wpjf blog

There was a demonstration outside the Shell garage on the A541 Mold Road in Wrexham on Saturday 23 Feb as part of the international ‘Hands Off Iraqi Oil’ day of solidarity action. Despite small numbers, we managed to make ourselves very visible thanks to the conveniently placed pedestrian crossing.

Members of Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum and Wrexham Women for Peace took part in a solidarity action in support of the people and oil workers of Iraq, who are fighting to keep Iraqi oil under national control in the face of pressure to accept a new ‘oil law’.  If this law is passed, it will allow foreign companies such as Shell, BP and Exxon to control Iraq’s oil production, guaranteeing massive profits for western oil companies and leaving Iraqi oil workers in poverty.

Protesters put up banners and placards at the Shell petrol station on Mold Road, Wrexham on Saturday and handed out leaflets.  The aim of the demonstration was to raise awareness of these issues and to show solidarity with the people of Iraq.

Genny Bove of WPJF and Wrexham Women for Peace said:

"We deplore the British government’s efforts to push this oil law through for the benefit of western oil interests and at the expense of the needs of the Iraqi people who have already suffered so much.  After years of sanctions which harmed ordinary Iraqis and led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, the British government supported the 2003 invasion which has led to up to a million more deaths. We cannot stand by now while Iraq’s most valuable economic resource is sold off.  The banners we displayed on Saturday - ‘Iraq for the Iraqis’ and ‘No Profit from War’ sum up our feelings."

From the Hands Off Iraqi Oil website -

STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE IRAQI PEOPLE

For the Iraqi people, the ongoing war and occupation have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, relentless insecurity and crippling poverty. But for foreign oil companies, the desperate situation in Iraq is an opportunity to make massive profits at the expense of the Iraqi people.

In February 2007 the Iraqi cabinet approved an oil law which, if passed into law, would allow the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon to take over control of most of Iraq’s oil reserves, depriving ordinary Iraqis of scores of billions of dollars. Shell and BP, with the help of the UK Government have been actively pushing for this law and these contracts since 2003.

One year on, despite five US administration- and IMF- imposed deadlines, the law is still being contested at every level of Iraqi society. However, a 18th February deadline for international oil companies to register to compete for tenders to help develop Iraq’s oil  http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php/article/26507) represents a first official foot in the door.

We need to keep the pressure up here in the UK and support the Iraqi people in their ongoing fight.

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions is at the forefront of grassroots campaigning against the privatisation of Iraq’s oil industry and has threatened strike action should the law go ahead. Oil experts, lawyers, academics, trade unionists, and students are rejecting the occupation-imposed oil law and the economic occupation it serves.

Who should decide the future of Iraq’s economy and resources? The people of Iraq, or Shell and BP? 

ANOTHER DEMONSTRATION AT HOOLE TOTAL PETROL STATION IN CHESTER

Wrexham Women for Peace and supporters returned to Hoole TOTAL petrol station in Chester on Saturday 26 January, to build support in Chester for the Boycott TOTAL campaign, which is calling for people to buy their petrol elsewhere until TOTAL stops supporting the violent and oppressive military regime in Burma.

With more people, banners and placards than last time and a beautifully sunny morning, most members of the group positioned themselves over the road and opposite the petrol station which is on a bit of a blind bend. From here, approaching motorists had plenty of time to take in the messages before they reached the garage; even better, we were in the warm sun. The rest of us handed out leaflets to passers-by on the other side of the road and to motorists on the garage forecourt. After we’d been asked several times by a very polite and embarrassed TOTAL employee to stay off the forecourt, a lone policeman turned up in a car, but didn’t even trouble to get out and put on his helmet to talk to us.

Our new ‘Beep 4 Burma’ banner had the desired effect, and soon the air was filled with the cheery, and occasionally startling, sound of tooting horns. Using the pedestrian crossing to, er, cross (and re-cross) with our banner also worked well.

Many motorists changed their minds and drove right on after indicating for the petrol station; others drove in and straight out; some filled up and vowed never to return; just a few refused to take the leaflets. This is a petrol station that regularly has queues for petrol on a Saturday morning. Trade for the morning was no more than a trickle, with the forecourt completely empty for long periods.

After the demo, one of the participants said: "By taking a stand I felt I could contribute to raising awareness of Total’s investment in Burma. It was so empowering to see an empty forecourt and and realise that the people of Chester were no longer willing to give their money to a company that funds the Burmese junta."

