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Nonviolent resistance to militarism
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Obstruction for peace
Reports
Here are two reports; the first published in non violent action and the
second one by Ciaron O'Reilly, who got arrested at the action for throwing red pain on the base's entrance sign.
Non violent action report :
Demonstrations on two successive days in December have helped to put the U-K war command centre at Northwood on the activist map again. The base, on the north-west fringe of Greater London, was once a naval command centre and houses a massive ‘nuclear-proof’ bunker from the Cold War era. It is now where British air, sea and land forces - when overseas, but not under the direct NATO line of command - are controlled from: for example, the Falklands War - was run from here.
Although it has been several years since any concerted campaign around the Northwood base, it is an obvious target for anti-militarists - and quite a convenient one, being the only military base of such significance which is within walking distance of an Underground station!
On Sunday 9 December, a Stop the War coalition from nearby Watford - who had already held a vigil at the base in November - organised a march past the base and a rally, with the support of London Region CND and others.
On Monday 10 December, it was the turn of a group of direct actionists. Though the numbers participating were low, even for this sort of event, it was well-organised, and has the potential to lead on to a continuing campaign of actions there.
Anselm Heaton reports:
December the 10th wasn't just another cold day - it was the anniversary of the international declaration of human rights; the same rights that have been violated throughout the attack on Afghanistan. For this occasion, a group of activists organised a mass non-violent direct action at the Northwood base - a blockade to "disrupt the smooth running of the war machine".
Located in a well-to-do residential area, the Northwood command centre is a key part of the command chain, providing the link between the Prime Minister and the different armed groups in the field. It has a crucial role in conflicts.
The action was to start very early - 7.30am - and the first group of activists arrived at 7am to find that - of course - the police had preceded them. One of the main actions of the day happened at that point, when three protesters defaced the sign at the base entrance with symbolic "blood" before kneeling and chanting for the dead. In the chill, misty morning, there was something extremely powerful about this. But the mood was soon interrupted as the police arrested them. One of them declared, "We have transformed this military sign into a shrine for the dead, the past, the present and future victims of the state terror that flows from this military base." Meanwhile, other activists were decorating the other side of the main entrance with peace placards, a group of Buddhist monks were drumming, and a banner stating "obstruction for peace" was held up.
Using the excuse that some of the area immediately outside the base gates was MOD land, the police quickly moved a dozen or so protesters to the other side of the road, facing the entrance. While this was happening, the other main action of the day was taking place: at 8am, two activists who hadn't gone to the main gate succeeded in getting through the perimeter fence elsewhere, and past the armed guards and dogs, "to check what they were up to". They managed to make phone calls from inside the base before being arrested.
At the main gate, people trickled in from the tube station to eventually form a group of about 80 people, with banners opposing the arms trade, and calling for "Food Not Bombs". Throughout the morning, attempts were made by the out- numbered protesters to cross the road and go back in front of the gates. The police easily pushed and carried people back to the other side, though three further arrests were made: one got arrested as he tried to climb over the fence, and two others who tried to run past the police and to the gates themselves. All the time, placards, banner and leaflets were used to alert the many computers and others driving past about the nature of the base.
At around noon, the remaining protesters decided to finish the action. Without actually blockading the base (the police themselves were doing that), the action did create enough pressure so that only a handful of vehicles entered the base during those 5 hours - the main gate would usually be quite busy.
Following the action, one of the organisers said “Today the smooth running of the war machine was disrupted. On Human Rights Day we dragged this headquarters of terror and human rights abuses out blinking into the public glare. Nonviolent direct resistance to militarism will continue in Britain and all around the world.
Ciaron O'Reilly report:
"From Sign to Shrine - A Reflection on Action at Northwood"
The day ended for me in thin hospital scrubs and undersized flip flops shuffling homeward up Holloway Rd. in the cold of the December night. The cops had taken my jacket, trousers,
boots, DNA and skin swabs to be held as evidence. Before they had got to us in the dark of the early morning, we had got to the "Northwood Headquarters" sign, each throwing a
healthy quantity of red paint over it. We then knelt, scattered photographs of the Afghan dead and recited a litany of places bombed and people slain with the collusion of Northwood
over the previous weeks.
