by Martin Thomas
About 20,000 marched in London on 18 March against US/ UK troops in Iraq, and against war on Iran. Workers’ Liberty activists and others distributed leaflets for the Iraq Union Solidarity campaign, and did a bucket collection for the Iraqi unions which raised £289, about the same as on the bigger demonstration of March 2005 and much more than on the last “Stop The War” demonstration, September 2005.
The “Stop The War” organisers, however, did not share the desire of many demonstrators to hear and support the voice of Iraq’s organised workers. Dashty Jamal, a British representative of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions of Iraq and the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, told Solidarity:
“I went to Parliament Square [the demonstration’s assembly point] with our banner saying ‘US/UK forces out of Iraq, no to America, no to political Islam’ in English and Arabic. Our comrades brought a bookstall, and we put it up near the Churchill statue.
“John Rees and other ‘Stop The War’ people came and told us to move. They said it was their demonstration and they did not want us there. When we refused, they brought an SWP [Socialist Workers’ Party] stall and put it
in front of us, to obstruct our stall.
“I asked them to move their stall and let people get to our stall, but they refused. When I pushed their stall with my hand, they called the police, but the police refused to intervene.
“Then they demanded that we move our banner, which we had put up on the crash barriers surrounding the square, saying that space was needed for an entry to the square.
“When our comrade Nadia Mahmood was being interviewed by Kuwaiti TV, SWP members gathered round and shouted to try to disrupt the interview.
“Later on, in Trafalgar Square [at the end-of-march rally], someone from the Muslim Association of Britain came, together with the platform speaker from the Islamic Party of Iraq, to complain about our banner. They said: ‘We are political Islam. You must remove that banner. You must go out of Trafalgar Square’. We refused”.
The Muslim Association of Britain, a formal co-sponsor of the demonstration (though it appeared to have mobilised little for it), is the British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and richest Islamic-fundamentalist political movement in the Arab world. The Iraq Islamic Party is its Iraqi offshoot.