In a rare piece of direct action by the authorities - supporting our efforts to encourage people to buy their petrol elsewhere - all motor traffic is going to be diverted well away from Hoole TOTAL garage from next week while the railway bridge is being repaired, so we might need to find another local TOTAL petrol station to visit. Suggestions on a postcard, please.

Wrexham Women for Peace and supporters held a demonstration in support of the people of Burma (Myanmar) this morning.

Campaigners targeted the TOTAL petrol station on the A483 Ruabon by-pass to draw attention to the links between French-owned TOTAL Oil and the Burmese military junta. Banners were hung on nearby bridges, placards displayed on the roadside and leaflets handed out to motorists on the petrol station forecourt in a peaceful action designed to raise awareness of this issue and to encourage a boycott of TOTAL petrol stations until the company severs its links with Burma.

Burma’s democratically-elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi - who has been under detention or house arrest for the past 12 years - has said that TOTAL is the biggest supporter of the Burmese junta and should pull out of Burma immediately. There is also a call for TOTAL to give up its interest in the Yadana natural gas pipeline to Thailand, constructed using forced labour, which it operates in conjunction with another oil giant: Chevron-Texaco.

Less than two weeks ago, European pension funds withdrew over £100 million of investments in TOTAL following protests over the company’s involvement in Burma.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/04/oilandpetrol.news)

A spokesperson for Wrexham Women for Peace said:

"Burma is a country rich in natural resources, yet its people are poor and hungry. Almost half of government spending goes on the military; very little is spent on health and welfare. There are more child soldiers in Burma than in any other country. Rape is used as a weapon of war. Many of Burma’s political prisoners are tortured by the regime.

The demonstration comes one week before a national day of action against Total’s involvement in Burma.

National protest 24 November: http://totaloutofburma.blogspot.com/

Readers can pledge their support for the campaign by signing a postcard to Total asking it to pull out of Burma. Visit this website:http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/total.html

To contact Wrexham Women for Peace or to join in the national day of protest, call 0845 330 4505 or email wrexhamwomen@yahoo.co.uk.

The SOCPA case against five activists who took part in the No More Fallujahs Weekend of action last October collapsed today at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court when judge Quentin Purdy found no case to answer and dismissed all charges against the five at the end of a protracted and at times farcical hearing which lasted almost four hours.

The five - Brian Barlow, Steve Barnes, Genny Bove, Rob Clohesey and David King - were all charged with taking part in an ‘unauthorised demonstration’ within the ‘designated area’ around Parliament on 29/30 October 2006. The cases had been joined together following a pre-trial hearing in May, where the five had agreed that they would not require any of the arresting/reporting police officers to be present at the trial.

Maybe the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had assumed that the case would therefore be a push-over and hadn’t bothered to prepare, or maybe they really are cracking under the strain of all those new laws and endless prosecutions. In any event, the prosecutor was ill-prepared for the case which she claimed to have only seen for the first time five minutes before the trial, and struggled to present a coherent prosecution from the six separate files piled up in front of her. She counted the defendants and then the files and then appealed to the magistrate that there were six files and only five defendants, having failed to notice that Steve was facing two charges.

To begin with, the defendants were all ushered - protesting - into the defendants’ box (behind a glass screen) to confirm names and addresses. Some of the five declined to give dates of birth, which went unremarked, thanks to Milan Rai’s and Maya Evans’ earlier stand on this, I guess. Standing in a glass box at the back of the court is not the best way to feel part of (or indeed hear) the proceedings against you, so the five vociferously expressed their wish to be seated in the main courtroom, which was agreed and turned out to be much more satisfactory. All the defendants represented themselves.

Before the case began, Genny asked to make a submission that to proceed with the case would be unlawful and an abuse of process, drawing on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights which talk about the need for any restrictions on the right to freedom of expression to be tightly drawn, with clear processes, foreseeable consequences and so on, and pointed to the duty of the magistrates court to stop the case going ahead given SOCPA’s complete lack of process for its ‘unwritten law’.

