The Raytheon 9 – a group of protestors who, during the 2006 Israeli assault on Lebanon, undertook the “decommissioning” of the Derry office of the Ratheon corporation whose weapons were doing all the killing – have been found not guilty by unanimous jury of three counts of criminal damage.
The prosecution could produce not a shred of evidence to counter our case that we had acted to prevent the commission of war crimes during the Lebanon war by the Israeli armed forces using weapons supplied by Raytheon.
We remain proud of the action we took and only wish that we could have done more to disrupt the ‘kill chain’ that Raytheon controls.
This victory is welcome, for ourselves and our families, but we wish to dedicate it to the Shaloub and Hasheem families of Qana in Lebanon, who lost 28 of their closest relatives on the 30 July 2006 due to a Raytheon ‘bunker buster’ bomb….
We said from the beginning that we came to this court not as the accused but as the accusers…
We’ve been saying it all along: these are illegal attacks, proscribed by international law and, as such, any attempt to thwart them can be defended under UK law.
It is, of course, possible, to take this line of argument too seriously (I myself have had to be taken to task over my international law naivety). The law is not neutral, rather it serves to defend the status quo, and emerging from a society rife with class division and class oppression it’s definitely not our status quo that is up for defending. The Iraq war was illegal because of the lack of UN Security Council organisation, but it would have been no less immoral if the rulers of France, Russia, China and the rest had also thought it was a good idea. Even then there is sufficient nuance for Brown and Blair to have avoided the Hague thus far.
The law is not our law. Nevertheless, as the Raytheon 9 have shown, we can use it. The aggressions of the West – and especially of Israel, whose actions have been condemned by the UN more often than all other countries put together – often reach the point where they even break their own laws, and when their system will not uphold their laws it is possible for us to do so. This can have a real and immediate effect on preventing war crimes, but it also challenges their legitimacy in a big way – and it gets the argument over what is and what isn’t a war crime into the court room far more effectively than any lobbying the ruling class for the trial of Tony Blair or the impeachment of Bush.
What does this mean in practice? The invasion of Iraq was one thing, but the occupation is quite another; appalling, yes, but illegal? Not convincingly. However, the occupation leads to a situation of war between the occupiers and the civilian population, and in this context war crimes are committed – particularly in Fallujah, and more recently (and, I suspect, repeatedly into the foreseeable future) in Sadr City. These we can challenge. And Israel’s treatment of the West Bank and Gaza is in systematic contravention of international law and if we act against this we have the law behind us. As for a potential invasion of Iran – we’ll just have to hope that Russia and China keep this from ever being rubber-stamped.
These are things to bear in mind over the coming months and years; in the coming days there’s already a meaningful act of defiance to be taken. The StWC protest at Bush’s visit to London has been banned – so yis’d all better be there. Sunday at 5pm, Parliament Square.
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