Protests too peaceful

By Hasan Suroor

LAST WEEKEND, at the end of the first week of the bombing in Afghanistan, protests were held across Europe demanding an end to the war. In Britain, nearly 20,000 anti- war protesters walked through Central London, while Italy witnessed a huge peace march in which over 200,000 people took part even as their Prime Minister, Mr. Silvio Berlusconi, was in Washington reiterating his Government's solidarity with the coalition. In Germany, rallies were held in Berlin and Stuttgart, where the U.S. European headquarters is located, and in Turkey the protesters targeted a NATO air base near the city of Adana demanding its closure and an end to further strikes against Afghanistan.

Cynics of course said the protesters comprised the ``usual suspects'' - Greens, CND activists and Muslims who see this as a war against Islam. The point was also made that the peace march in Italy was an annual affair, though this time it attracted more people and more attention, and the rallies in Germany simply reflected the increasingly pacifist post-War mood in that country. The significance of the London march was sought to be belittled by comparing it unfavourably with an opinion poll which showed that 75 per cent of Britons backed the military action - and would continue to do so even if there were British casualties. The British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair's personal rating touched an all-time high with even his peacetime critics giving him their full-throated support.

So, are the hawks winning the war? On the face of it, yes, but you do not have to be a soothsayer to get the sense that the support for the war would begin to vanish once the body bags begin to arrive. Already, dissenting voices are increasing as civilian casualties mount and in the Commons this week, the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Jack Straw, was grilled by his own party members one of whom, Mr. George Galloway, called the offensive in Afghanistan the ``equivalent of Mike Tyson in the ring with a five-year-old child... '' So unequal was the fight, he argued.

But the real bad news for the hawks is when the leader writers at The Times,arguably the most gung-ho of the mainstream broadsheets with the exception of The Daily Telegraph,start to sound squeamish. In an editorial early this week, it warned against a protracted air campaign saying that in the absence of a ``clarity of political objective... and the military means... to match it'' the current phase of the U.S. campaign could ``impair'' the broader aim of demolishing the global network of terror. While it wanted the ``military momentum'' to be kept up, it pointed to the danger of a protracted air campaign: ``maximum uproar in the Muslim world and minimum impact on the enemy''.

With reports from Afghanistan warning of starvation, there have been calls from human rights organisations and international aid agencies for a pause in bombing to allow food to reach the people - a demand also raised by peace protesters who argued that subjecting innocent civilians to starvation was not the way to fight terrorism. There was no point dropping food packets which did not reach the right people, and the important thing was to create conditions so that aid efforts could be stepped up, they said. The United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Ms. Mary Robinson, called for a halt in hostilities but such is the pressure to conform that within hours she backtracked, prompting Mr. Jonathan Steele, a seasoned commentator, to remark that her ``backtracking'' was a singular case of how the coalition against terrorism was ``destroying people's ability to think and speak''. ``Some fear that opposing military strikes will be interpreted as condoning the atrocities of that dark day in America. Others worry, their `credibility' may be undermined,'' he wrote in The Guardian.

The humanitarian aspect of the crisis has also been stressed by Britain's Secretary of State for International Development, Ms. Clare Short, a resident peacenik in the Blair Administration who has, however, lost her voice since she joined the Prime Minister's ``war cabinet''. Privately, she still has strong reservations about what is going on in Afghanistan - as do a number of Labour backbenchers and Liberal Democrats. But in a climate of jingoism, anti-war sentiment remains largely suppressed except when it manifests in a collective show as happened last weekend all over Europe. The ``silent majority'', it is believed, is against bombing a country which is already on its knees and whose people have done nothing to deserve this.

``Why are they doing this? What has the man in Afghanistan whose five-year-old child was killed in bombing done to deserve this,'' asked a protester in Italy echoing the widespread view that terrorising innocent people is not the best way to fight terror. Peanut butter and plastic cutlery that comes with it in yellow with-love-from-U.S. food packets are no consolation to those already consumed by the bomb. ``Not in my name,'' said a placard carried by peace demonstrators in London. The argument against bombing innocent civilians is that far from eliminating terrorism there is a risk of laying the seeds for ``more bin Ladens''.

Yet, for all the unease, street protests in the West have been few and far between - certainly nothing on the scale witnessed in Muslim countries - and an organised anti-war movement is yet to take shape, if it does at all considering that 2001 simply lacks the ideological passions of the 1960s and 1970s.

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