Book
Review –
O Daughter of Babylon – Journey of an
Iraqi Patriot and What Chilcot Didn’t
Say
Two years ago Riad
el-Taher died from cancer. In March
2017 Riad was expelled from the Labour Party,
not for ‘anti-Semitism’, but because he had been imprisoned for having breached
the West’s genocidal sanctions on Iraq which had killed half a million Iraq
children. Riad was fingered to Labour’s crooked General Secretary, Iain McNicol
by the corrupt former New Labour MP,
Jewish Labour Movement member, Zionist and war criminal, Ivor Caplin.
Many of the victims of Labour’s
witchhunt are well known, but Riad was one of the less well-known ones. Riad
had come to Britain as a young man in order to train as a skilled engineer in
the oil industry. When the West embarked on hostilities with Iraq Riad threw
himself into campaigning first against the West’s murderous sanctions on Iraq
and then into the anti-war movement.
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| Tam Dalyell - immaculate in the summer heat in Iraq |
Riad worked closely with
three Labour MPs – Tony Benn, George Galloway and Tam Dalyell - in the fight against sanctions and Friendship
Across Frontiers, (FAF) the organisation he set up to oppose them. Jeremy Corbyn too was part
of the campaign and must have known Riad yet he didn’t, as leader, lift a
finger to help Riad.
In the interests of
appeasing reactionary creatures like Caplin, who were busy stabbing him in the
back, Riad was thrown under the bus by Corbyn. In any other circumstances the
suspension of Corbyn by Keir Starmer might seem like poetic justice.
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| Add caption |
Shortly before he died,
with the help of Caroline O'Reilly from Brighton & Hove
Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Frances Clark-Lowes, an autobiography covering the life of Riad, from
prosperous oil engineer and businessman to anti-war activist, prisoner, peace
campaigner and Labour Party member was published, edited by Francis
Clark-Lowes.
The book has an introduction
by the late Tam Dalyell, who was MP for Linlithgow (formerly
West Lothian), an old Etonian, fierce anti-imperialist and idiosyncratic member of the Campaign
Group. He was the first Father of the House, serving for 43 years as an MP, to be
ordered to withdraw from the House of Commons by the right-wing Glaswegian
Speaker Michael Martin (who would become an early casualty of the Parliamentary
expenses scandal).
In his introduction
Dalyell records the puzzlement of Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s Christian Deputy Prime
Minister and Foreign Minister: We were
dining you; you were dining us. How did all this [the First Gulf War and
the sanctions] happen?’
It is a familiar story of
regimes that do the bidding of US imperialism and bask in their approval only
to be undermined and overthrown when they get too big for their boots. Libya’s
Colonel Ghadaffi and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad received similar treatment. The
only government in the Middle East that hasn’t received this treatment, because
of its special relationship with the United States, is Israel. To a lesser
extent this is also true of Saudi Arabia.
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| Donald Rumsfeld - the United States arms salesman to Saddam |
In the wake of the Iranian
Revolution and the hostage crisis, the West encouraged Saddam Hussein to wage
war on Iran. We supplied him with the weaponry he
needed and Donald Rumsfield played the role of the West’s arms
salesman. Germany was the major supplier of the chemical weapons used
to repulse the Iranian military with the
US coming in second. Later these weapons were used to murder 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. The fact that these same
chemical weapons, which had long been destroyed by 2002/3, provided the pretext
for the invasion of Iraq by Britain and the United States in 2003 demonstrates
the rank hypocrisy of western imperialism.
The US Ambassador in
Baghdad, April Glaspie, gave the green light to Saddam to invade
Kuwait in August 1990, promising that there would be no retaliation and that the
US had no opinion on their dispute with Kuwait. A week later Saddam attacked
and the rest is history.
Although Tariq Aziz was
puzzled, the question is not a difficult one to answer. Having used Iraq to
subdue Iran, whose clerical regime had overthrown the Shah, the US then turned
on the Iraqi regime which was also too independent for their liking. Iraq, just
like Iran today, was seen as a threat to the US and Israel’s hegemony.
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| Riad at his farm near the Euphrates |
Aziz’s words to Dalyell
were to prove prophetic:
People in the
West may think that Saddam and I are awful – but if you get rid of us, what
will follow will be far, far worse.
And so it has proved.
