Have cause, will travel
You don't need a war to be anti-war, say international activists. Nyier Abdou looks at the lessons of the Cairo Conference, one year on
When activists and peaceniks from around the globe gathered for the launch of the International Campaign against US Aggression on Iraq in Cairo in December 2002, the Bush administration was beating the drums of war. Few thought the war could be stopped, but a growing number of people were determined to put up a fight.
One year later, the spirit of resistance is mushrooming and Cairo remains an improbable hub of the anti-war movement. Riot police lined the streets while international activists from such diverse countries as Sweden, Japan, Belgium and Turkey milled about the Press Syndicate with their Arab counterparts on Saturday and Sunday at the Second Cairo Conference. It has been seven months since the Bush administration declared major combat operations in Iraq over and the anti-war movement is gelling into a battle without a real war.
Demonstrations in world capitals in the run-up to the war recalled the emotions and anger of the Vietnam era, but today there are many fronts to this movement. It is anti-capitalist; it is anti- colonialist; it is anti-imperialist. It is anti-American; it is anti-Zionist. Slogans on conference banners declared: "No to Capitalist Globalisation and US Hegemony! Yes to Resistance in Palestine and Iraq!" The name of the project has subtly changed to the International Campaign Against American and Zionist Occupation.
"People always ask, 'Why is it still called Stop the War Coalition'?" remarked John Rees, one of the founders of Britain's most high-profile anti-war organisation and a man clearly bored with this question. "The war we're against is [US President] George Bush's endless war against terrorism, and the Iraq war is an episode in that longer war," Rees told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It's that we're opposed to, and that's why we're still in business."
Asked what value a gathering like the Cairo conference offers to the movement, Rees, like many international activists who took part, stressed the importance of making links. "I think that if you want to stop an imperial project on this scale, you have to build a movement, rather like the anti-apartheid movement was, where it isn't just a question that some leaders of the movement in one part of the world know some of the leaders in another part of the world. It has to be a dense thing. It has to be a very closely woven fabric. And that requires that tens, if not hundreds, and eventually thousands, of activists directly know each other. They've met, they've spoken, they've got each other's phone numbers and e- mail addresses, and they're bound together. That, for me, is the primary value of it."
Whisking about the conference hall between pockets of delegates, Ashraf Bayoumi, an Egyptian-American professor active in the anti-war movement both in Egypt and the US, underlined the importance of international groups coming together and recognising that "the enemy is the same, and the struggle is the same". That struggle, to "defeat the forces of hegemony and military aggression", is an expanding project, but one that many activists see as tied up in the ideals of the anti-globalisation movement.
"While various speakers clearly realise the overwhelming power of the industrial military corporate media complex," Bayoumi told the Weekly, "they have faith in the immense power of grass-roots movements." Asked if he thought too many issues were being garbled under one banner, Bayoumi was adamant: "No, no, no. The issues are connected, and they cannot be divided," he said. "I am vehemently against the atomisation of issues."
Ben Langley, an activist from the British group North Manchester Against Wars, was sent as a delegate to the Cairo conference "with the idea of finding out what the impact of the work we've been doing in Britain has had in this country and across the region". Positioned at the entrance of the conference with albums of pictures showing vigorous demonstrations in Britain, Langley was determined to drive home the point that "not every Briton is represented by Blair and this war". And he was not surprised that a bundle of issues have been rolled into the anti-war package.
"Instead of investing in welfare, our government has invested in warfare," he said. "There have been six wars since the New Labour government came to power. So I think it's natural that in the huge mobilisation there has been in this country people with all sorts of different agendas, all sorts of different concerns, are going to be present, are going to be discussing their ideas and making their links, and that's one of the strengths of the anti-war movement in Britain."
Asked if he thought that the anti-war movement had been rejuvenated by unrest in Iraq and growing resentment towards US occupation and casualties, Rees noted that it was Bush himself who rekindled the fire. "George Bush presented us with an opportunity that we would have been willing to pay a large amount of money for when he came to Britain," remarked Rees. "He gave a focus to the anti-war movement that it would otherwise have had to invent."
Much of the rhetoric on the podium at this week's conference focussed on support for resistance in Iraq and Palestine. The two occupations have been strongly identified with one another, but a definition of the "Iraqi resistance" is something that has not been forthcoming.
Asked who made up the Iraqi resistance that was supported by the campaign, Bayoumi was blunt: "No one here can claim that they know the answer to this question." But he did not leave it there, instead offering the "golden rule" that is a guiding principle to this movement: "The reaction to occupation is resistance."
Noting that warmongers scoffed at the idea of an Iraqi Intifada in response to US occupation, Bayoumi remarked that it is clear now that this was not just wild speculation. "I can assume that [resistance] will grow and widen," he said. "And that is not a hope -- that is a prediction, with a high probability of realisation."
