[casi] George Galloway Writing In Today's Independent

[rubytoo@DELETETHISxemaps.com]

George Galloway: I'm a victim of the war against the Iraqi people
I've never personally benefited from my work on Iraq; I have given my political life's blood to 
this fight
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=399799
24 April 2003

The funding of political campaigns is seldom the prettiest of sights. Ask Tony Blair, he of the 
"blind trusts", Ecclestone, Mittal et al, not to mention Lord Sainsbury, who is giving a new 
meaning to sponsoring a chair, in his case in government. And it is especially difficult when your 
campaign is challenging a core foreign policy of two of the world's most powerful states: Britain 
and the United States.

That is the challenge I faced when I embarked upon an initially lonely fight to lift the embargo on 
Iraq, described as "genocide" by Dennis Halliday, a United Nations official, when he resigned in 
protest, and as "infanticide masquerading as politics" by the American Democratic congressman David 
Bonior.

It was a challenge that led me into fundraising among pro-Western monarchies, such as the United 
Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the latter despite my having been an arch critic of that country's 
political system and its role in the Middle East.The campaign I helped build, the Mariam Appeal, 
was astonishingly successful; but it only almost lifted the embargo and merely almost stopped the 
war.

I estimate, although the exact details will be available to the courts in the libel action I have 
launched against the right-wing pro-Zionist Daily Telegraph, that between 1998 and 2002 our 
campaign raised over £800,000, of which the great majority came from one source: the government of 
the United Arab Emirates.

This was such a secret it was plastered over every piece of our campaigning literature and 
emblazoned on the front of our famous red London bus, which we drove from Big Ben to Baghdad in 
1999 – across 11 countries, three continents and 15,000 kilometres. The Crown Prince of Saudi 
Arabia, moved by the plight of children with cancer in Iraq – a tenfold increase in childhood 
cancer is possibly linked to depleted uranium weapons – donated around £100,000.

The other significant donor has been the man much mentioned in recent press comment, the Jordanian 
businessman and political activist Fawaz Zureikat.

His presence at our side was scarcely undercover, either. In fact, virtually every British 
journalist who has travelled to Iraq over the past few years – including several from The Daily 
Telegraph – was introduced by us to him in his role as a financial supporter of our campaign. Many, 
if not all, had cause to be grateful for his help and his hospitality in facilitating their work in 
Iraq.

Now, if newspaper critics had focussed on the incongruity of a left-wing campaigner obtaining 
support for his campaigning organisations from semi-feudal monarchies and businessmen such as Mr 
Zureikat, who represented some of the world's biggest companies in Iraq, that would have been a 
legitimate line of attack – though my defence would have been that needs must. We were, after all, 
fighting against the policies of a much more motley crew. However, as we now know, that is not what 
The Daily Telegraph has said.

Emblazoned across four broadsheet pages this week is a story in which the Telegraph says 
unequivocally that I personally have received hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from the 
previous Iraqi regime as part of an oil deal. This is a lie of fantastic proportions, which is now 
the subject of a legal action for libel. For the record, I have never personally benefited from my 
work on Iraq; on the contrary, I have given my political life's blood to my fight for Iraq's people.

The only evidence supplied by the Telegraph to support this allegation is a document, signed 
illegibly by an unnamed "head of Iraqi intelligence", purporting to be a memo to Saddam Hussein's 
office asking for even more money for me personally. This document, we now know, has confused dates 
and is answered, apparently by Saddam's office, without reference to me, in the negative.

The Telegraph says I traded in oil and food under the oil-for-food programme. To whom did I sell 
this oil (which, incidentally, is done through the United Nations Sanctions Committee and subject 
to the most forensic scrutiny)? And what happened to the proceeds? In other words, where is the 
money? From whom did I buy the food that I allegedly sold to Iraq? Which food? When? Where?

I am genuinely surprised that lawyers on a major national newspaper appear not to have asked these 
basic questions. Does anyone seriously believe that I, one of the most observed and scrutinised 
political figures in Britain, could have been in receipt of such sums of money without attracting 
the attention of the security services?

I don't know the provenance of these documents, or how the Telegraph – which has broken three major 
"intelligence" stories in two weeks out of Baghdad, targeting Russia, France and now me – came to 
stumble, in a burning, destroyed, looted building, upon such a find. Their own reporter states it 
was a "mystery" how these documents alone were undamaged.

Forgery and deception have, of course, been a hallmark of the whole Iraq story, from the fake 
British "dossier" h to the false invoices for uranium from Niger, with which Iraq was "months" away 
from producing a nuclear bomb.

And from the Zinoviev letter through the smearing of Michael Foot as Soviet "Agent Boot" to the 
poisonous concoction of lies about Arthur Scargill, Libyan money and a non-existent mortgage, it is 
an old, old story to smear troublesome dissidents in this way. But whatever the nature of the 
documents, the information within them is simply false and will be shown to be so in the British 
courts.

It has all been a helpful diversion from the United States/United Kingdom invasion, destruction and 
occupation of Iraq – which is going so disastrously wrong, as some of us predicted that it would. 
And it is a useful, if reckless, joyride for journalists more keen on witchunting me than 
uncovering the lies, forgeries, deceptions and war crimes of two of the world's most powerful 
states, which are currently laying waste to one of the world's most wretched countries.

I have been through many media firestorms in my life, but the shock and awe of this one beats them 
all. My reputation has been carpet-bombed for weeks; first I was traduced as a traitor, then said 
to be in the pay of Saddam. But I stand by my views about the war and the sanctions, which 
slaughtered more people than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.

And I am proud of the huge international campaign that we fought, a campaign that moved so many and 
shook the few who took the fateful decision to go to war, to their very core.

My only regret is that, in the end, we failed to halt the slaughter – to stop the opening of the 
gates of hell, as the Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa memorably put it. Many interests and 
many lives are going to be scorched in the fire that is coming. And it is going to spread far and 
wide.

The above is based on an article that appears today in 'Tribune'. George Galloway is the Labour MP 
for Glasgow Kelvin and writes a regular column in the Scottish 'Mail on Sunday'

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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