Bonjour mes chers amis und guten tag. Wilkommen in Old Europe.
Thank you for coming here today and showing that we will not be silent now that the invasion has started. I know that there are thousands of people taking action elsewhere to day against this unnecessary war: this illegal war. For example, my Green Party colleague Caroline Lucas is joining the protestors at the peace camp at Fairford airbase, home of the B-52s.
This week, the people of South Kurdistan (Northern Iraq) have been commemorating the horrendous gas attacks at Shekh Wassan and Halabjah. They have also been remembering Anfal - the deliberate policy of genocide carried out by Saddam Hussain against the rural Kurds. We should also remember his ongoing destruction of the Marsh Arabs and his vicious oppression of his country's population.
I want to make that point, because those of us who oppose this war are often accused of being apologists for Saddam Hussain and we are not. We are people who are consistent in our support for human rights and justice - not just when it suits us to remember because we have decided that our economy is in a bad way and we need a war, with some nice juicy reconstruction contracts for the big companies that supported our election campaign, which is what George Bush is currently working on. EU Commissioner Poul Nielssen this morning described these proposals as having "the smell of oil". He is right.
Presumably it will be the revenue from oil sales which will pay for the reconstruction. Yet we have been told that this money will be put in trust for the Iraqi people - which really means for the benefit of George Bush's friends.
Who helped create the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein?
The Tory government which, one week after the gassing of the Kurds, doubled Iraq's credits for the purchase of British arms.
The 150 companies from some 15 countries (including Chancellor Kohl's Germany, the UK, France, Russia, Belgium, Spain, China) which supplied armaments and the components for chemical and biological warfare. Such as the US company American Type Culture Collection which supplied biological agents.
We are now facing the results of this international willingness to trade the human rights of the people in Iraq for profit. The attacks our governments now fear from chemical and biological weapons and dirty bombs are the result of their own actions coming full circle.
If , and I say, IF - Bush, Blair, Aznar, Howard (the Australian PM) are so concerned now about weapons of mass destruction, they must stop supplying them and they should give up their own - no more double standards. They have to work for effective international treaties on chemical weapons, nuclear and biological weapons and stand by them - support real law and not gun law.
Geoff Hoon's refusal to rule out the use of weapons such as cluster bombs and depleted uranium ordinance was, I believe, truly wicked. They reek terrible and ongoing devastation and add to the miseries of a people already weakened by years of sanctions and the other after-effects of the last war. If you truly want to reduce civilian deaths, you outlaw such weapons and try those who sanction their use for crimes against humanity.
The so-called "Coalition of the Willing" is only too willing to dump their international undertaking to uphold the law whenever it suits them. That is a dangerous message to send to an increasingly unstable world: a world which sees that if you have the firepower, you can do as you choose.
This illegal war will create more problems than it solves. The ceasefire in Turkey between the Kurds and the Government is becoming more fragile, as the Turks move troops in to South Kurdistan. The recent deaths in Kashmir tell us that the nuclear powers of Pakistan and India are a real and present danger. Palestinians are still being forced from their villages in to no-man's land and their oppression continues. There is huge unrest developing in the Arab world and in Moslem countries. We are seeing new divisions appearing in Europe, when we had hoped we were healing the divisions of the past.
This war is dividing the world.
It is illegal.
It
is immoral.
It won't stop the spread of terrorism.
It won't make the world
a safer place.
To create a world which is more just and more peaceful: our governments can start by taking weapons home rather than bodies.
Stop the war. Start the peace.