They claim we "damaged" the sign at the entrance to Britain's joint military command centre, it was self-evident that we had "enhanced" it. The symbol of bloodshed brought back
to Northwood, located in the suburbia of north-west London, the British ?nerve centre? in the war on Afghanistan. Sixty military planners had, under the command of Air Marshal
Jock Stirrup, been transferred from Northwod to service General Tommy Franks and the U.S. Central command based at Tampa, Florida.
We had come in a spirit of nonviolent resistance and solidarity with the past, present
and future victims of the state terror that flows from this base. Northwood has been integral in Britain?s ten year enforcement of the genocidal sanctions on Iraq that has claimed
over one million victims. Over the past few months Northwood has played a pro-active role in supporting the indiscriminate US aerial bombardment of Afghanistan. Northwood has
long supported the Saudi dictatorship and the Pakistani secret service who, with the backing of the US and UK, produced the Taliban and al-Quieda network. The roots of 3rd. World
terror, both wholesale and retail, can be tracked back to these bases in the leafy 1st. World suburbs of Norhtwood and Langley. We had come in nonviolent defense of those
throughout every continent of the Third World who are being lined up as future ?collateral damge? by Bush and Blair.
In the back of the police wagon we sit smothered by the rituals and symbols of the state - to counter, we pray. Sr. Susan an English Catholic nun, Scott Albrecht a former member of
the US Air Force and myself embrace prayer as a radical disillusionment with this death culture. We see an anarchist orientation towards power and a pacifist orientation towards
violence as implicit to our Christian discipleship. The call of the cross is to confront imperial power with disarmed love.
We suffer no illusions of how co-opted the church has become over the last 2,000 years. The latest example being the abandonment of both pacifism and just war principles by the
US Catholic Bishops voting 140-4 to support US military action in Afghanistan. At a lecture at a New York Catholic university, Fr. Daniel Berrigan responds "the Bishops have
abandoned us....maybe we should burn our copies of the gospels, process into our church sanctuaries holding aloft the Air Force Rule Book, with its command to kill our enemies and
incense that instead. At least that would be more honest, It would express our fidelity to the gods of war, since we do not worship the God of Peace".
We suffer no liberal illusions that our movement has a monopoly on co-option and sell out secured by the three temptations of the desert - wealth, power and status. From punk to
feminism to organised labour, the sell out for many has been accomplished in a fraction of the time. As we sit in the wagon we hear the reassuring drum beats of life and solidarity
from the Buddhists of the Nippopnzon Myohoji order. We had rendevoused the previous evening with these radical orange robed nuns and monks at the Watford Quaker Centre.
Also present were radical feminists, pacifists, anarchs - all disappointed in their own movements succombing to the well worn 1st. World creature comforts of cynicism, despair,
internal migration and the paralysis of analysis. We had reached out and gathered together from our various traditions to act, to confront power, to resist the war machine. Compared
to the numbers deployed and dead, our numbers are small. At Northwood we will max. out at 50. Over the past three months of bombing there has been little resistance in Britain to
the war. The large numbers at a couple of London peace marches has not gone beyond the rote response and recruitment priorities of the liberal and left organisers - protest hadn?t
translated into resistance. There was, however, an early occupation of a military recruitment centre in Brighton, the blockade of the Naval base at Faslane by Trident Ploughshares
folks, a nonviolent international brigade heading to Palestine, a couple of hundred folks staging a sit down outside Downing St. and a solo blockade of a planeful of US troops taxing on
to the runway of Shannon Airport, Ireland.
The growing anti-globalisation movement seemed to evaporate in the wake of September 11th. the US mobilisation for war and the threatened dissident crackdown.
Some of the
more moderate groups such as ?Friends of the Earth? (US) removed all criticism of Bush from their websites in a wave of self-censorship. The warlords did not waste any time
stepping into the ever expanding breech left by this retreat. The imperial state would successfully conscript authentic grief, commodify it into vengeance and continues to employ it as
a basis to repeat September 11th.a hundredfold in Afghaistan, Iraq and who knows where next. Under the Pentagon spin the courage of New York fire-fighters is misused as a basis
to unleash fire on faraway innocents. The Cathedral became a font of blasphemy as Bush promises vengeance from the altar. Well planned agendas of the powerful abound in the
confusion and grief of the moment. US Defense Secretary Runsfield justifies a return to the permanent war footing of the Cold War that fashioned him. Deputy Secretary of Defense
Wolfowitz expresses loftier genocidal ambitions of ?ending five countries?, starting with an all out war on Iraq. Vice President/oil magnate Cheney has long wanted to run a pipeline
through Afghanistan to them thar Caspians. Attorney-General Ashcroft riding a new wave of McCarthyism gets to trash the Bill of Rights. Within a few hours of the World Trade
Centre attack, imprisoned Plowshares elder Phil Berrigan and other political prisoners were moved out of general population and placed into punitive segregation cut off from all
communication with family and the anti-war movement. 1,000 Arab-Americans have been detained, a Green party activist was stopped at gunpoint from boarding a domestic flight
to attend a peace conference, artists and authors have been visited by the FBI on suspicion of unAmerican activity.
