April proved to be a fine month to visit Brussels, twice. The sun shone, and people gathered outdoors in the parks and the squares. Meanwhile, far away in Iraq, the siege of Falluja was claiming hundreds of lives, and in Baghdad the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison were already well known to General Taguba, the Red Cross, and Ambassador Bremer, even if President Bush, Secretary  Rumsfeld, and Prime Minister Blair were trying to look the other way. But what was really happening in Iraq? 

 

My first journey to Belgium was to attend the BRussells Tribunal. The organisers had deliberately wished to invoke the tradition of earlier Russell Tribunals – hence the pun. The organisers, and in particular, Lieven de Cauter, himself an ‘independent philosopher’, were keenly aware of a responsibility to ‘prevent the crime of silence’ with respect to Iraq, as Russell had been with Vietnam, a generation before. 

 

The sub-title of their Tribunal was ‘A hearing on the Project for the New American Century’. It proved remarkably faithful to its purpose in probing the activities of the neo-conservative think-tank. Jim Lobe and Tom Barry, for the defence, manifested an encyclopaedic knowledge of the public statements and backdoor connections of this highly influential lobby. Hans von Sponeck, who along with Tribunal Commissioner Denis Halliday resigned his UN post in Iraq in protest at the severe sanctions regime to which the country was subjected, provided candid testimony of the long gestation of the wars on Iraq, and the involvement of the United States in arming the country during its war with Iran, in the 1980s. François Houtart presided gently over the proceedings and the Tribunal Commission whose judgment can be found on the web (www.brusselstribunal.org). One Commissioner, the Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi, recalled her visit to Russell at his home in Wales, long ago in 1960. 

 

One revelation of the Tribunal concerned what is really happening in Iraq. Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar, an Iraqi scientist and writer, testified that, contrary to claims, there is no appreciable reconstruction to benefit the civilian population. In fact, when Iraqi engineers offered to help restore the electricity, water and telephone services, their offer was turned down flat. Instead, workers are brought in from abroad, mainly disappearing inside the stockades and garrisons of the occupying armies. Living conditions are desperate. Meanwhile, the killing at Falluja was claiming hundreds of dead. The opposition to the occupation was spreading thoughout Iraqi society. Such well-informed Iraqi testimony to the Tribunal threw a sharp light on the true state of Iraq, and in so doing contributed to the wider process of the World Tribunal on Iraq, of which the Brussels hearing was one of a series of scheduled international sessions, destined to conclude in Istanbul in 2005.

 

By the time I returned to Brussels at the end of April, for the conference of the European Network for Peace and Human Rights, the death toll in Falluja was reckoned at more than 600.  Stark video evidence of the slaughter taking place there had reached us just in time. Al Jazeera television had promptly responded to a request from the Russell Foundation for film of the siege of Falluja to show at the Network’s conference in the European Parliament in Brussels.  This was a a truly shocking documentary which troubled all those who saw it.  Opposition to the war is clearly gathering strength, and we’re bound to wonder how long its perpetrators can continue in their chosen course.

 

Tony Simpson, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, www.russfound.org, 28.05.04