Global Policy Forum

By Sanjay Suri

The thousands who turned out were a fraction of the estimated million who came out to protest Feb. 15 last year against an imminent invasion of Iraq. But given strong public reactions against a redeployment of British troops to Falluja from the relatively safe Basra that was proposed earlier this week, the anti-war rally took on a new urgency.

The anti-war rally was in effect an anti-occupation rally. And it went beyond calls to end occupation to resolutions to support the Iraqi resistance against occupation. ''We will not allow the resistance to be trivialised as some sort of terrorist movement,'' Chris Nineham from the Stop the War Coalition told IPS. ''It is a popular insurrection resisting occupation.''

Stop the War Coalition was the leading group that helped organise joint protests across Europe last year. The civil society campaign failed to stop the invasion but won a moral victory underlined by a disastrous occupation. The new campaign seems set on a moral winning track.

Nineham acknowledged that it was possible that this campaign would be accused of supporting terrorism. ''But we see the real terrorists as the ones with the B-52 bombers,'' he said. Nineham said ''if our own country was occupied by a foreign force of 150,000 troops with missiles and what not, we would organise resistance by any means.''

European civil society groups who had campaigned hard to stop the invasion in Iraq are now putting together a new struggle to demand a pullout of occupation forces. Several groups came together at meetings through the European Social Forum (ESF) to back the campaign against occupation. These included the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Green Party, the Muslim Association of Britain and A Bridge to Baghdad from Italy. They were backed by Iraqi groups including Iraqi Democrats Against Occupation. Many of these groups were together in the anti-war rallies of a year ago.

The rally gained emotional strength with a message from Paul Bigley, brother of the murdered British hostage Ken Bigley. ''The more people raise their voices, the safer we will all be,'' he said in his message. Rose Gentle and Reg Keys, parents of two soldiers killed in Iraq addressed the rally at Trafalgar Square. Rose Gentle was cheered loudly when she asked Prime Minister Tony Blair to come to Trafalgar Square to meet the demonstrators. Her son Gordon Gentle, 19, was killed in an ambush near Basra earlier this year. Reg Key's son Lance Corporal Thomas Keys, 20, was among six military policemen killed when a mob stormed a police station.

Stop The War Coalition convenor Lindsey German said it was ''a personal decision for families involved in this conflict to speak out, but we are very pleased when they do. Our main argument is that we want to end the occupation of Iraq and want the troops pulled out. We are making the situation worse and we are killing many, many Iraqis.'' She added ''we are losing many British and American soldiers in this conflict.''

Veteran Labour Party leader Tony Benn said at the rally: ''The Iraqi war is an act of criminal aggression which America launched and Britain supported -- it's illegal and immoral and it will not succeed.'' Although the rally was relatively small, it was in line with majority opinion. ''All the opinion polls say that an overwhelming number of British people want the occupation troops withdrawn,'' Kate Hudson from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) told IPS. ''People are clear that the way forward is through elections, British people believe that Iraq should be run by Iraqi people, and that their resources are not available to be plundered by foreign companies.''

Among those supporting the anti-war movement at the forum were Aleida Guevara, daughter of Che Geuvara, who was the most celebrated martyr of the Latin American left, Ahmed Ben Bella, leader of the Algerian independence struggle, Richard Boyd Barret from the anti-war movement in Ireland, Sami Evren from the confederation of public sector workers unions in Turkey, and Maria Stylou from the anti-war movement in Greece.