‘Regime change’ was always justified in terms of how terrible a regime was. MPs
like war monger Anne Clwyd bought into the idea of Saddam as a unique monster
amongst angels. But it was all a bloody hypocritical charade. Certainly
Saddam’s Iraq was a vicious and repressive, anti-communist police state but the
West has never objected to such regimes on principle, as we can see with Saudi
Arabia and Egypt today.
The real reason for the
attack on Iraq, as Riad repeatedly pointed out, was that despite attacking Iran
with the blessing of the West, the Baathist regime still maintained its
independence from the United States. Unlike the Gulf regimes and Saudi Arabia it
wasn’t a client regime. Saddam Hussein’s fatal mistake was to believe that in
exchange for acting as the West’s mercenary he would be allowed free reign to
attack Kuwait, a client regime that the West had created through lines drawn in
the sand.
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| Two years ago Riad was laid to rest in a Sussex graveyard near Hassocks |
It has to be emphasised
that Kuwait was an artificial creation of British imperialism. The very name
means ‘small human settlement.’ It
was a small village on the Persian Gulf, a district of Basra in the Ottoman
Empire. It was created as a separate entity in 1921/22 by the British with the
sole purpose of denying Iraq access to the Persian Gulf. In 1920 the Iraq
Petroleum Company had been created, with 95% of the shares going to Britain,
France and the United States.
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When the Kuwaiti Sheikh
was forced to agree, in 1938, to a Legislative Council, the members promptly voted
unanimously to demand unification with Iraq. In March 1939 there was a popular
uprising of Kuwaiti youth, the Free Kuwaiti movement, demanding unity with Iraq.
It was savagely put down by the Kuwaiti Sheikh with the military support of the
British. [see Mechanisms of Western Domination: A
Short History of Iraq and Kuwait, David Klein]
The Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein provided a comprehensive free health care
service for Iraqis and services such as water and electricity were efficient. The
state was certainly repressive but it was also efficient in delivering services
such as education. All of this was destroyed by the imperialist invasion which
targeted and destroyed water treatment plants and power stations. When the US
invaded its troops protected the oil industry and
permitted the national museum, containing priceless artifacts dating back thousands
of years, to be looted and destroyed.
Despite its propaganda
about the invasion in 2003 being a ‘war for democracy’ it was always about one
thing only, control of Iraq’s oil resources. As soon as the United States
installed itself, it set about reversing the nationalilsation of the oil
industry.
The title of this book is
taken from Psalm 137 in which the Jewish exiles, after the destruction of the
first temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, lament their plight and promise
vengeance: ‘By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion’ ending with
‘Oh daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed
shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!’
The Iraqi Jewish community
became one of the largest, richest and most cultured communities in the Middle
East as well as the world’s oldest Jewish community. There are two versions of
the Talmud, the source of halakah, the rabbinical interpretation
of the Bible – the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud. It is the latter which
is the authoritative version.
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| Two giants of the Labour movement - Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell - Corbyn unfortunately was never up to it |
When the State of Israel
was established the Zionists set about destroying this Jewish community. They
were needed because Israel required a Jewish working class to service the
Ashkenazi Zionist ruling class. Zionist agents, who had served in the British
army and Haganah in Iraq during the war had accumulated considerable amounts of
arms which they stored in places such as synagogues. During 1950 and 1951 bombs
were thrown outside places which Jews frequented such as coffee shops, cultural
meeting places and even a synagogue, Masuda Shemtov. The Zionists sought to
simulate anti-Semitism in order to ‘encourage’ Jewish emigration from Iraq.
[See The Zionist Destruction of the Iraqi
Jewish Community and Prophets in Babylon, Marion Woolfson] The result was that by
the end of 1951 just 5,000 out of Iraq’s 120,000 Jews remained in the country.
Riad was born in Basra in
southern Iraq between 1939 and 1941, his actual birthday is unknown. In 1956 he
came to England to study for a diploma in engineering at Southend Technical
College. Shortly afterwards he attended a demonstration in London against the Suez
invasion at which Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn spoke. In 1959 Riad came to
Brighton to study for a higher diploma in engineering. After graduating in 1961
Riad went to the Central Electricity Engineering Board for his post-graduate
studies and in 1962 he got married to Doreen Saunders, a fellow student in
Southend.