Meanwhile back at Rickmansworth Police Station, it?s quite a crowd scene at the front desk. A variety of cops are hovering as the desk sargeant goes through the routine.
Hartfordshire's finest have been drafted in for the day, there are Ministry of Defence police and an undercover guy who looks like he has stepped out of "The Matrix". They take our
clothing with paint stains - there had been quite a bit of ?frendly fire? in our enthusiam to enhance the sign! They put me in a stripped down cell, no plumbing, plastic mattress on the
floor and leave me with my copy of ?The Long Loneliness? the autobiography of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day. I hear Sr. Susan and Scott being processed. Later, Rosie and
Davey who have been picked up after cuttng ther way into the base. Later still Anselm, Simon and others are brought in for blockading the base. Outside our excellent support
swings into action, getting the word out - solidarity makes resistance possible.
In Afghanistan the bombs continue to fall. I lie back on the matress and imagine B52's at work, the images I conjure are from the Vietnam War as their more recent emploment over
Iraq and Seria has been heavilly censored - the censorship no more complete than in Afghanistan. At the outset of this war, the Bush administration summoned the major US
networks and gave them their marching orders, the Pentagon bought up all commercial sattelite imagery available to the general public and scored a direct missile hit on the Kabul
office of the Al Jazeera television network - a war without witnesses secured.
B-52 attacks begin without warning because the bombers fly 10 miles high and cannot be heard from the ground. Seconds before the ground quakes, a zooming sound announces
the arrival of 60,000 pounds of explosives from a single aeroplane.
Powerful shock waves etch ripples in the ground, shredding rcks and metal into shards that whirl through the air like shrapnel.
For those not amongst the corpses, the concussion shock waves burst ear drums or render them dazed and disorientated. Some emerge from the bomb blasted craters blood flowing
from the ears and nostrils, the whites of their eyballs turned red from ruptured capillaries. They have dropped cluster bombs containing thousands of tiny metal fragments that fly
apart over a wide area, penetrating deep into the body and sever internal tissue, 15% designed not to explode to act as land mines later. They have unleashed fuel air explosives -
time delay bombs that disperse a fine mist of fuel followed by a massive fireball that incinerates anything or anyone in its path. They have dropped Blu-82 sub-atomic bombs
(equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon) that destroys everything in a 600 yard radius, giving off a mushroom-like cloud. By the time I arrive in this cell, they had killed at a
conservative estimate (see http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.org), at least 3,767 Afghan civilians, on average 62 per day since Oct. 7th. They had bombed mud homes,
people at prayer, children at table, a wedding ceremony, UN mine-clearers, Red Cross staff, a telephone exchange, a television station, journalists, their own troops, their own
Afghan allies, religious schools, a hydro-electric power station, delivery trucks, urban areas, a hospital..........
So its 12 hours of stripped down celltime, thinking about the military, praying for the victims, drawing sustenance from Dorothy Day?s 80 year struggle to confront poverty and war.
Whenever the cop comes to the door I hussle to improve my immediate surrounds...Any chance of some trousers? Any chance of a cup of tea? Any chance of a blanket? Any
chance of world peace??
It's dark by the time we're released and folks have been waiting in the cold for us. Some old friends, some new ones. Good solidarity is as rare as good resistance these days and
there is definitely a relation between the two We all have a sense that we have participated in something significant and sacred. We are thankful for each other and for being part of it.
We have a court date in Watford to look forward to and will return to Northwood along the line. Angela drives a van load of us back to London, she is preparing to join a peace
witness in Palestine. I jump out on Holloway Rd. and start shuffling home in my police issued flipflops, an American friend spots me from a passing bus, jumps off to buy me a pint.
Deliverance from the state, community/soldiarity and resistance demands celebration.
Ciaron O'Reilly
London December 2001
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