Rather surprisingly to the defendants, who were expecting to be silenced at the earliest opportunity, Genny was given time not only to make the submission in full, but also to give some examples of the problems that have arisen in the past due to SOCPA’s shortcomings in this area. The prosecutor asked for time to go and dig out the caselaw to respond to this submission and asked if there was anything else the defendants wanted to raise so she could deal with that at the same time. Genny stood up again and outlined an argument, based on information contained in the CPS’s website, that the ‘public interest’ test for bringing a prosecution could not possibly have been met, and that such a prosecution would do nothing to reduce crime, would not increase public confidence in the criminal justice system, nor be value for money. This also gave an opportunity for us to talk a little about the events we’d taken part in, our motivation and our dismay that we were being treated as criminals for remembering the dead. After that there was an adjournment for the prosecutor to scurry around and for the defendants to take a breather, before it was back in for round 2.

Read the rest of the court report here and letters to the press here.

A couple of weeks back I received a summons for taking part, last October, in an unauthorised demonstration in a public place, namely opposite Downing Street, Whitehall, SW1, in a designated area, when authorisation under section 134(2) of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005 had not been given when the demonstration started.

SOCPA has removed the right to protest within a kilometre of Parliament, and has replaced it with the right to protest in this area only with prior police authorisation, the police being able to set conditions on the place and duration of the demonstration, the size of banners and the number of people who may protest.  This picture sums up my feelings about SOCPA.  I’ve had some correspondence with MP Steve Pound about SOCPA after hearing his defence of the Act on Radio 4 just after Christmas.

Anyway, I did take part in an unauthorised Peace Camp in Parliament Square last October.  It took the Crown Prosecution Service six months to decide that it was in the public interest to prosecute under SOCPA, but now they have, and I’ve got a provisional court date of 14 September.  I’m planning to plead not guilty because I cannot accept that it is a criminal offence (serious organised criminal offence, even) to remember the British soldiers who have died in Iraq by reading out their names in a solemn remembrance ceremony, even if I choose to do that outside Downing Street without asking for police permission.

I’ve written an article for indymedia about the court cases to date, which you can read here.  

With 15 British sailors still detained in Iran, it’s worth reading what Craig Murray has to say on the matter to balance the moral outrage of the British government and media.

No doubt at all that the sailors are being used as pawns, but at least as much by Britain and the US - who are, we must remember, illegally occupying Iraq - as by the Iranians.

As for all that nuclear hypocrisy being spouted in relation to Iran’s Uranium enrichment programme, our own home-grown Uranium enrichment facility is just up the road in Capenhurst, near Ellesmere Port.

This report from the BBC rather smugly states that "Nations which are signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) have the ‘inalienable right’ to make nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes, through enriching uranium or separating plutonium."

All very well, except our Uranium is not only used for peaceful purposes, and we are in breach of the NPT in any case because we haven’t made any attempts to get rid of our nuclear weapons.   The result of exercising this ‘inalienable right’ is that Uranium from Capenhurst is discharged with the blessing of the authorities into the local Rivacre brook which runs close to schools and houses… the childhood leukaemia rate is four times the national average close to the site.  The Uranium is used in the Trident nuclear weapons programme; it ends up in Uranium weaponry which has polluted forever areas of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; the fallout from this pollution ends up all over the place including back here in the UK; Uranium weapons have contaminated parts of Scotland where they have been tested; surplus uranium is dumped illegally in Russia.

Black vultures circle Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, where Fidel Castro has in the past spoken to millions of Cubans. Today it’s empty save for a few tourists and looks like a sprawling car park. The only buildings of note are the Che bronze outline on a nearby block and the José Marti column made of marble that towers above.

Anyone expecting to find a workers’ paradise in Cuba is in for a shock. The rural east of Holguin Province, for example, is still agricultural and you’re as likely to see oxen or horses drawing carts as private cars on the pot-holed roads. Hitch-hiking is popular and it’s almost obligatory to stop if you’re in a car. The tourism boom has been largely contained in all-inclusive resorts owned by state companies.

Read the full article here.

I spotted these -

on cartoonist Latuff’s Tales of Iraq War blog.

I can’t think of anything to say about Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq that hasn’t already been said, some of it by Republicans too!  Let’s just hope he goes quickly now.
 
Les thought that Pete Seeger’s anti-war song from the Vietnam era would be an appropriate comment.  So, here is Waist Deep in The Big Muddy. 

There’s also Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation by Tom Paxton.  Just replace Lyndon Johnson with Bush, 50,000 with 20,000 troops and Vietnam with Iraq and we’re off "to save Iraq from the Iraq-is".