On returning to Iraq, Riad
obtained work at a new Russian built power station in Basra as an
engineer. He was to spend his next 8
years working for the Iraqi Petroleum Company. Despite his qualifications he
came up repeatedly against British expatriates whose main interest was in preserving
an all White European monopoly on skilled jobs. One aspect of maintaining
neo-colonial control of the oil industry in the Middle East was maintaining an
unofficial colour bar.
Riad describes how the IPC
had a vested interest in producing the minimum amount of oil in order to keep
the Iraqi government poor and weak. That way the role of foreign oil companies
in running Iraq’s oil production could be maintained.
Following the nationalist
coup in 1958 and the ousting of the British puppet Suez Aneurin Bevan Central
Electricity Engineering Board for his post-graduate studies and in 1962 he got
married to Doreen Saunders Nuri e-Said and King Faisal, the drive was on for
the Iraqisation of the oil industry. Riad describes how he ‘experienced considerable hardship, abuse and discrimination at the
hands of the British staff.’ (16) His wife was allowed to join the British
club in Basra, he was not.
Riad described one
incident in which his British supervisor insisted that he was irreplaceable. It
was only when his request for annual leave was rejected because he could not be
replaced that Riad was promoted! At that
point he was granted 3 months leave only to find, when he came back, that it
was Riad who was in charge!
In 1963 the Baathists came
to power in a CIA-backed coup and their protégé was none other than Saddam
Hussein! In Revealed: how the West set Saddam on
the bloody road to power Patrick Cockburn wrote that
The death lists were drawn up in CIA stations across
the Middle East with the help of Iraqi exiles. In Egypt the agency was helped
by an Egyptian intelligence officer who got much of his information from Saddam
Hussein living in exile in Cairo...
As the CIA lists reached Baghdad the result was a
massacre of extraordinary ferocity. Pregnant women and old men were killed,
some tortured to death in front of their children. Mr Aburish says: “Saddam Hussein, who had rushed back to Iraq
from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture
of leftists in the separate detention centres for the fellaheen [peasants] and
the muthaqafeen, or educated class.”
In
1970 Riad illegally emigrated from the country. After starting work for Shell
he was sent to Kuwait where expatriate Britons were in charge. Kuwait had no
equivalent to Iraqisation and he met the same problem of racism during work.
As
a skilled engineer with many contacts it wasn’t long before Riad set himself up
as a consultant and prosperous businessman before moving to the New Forest in
1984 to set up a poultry farm.
This
was the time of the Iran-Iraq war, ‘the
biggest mistake it, or indeed Iran, ever made. This pointless conflict was
financed and encouraged by the Western world, Russia and China.’
The
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2nd August 1990 ‘marked a crucial turning point in my life.’ Thus began the
institution of crippling sanctions which marked Riad’s entrance into British
politics.
Riad
described the atrocity propaganda which accompanied the West’s campaign against
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. One
particularly famous incident was the appearance on US TV of a distraught
Kuwaiti woman who claimed to have seen Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of their
incubators by Iraq’s military. It was only months later that two New Forest Philipino
nurses who had worked at the hospital revealed that no babies were thrown out
of incubators and that the distressed Kuwaiti ‘nurse’ had never worked
there. She was in fact a member of the
Kuwaiti ruling family!
Throughout
the book Riad calls Israel ‘the Zionist entity’. Riad was a fierce anti-Zionist
who refused to recognise its legitimacy. At times though he ascribes too much
power to Israel. E.g. in the first Gulf War, in order to cement its alliance
with the Arab states, Israel was told, notwithstanding Iraqi missile attacks,
not to take any action that would imperil the imperialist alliance with the
Arab countries.
Riad
was accused by the New Forest Philipino Blairites and people like Ann Clywd as being
a Saddam apologist. This is untrue. He was an Iraqi nationalist and fiercely
resented the devastation of his country. His story is an antidote to the
imperialist narrative which portrayed Saddam Hussein as a one-dimensional monster.
That Saddam Hussein was a brutal and repressive dictator is not in doubt but he
was the creation of the CIA.
