that is overtly supportive of all Palestinian actions against occupation.
Broadening this argument out to ment must decide where stands. Do we build an Iraq solidarity campaign that actively supports the Iraqi resistance and engages in direct action, or do we continue to simply call for Blair's resignation and have more marches to Trafalgar Square?
I personally would favour losing some of the tamer elements of the movement in order to build a militant campaign of direct action that imaginatively and creatively supports the Iraqi and Palestinian resistance in ways that attract media attention and involve people in a more meaningful way than asking them to listen to speeches (not that I have anything against good speeches).
There is a danger that the movement fizzles out and becomes a rump of the far left with numbers in Trafalgar Square dwindling more and more. We need to be more media savy and make our presence felt on the streets on a regular basis, with sit-ins occupations, halting the traffic. Such activity has particular (though not exclusive) appeal to young people.
lam not proposing elitist' actions carried out by professional activists in the style of Greenpeace, but inclusive actions that encourage everybody who is confident enough to participate.
The Stop the War movement must adopt a more specifically anti-imperialist stance, one that gives active support to the Iraqi resistance and to the intifada in Palestine. We must be creative, we must take politics
to the streets, or we risk squandering the
best opportunity we have had in a very long
time to shape a generation's political consciousness in a militant, revolutionary direction.
page 19 of the scan
sockaist resistance Summer 2004 |9 ....
Palestine