and ain't i a woman: Greenham Common women inspired many

Greenham Common women inspired many

BY MARGARET ALLUM

“We say no to the threat of global holocaust,

no to the arms race, no to death.

We say yes to a world where people,

animals, plants and the earth itself

are respected and valued.”

— Women's Peace Camp poem.

On September 9, the last of the women protesters at Greenham Common,
in Berkshire, England, left the site, ending a protest which had lasted
19 years.

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was set up in 1981, after women marched
180 kilometres from Cardiff, Wales, to Greenham Common to protest the British
government's decision to allow 96 cruise missiles to be deployed at the
Greenham Common US Air Force base.

Leaving Cardiff on August 28, 1981, they set up the peace camp outside
the main gate of the base upon arrival on September 5. The camp became
known as Yellow Gate when satellite camps sprung up around the base perimeter,
each distinguished by a colour of the rainbow.

From the start it was a women-only action, a decision with which not
everyone agreed. This decision was seen by many as a way to empower women
and rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament described the decision: “There
was some opposition within CND and the wider peace movement to the fact
that men were barred from the camp, but this largely melted away as the
determination, imagination and the energy of the Greenham Women became
clear. In spite of press hostility and physical abuse including repeated,
often quite brutal evictions, they stayed at the base, sometimes in their
thousands, sometimes a few dozen only, but never giving up.”

On November 14, 1983, the cruise missiles arrived. Women arrived from
all parts of Britain and began determined non-violent direct action to
rid the common of nuclear weapons and the military. The common was an ancient
common land where occupiers of homes adjacent to the land were granted
the right to use it. When it was taken over by the military it was not
deregistered as a common, which meant that it still belonged to the people,
and trespass laws could not be applied.

In April 1985, the British secretary of state for the ministry of defence,
Michael Heseltine, made by-laws for Greenham Common under the 1892 Military
Lands Act which allowed for the arrest and criminalisation of the women.
Over the years, hundreds of women were arrested, detained, convicted and
imprisoned under these RAF by-laws.

In March 1991, the last of the cruise missiles were flown back to the
US, and in September the following year, the US Air Force left Greenham
Common. In 1994, the last of the satellite camps closed. The women at Yellow
Gate camp turned their attention to the atomic weapons establishment at
Aldermaston and Burghfield, 13 kilometres away, and campaigned against
convoys carrying nuclear weapons through England and Scotland. The last
organised push was the Greenham Common Millennium Initiative, through which
they promoted their anti-nuclear campaign throughout Britain, Europe and
North America.

With the base no longer active, the military tried to deregister the
common so that it could sell it to developers. This was fought on the common
and in the courts by the Greenham women, a number of whom also challenged
the legality of the arrests made since the introduction of the by-laws.
Developers paid vandals to wreck the camp and disperse the women, but the
women refused to be moved.

Women from the camp participated in other campaigns against injustice,
including speaking out at rallies against the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill
designed to increase police powers and criminalise peaceful protest.

On July 6, 1993, the Women's Nuclear Test Ban Network, which included
some women from the Greenham Common protests, scaled a high wall of Buckingham
Palace to protest the nuclear testing Britain was conducting in the US
Nevada desert on the lands of the Western Shoshone people.

More recently it has been revealed that the ill health that some of
the camp participants reported, including nausea and headaches, may have
been the result of nuclear contamination of the common. Declassified British
ministry of defence reports confirm scientific evidence of radioactivity
on the base. Thousands of women were contaminated by radiation in the soil,
left from when a nuclear weapon burned in an accident at the airbase in
1958.

The women's protest camp inspired many campaigners over the two decades
it lasted. While not everyone agreed with all the tactics used, the courage
and tenacity of the Greenham Common women have been one of the high points
of the anti-war, anti-nuclear and women's liberation movements.

As a participant in the camp explained in 1983: “What is really great
about the movement and those who fight back, with everything to gain and
nothing to lose, is that new human relations exist in it. People's values
and attitudes change, they seem to move beyond the constraints and conditioning
that society imposes on us. I think that inspires me above anything, to
see the transformation in people.”

From GLW issue 423