Riad
makes a number of criticisms of Saddam Hussein, not least the persecution of
Iraqis of Iranian origin. (p. 305) However it would be fair to say that Riad is
guilty of overlooking the persecution of the workers’ movement and the
destruction of democratic parties, as well as the use of torture and murder by
the ruthless Baathist regime. Riad tended only to see the regime’s achievements
without seeing the cost. As Riad put it:
‘I had no
illusions about the President; he was a man who ruled with an iron hand. So,
however was Stalin, but Churchill didn’t shy away from a friendly relationship
with him.’ (p.305)
Riad
described how Iraq was the only oil-producing country where technology transfer
occurred in the area of engineering design and how, after nationalisation in
1972 Iraq’s Ministry of Oil made strenuous efforts to promote engineering
design. It was this economic nationalism, the desire to achieve economic
independence and not WMD which were behind western sanctions and the 2003
invasion.
Riad
had no hesitation in branding Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait as an unbridled
mistake. This was because:
‘Saddam deluded
himself that he was the supreme leader who could challenge and win against the
regional power Iran. He was duped by the US into attacking this neighbouring
country and the Iraqi people paid for the most stupid mistake of his life with
eight years of carnage and impoverishment.’ (53)
Riad
threw himself into the campaign against sanctions on Iraq. He approached Tam
Dalyell MP and persuaded him to come to Iraq to see for himself the devastation
that had been wrought. As a columnist for New Scientist Dalyell was already
aware of the plight of Iraqi children from a report by Harvard’s Medical School
which described how
‘a country famous
for its medicine… had been reduced to a chronic shortage of drugs and sanction
were hitting the vulnerable, young and old.’
Because
of his contacts with Saddam and the ruling circles in Iraq from his days in the
oil industry, Riad was able to arrange the visit of Tam Dalyell, George
Galloway and Tim Llewellyn, an ex-BBC Middle East reporter, to Iraq to see for
themselves the devastation wrought by sanctions. It was not an easy trip as
there were no flights to Baghdad. Instead they had to fly to Amman and from
there make an arduous journey by car through the desert to Baghdad.
Riad
organised a number of such delegations to Iraq. One such was for the late Sue
Lloyd-Roberts, a BBC journalist, Tam Dalyell and Albert Reynolds, the ex-Taoiseach
of Ireland.
In
1993 Riad set up Friendship Across Frontiers,
at Tam’s suggestion, to campaign against sanctions. It was supported by 32 MPs,
including 22 Labour and 5 Tories. In 1997 Labour was elected to power and Riad
described how
‘I had high hopes
that a Labour government, with its internationalist and anti-imperial
traditions, augured well for Iraq.’
He
was to be disappointed. Blair ‘soon revealed
himself to be an ardent supporter of US policy and also of the Zionist entity.’
As
part of the run-up to the invasion the US Congress passed in 1998 the Iraq
Liberation Act. The Blair government were their willing collaborators. Foremost
amongst the supporters of the sanctions was former firebrand and Anti-Apartheid
activist Peter Hain, by now a Foreign Office minister. During a debate on Iraq
Hain stated that
‘The recent documentary produced by John
Pilger tried to show that sanctions are responsible for the suffering of the
Iraqi people…. It is a lie propagated by Saddam Hussein and his
apologists.’
Hain
was referring to ‘Paying the Price: Killing the
Children of Iraq’.
Because
Riad knew various members of the government from his oil industry days he was
introduced to Saddam Hussein about whom he remarked that ‘those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad’. And western policy had certainly driven
Saddam mad.
Riad’s
assessment of Saddam and Baathist rule was undoubtedly optimistic and
favourable however it is not true that Riad was a Saddam stooge. He wrote:
‘Yes Saddam and
his political party did a lot of harm but equally they contributed to many
popular measures… the loyalty of ministers and officials went right to the top.
Following Saddam’s example they were accountable to themselves and to the
people. Corruption was largely eliminated.’
Riad
undoubtedly turned a blind eye to Saddam’s ruthless elimination of opponents
and fierce repression of the workers’ movement, because of the imperialist
attack on his country. However given the one-sided and hypocritical imperialist
press that left no stone unturned in its
damnation of Saddam, its former favourite, this is not surprising.
A
similar thing happened in 1983 with the invasion of the Falklands/ Malvinas by
the Argentinian Junta. An anti-communist regime which, like Pinochet in Chile Thatcher
had unequivocally supported, suddenly became a fascist monster! British newspapers
which had never uttered a word of criticism about its murder of 30,000 leftists
and the torture of thousands more, suddenly woke up to the Junta’s human rights
abuses.
Riad
was of the opinion that
‘Saddam’s support
for the Palestinians was, unlike that of other Arab leaders, consistent and
generous and inspired admiration across
the Arab and Muslim world.’
