700 people hear eyewitness report on Iraq

BY ALEX SALMON

PERTH — Seven-hundred people attended a meeting at Fremantle Town Hall on May 14, to hear long-time peace activist Reverend Neville Watson, who has just returned from a "peace mission" in Iraq.

The 73-year-old Watson travelled to Iraq when war looked imminent, just as he had done in late 1990, in order to "be alongside the Iraqi people".

Watson told the meeting that the war was caused by "US imperialism" and it "wasn't just about oil" but was also "about US domination".

Condemning the media hypocrisy, he described how Ali, a boy who lost his arms, legs and parents to the US-led bombing, only became news when CNN decided to fly him out for treatment — after two weeks of attempts to get him treated.

Watson described the war as "a failure of democracy, not of the peace movement". He responded to questions about whether Saddam needed to be removed, by pointing out that both Suharto in Indonesia and Marcos in the Philippines were overthrown by peoples power movements — without war.

"In future we will have to up the stakes in the movement", Watson argued. He gave the example of the sit-down protest in San Francisco and noted that unions will have to go on strike to stop future wars.

From Green Left Weekly, May 21, 2003.

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From GLW issue 538