Unfortunately
Riad didn’t see that Saddam’s ‘support’ for the Palestinians was not quite as
generous as he made out. Saddam saw support for the Palestinians as a means of
gaining the support of the Arab masses in his battle against the United States
and Britain.
Riad
forgot that Saddam’s ‘support’ including his sheltering of rogue PLO official
Abu Nadel, whose attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in
London in 1982 provided the pretext for the invasion of Lebanon. Saddam, like the
Syrian regime, maintained its own faction within the PLO, in this case the Arab
Liberation Front.
In
the run-up to the invasion the West castigated Saddam for the mass murder of
5,000 Kurds at Halabja
in 1988. However, at the time, the CIA blamed it on Iran. I can remember the
BBC at the time describing it as an ‘alleged’
attack by Iraq.
After
the first Gulf War in 1990 the UN imposed crippling sanctions on Iraq which
devastated the country. It wasn’t the regime which was most affected but
children and poor people. The purpose of the sanctions was to degrade the
economy and turn the people against the regime.
When
Madeline Albright, the US Secretary of State was interviewed by Leslie Stahl on
60 Minutes, Stahl put it to her that:
‘We have heard
that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died
in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’
To
which Albright replied:
‘I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.’ (6.12.96.)
page 303.
The
purpose of the sanctions wasn’t to ensure that Iraq conformed to international
law and rid itself of the weapons of mass destruction that the West had
supplied but a means of waging war by other means. They were the softening up
process that laid the basis for the invasion.
By
Resolution 687 of 3rd April 1991, the UN Security Council established the terms
and conditions for a formal cease-fire between Iraq and the UN. On 18 April
1991 there was established by the Security Council the United Nations Special
Commission (UNSCOM) and the weapon inspectors. From the start, as the UN later
admitted, UNSCOM directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence system
for the United States in violation of its mandate.
Realising
that if the inspectors took their job too seriously it would weaken the case
for war, neo-con Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz charged the CIA to
investigate Hans Blix, the head of the Inspection Commission.
It
was into this scenario that Riad entered. Riad, because of his previous
connections, became involved in the UN’s Oil For Sanctions programme. He argued
that he did this, not for the money he earned but because he wished to help his
fellow countrymen.
The
regime soon imposed a ‘surcharge’ on each barrel of oil ‘lifted’ as a way of
earning foreign currency though they later dropped it as it was more profitable
directing its exports via Jordan whose economy would have collapsed if
sanctions had prevented it trading.
As
Riad observed, one of the consequences of the build up to the war was the
‘working alliance’ between the ‘Great Satan’ the USA and a member of the ‘axis
of evil’ Iran. The US’s attack on the Baathist regime could not help but be of
assistance to Iran strategically. It also ensured that Iran, which armed and
equipped the Badr Brigades and other sectarian militia, confessionalised the
struggle against the USA.
Riad
described a meeting in the summer of 2002 between Ahmad Chalabi, a right-wing Iraqi
exile and US protégé and an Iranian Ayatollah Abdul-Azis al-Hakim and Donald
Rumsfeld with Dick Cheney, the Vice-President joining them via video
conferencing.
Riad
saw the evil influence of Israel everywhere. However although it gave nominal
support to the attack on Iraq, Israel was more concerned about the
strengthening of Iran. I have seen no evidence that Israel played any part in
the decision of the United States to invade. Riad was right to say that the
primary motivation was the US’s determination to regain control of Iraq’s oil
but he was wrong to suggest that protection of the ‘Zionist entity’ figured
prominently.
Those
who paid surcharges for oil lifts including Riad, were acting illegally but
this was in the context of a sanctions regime which was deliberately killing
thousands of Iraqis. However this intentional killing was not illegal. In
addition the British and the Americans were turning a blind eye to those paying
the surcharge and in the end only Riad was singled out for prosecution by the
Serious Fraud Office. The judge at Riad’s trial maintained that his primary
motive for breaking UN sanctions had been private gain but this was a lie. Even
The Times raised
the unfair prosecution of Riad and it was probably the general unease at the
prosecution which led to the Court of Appeal’s reduction by 2 months of his 10
months sentence.
Riad
takes us into the labyrinthine methods of Blair’s drive to war, including what
became known as the ‘dodgy dossier’, which had been ‘borrowed’ from a graduate
student in California to justify making war on Iraq. Robin Cook described it as
‘the most extraordinary failure of
British intelligence.’
Riad
describes the establishment of the Stop the War Coalition on 21st
September 2001, which FAF was involved with. As well as being an anti-war
activist Riad functioned as an unofficial liaison between the Iraqi regime and
the anti-war movement. He helped facilitate Tony Benn’s visit to Iraq shortly
prior to the invasion.
An
estimated 30,000 Iraqi combatants and 7,000 civilians died in the 2003 invasion
compared to 196 of the coalition. Riad describes in all its gory details the
catastrophe that was the Occupation. In particular the disaster that was ‘de-Baathification.’
It was modeled on de-Nazification in Germany except that Baathism wasn’t the
equivalent of Nazism ideologically or politically.
This
fateful decision, which caused the removal within a month of America’s first
plenipotentiary, Jay Garner, and his replacement by Paul Bremer, rebounded on
the Americans. It meant the complete disbandment of the Iraq army. Thousands of
Sunni soldiers and technicians were rendered unemployed together with their
weaponry. It was a recipe for sectarianism as the Shi’ite majority were played
off against the formerly Sunni administrators. It was this decision that led to
the creation of Al Qaeda in Iraq which morphed into ISIS.
There
had been no post-occupation planning. De-baathification had been the brain
child of 2 neo-cons – Douglas Feith and Ahmed Chalabi, an exile puppet of the
Americans who had no base of support in Iraq. Together with Wolfowitz, Cheney
and Richard Perle, a former head of the CIA, they set the seal on the bloodshed
that followed.
The
CIA station chief in Baghdad warned Bremer that firing the technicians who
operated the electric, transportation and water infrastructure of the country
would drive up to 50,000 Baathists underground and that in 6 months they would
regret this decision. As a result of the ensuing violence, by early 2006 the
Lancet estimated that ‘excess deaths’ in Iraq were 654,965 compared to less
than 5,000 coalition deaths.
One
result of America’s divide and rule policy was that Iraq’s religious minorities
– Christians, Sabians and Turkomans - became targets for the sectarian militia.
Riad described how the American occupation regime’s policies amounted to an
intellectual cleansing of the country. ‘The
vacuum created by the purging of Sunnis in high positions was filled by Shias
loyal to Iran.’ (227)
FAF
which had been originally founded to campaign against the sanctions now faced
the occupation of Iraq. Tam Dalyell, its main supporter, retired from
parliament in 2005. Fortunately Harry Cohen, an anti-Zionist Jewish MP, agreed
to become a second patron of FAF. Riad was living proof that the Zionist
accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ against its opponents was a lie.
Riad
described how the Americans lost no time in drafting a new oil law for Iraq. It
allowed production share agreements with foreign oil companies. A poll showed
that 63% of Iraqis opposed this law, but American democracy did not include
matters of the economy.
David
Whyte in the British Journal of Criminology, wrote that:
The scale and
intensity of the appropriation of Iraqi oil revenue makes the 2003 invasion one
of the most audacious and spectacular crimes of theft in modern history. The
institutionalization of corporate corruption that followed the invasion can only
be understood within the context of the coalition forces’ contempt for
universal principles of international law enshrined in the Hague and Geneva
treaties.’ (p.212)
As
Riad remarked of Saddam:
we live in a
hypocritical world in which extreme violence is condemned with great moral
self-righteousness by the very people who initiate yet greater violence and
destruction, and all in the name of democracy and human rights.
Riad
was particularly moved by the capture and sentencing to death in 2010 of Tariq
Aziz, who was not part of the regime’s apparatus of terror. He was a Christian
and a suave diplomat rather than someone with real power. Because of
international pressure Aziz was not executed but allowed to die of cancer.
Riad
describes what he called a tale of two trials.
Firstly that of Blair before the Chilcott Inquiry and then himself at
Southwark Crown Court. Unfortunately the wrong person was sent to prison.
The
Chilcott Inquiry took some 7 years to report and there is no doubt that when it
did finally report with its over 2 million largely unread words, the steam had
gone out of the anti-war campaign.
Riad
heavily criticised the unreality of Chilcott for arguing that oil and Palestine
didn’t fit within his remit. It was abundantly clear that oil and strategic
hubris were the main reasons for the invasion.
The
second trial was of Riad himself. Riad was singled out amongst the thousands
who breached the UN sanctions regime, itself a breach of international law, for
punishment because of his anti-war activities.
On
7th August 2008 Riad and his then partner, Charmaine, were woken by more
than 20 police officers early in the morning. Between March 2010 and 2011 Riad was tried. As he remarked
If what I did was
considered worthy of prosecution, then the charge should have been applied to
all those who lifted oil under the oil-for-food programme during the period
between 2000 and 2002, not to me and my co-Defendant alone. After all, the SFO
had only to look at the Volcker Report to know who the main culprits were.
When
Deputy First Secretary at the British mission in New York, Carne Ross, was
cross-examined, he confirmed that the government had turned a blind-eye to the
payment of a surcharge. Riad’s legal team however agreed to his trial being
linked to that of a Pakistani oil-trader, Aftab Hasan. ‘Unlike his position, mine was one of principle and patriotism’.
Hasan was in it for the money, unlike Riad, so it was a particularly stupid decision
of his legal team. As a result Riad was coerced into pleading guilty. The Judge
let it be known that if he did not plead guilty and was convicted he could get
up to 7 years in prison. That is British justice.
Not
only did Riad serve a few months in prison, mainly Wandsworth but also Ford in
West Sussex but he was ordered to pay £500,000 ‘compensation’.
The
final injustice was being expelled on a trumped up pretext from the Labour
Party. The recent EHRC Report complains that Corbyn’s team interfered in some of
the disciplinary proceedings. The real complaint should be that Corbyn, in his
terminal stupidity, refused to intervene in cases like that of Riad and instead
allowed crooked McNicol, the General Secretary, to harass his supporters.
Riad
had only recently been elected to the General Committee of Hove Labour Party
and as someone on the left was seen by Caplin as a threat to his erstwhile
boyfriend, the current MP Peter Kyle. Caplin, a crook who had figured
prominently in the parliamentary expenses scandal, refused to
pay back the £18,000 that he owed. This however was not deemed
worthy of expulsion.
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| Ivor Caplin - the corrupt Zionist and former Hove MP who fingered Riad |
Caplin
had been a junior Defence Minister in 2003 at the time of the Iraq War. I can
remember him cowering in his office at Portslade Town Hall whilst we were
outside protesting. Riad had fought and taken risks, including serving a prison
sentence, in order to undo the damage caused by Caplin and New Labour. The
failure of Corbyn and the Momentum left to squash McNicol’s tawdry expulsion,
without anything like a hearing, is a testament to how bankrupt they were.
Riad
was a fervent opponent of Zionism but his analysis of the Israeli state often attributed
to it powers it didn’t have. Riad called the Arab Spring ‘the Arab disaster’,
which it did indeed turn out to be, but that was because of the fierce
counter-reaction and in particular the efforts of the Saudis and the Gulf
regimes to confessionalise the struggle of the Syrian people. However he was
wrong to attribute the fall of Egypt’s President Mubarak to the belief by
Israel that he was a ‘spent force’. Israel’s leaders, including the Zionist
‘dove’ Shimon Peres expressed
their anguish at Mubarak’s ousting and no doubt
played a part in the overthrow of the Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
 |
| Peter Kyle - the racist MP for Hove and Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Israel |
Riad
ends the book with a poem by Karen Audin, his yoga teacher and lover, which
gave him comfort while in prison:
They may have taken away my
liberty
But there is a peaceful
place
That I can see
So when at times it seems
too much
I know I can just get in
touch
With that stillness that
resides in me
The place where I am always
free.
Despite
his ordeals Riad found friendship and comradeship amongst fellow party members
in Brighton and in Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign. There will always be a place in our hearts
for our steadfast comrade Riad el-Taher.
Tony Greenstein
Riad’s
book can be ordered from New Generation Publishing, 2018, ISBN
978-1-78955-323-9 (hardback) & ISBN 978-1-78955-3122-2 (paperback).
Prices on Amazon are £23.99 hardback and £17.99 paperback. However
you can also order it from Francis Clark-Lowes, on special offer while stocks last, at the
following prices by contacting fclarklowes@gmail.com
Hardback without pictures: £10 + £3 p&p within the UK (online link to pictures)
Paperback without pictures £6 + £3 p&p within the UK (online link to pictures)
Paperback with pictures £12 + £3 p&p
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