On the 24th October this year, the Syria Solidarity Campaign held a demonstration outside the Russian Consulate opposing Russia’s growing military presence in Syria. The Russian government had recently said they would increase their military support of Bashar-al Assad.
After arriving late to the demonstration (I got myself lost and found myself waiting outside the Russian Embassy alone), I was disheartened to see a small crowd, made entirely up of Syrians, taking down their banners and placards. As I chatted briefly to some, I discovered that there had only been three non-Syrian protesters standing amongst them. There was no sign of the anti-war Left.
The British anti-war movement has been dominated by the Stop the War Coalition for many years. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised to see no Stop the War banners outside that Russian Consulate that day, this is an ‘anti-war’ organisation that has indulged Putin’s imperialist actions in the past so why would they change now? They defended Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, as a reaction to “the ambition of the USA to exercise global hegemony”, and have previously excused Russian’s expansionism in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.
I went to that demonstration because I believed that Russian airstrikes would lead to civilians casualties (this has been proven by documents leaked to Amnesty International), but also because I felt that their support of Assad, in light of his crimes, was a betrayel of the Syrian people.
It cannot be stated clearly enough — the vast majority of civilians deaths in the Syrian civil war have been attributed to General Assad. Figures from the Syrian Network for Human Rights, suggest that since March 2011, 180,879 civilians have died at the hands of his forces.
To not oppose Russia’s support of Assad’s civilian bombing campaign, while simultaneously organising against British bombing of ISIS, pits you not only against Syrian revolutionaries — but also against Syrian doctors, against Syrian White Helmets rescue volunteers, and against Syrian civil society activist currently fighting to protect their country.
I do not doubt that Stop of War’s intentions were originally noble. But I believe their ‘anti-imperalist’ world-view has left them morally blinded.
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The first poll of Syrian refugees in Europe has torn up some of our assumptions about the war in Syria and subsequent refugees crisis.
With our media’s focus primarily on the medieval barbarism of ISIS and their threat to Britain, we have been given the impression that IS are the driving force behind Syrian peoples’ mass exodus of their country. However the responses from this survey of Syrian refugees, carried out by The Syrian Campaign, shows that it is in fact the state-orchestrated bombing from Assad’s regime that the majority are fleeing.
Of those interviewed, only 8% of the refugees want to stay in Europe indefinitely, and over half said that Bashar Al-Assad must leave power before they would return home. The evidence from this survey backs up what Syrian civil groups have been arguing for years — for peace to be brought to Syria we must begin with implementing no fly zones, no-bombing zones and safe zones, to prevent further killings my Assad’s serial raids.
As I mentioned in part 1, Stop the War’s silence over Russian intervention in Syria has been damning. It is clear that the Stop the War Coalition will only attack imperialism if it is imperialism of ‘The West’. StW’s National officer John Rees even defended this stance on the grounds that “the main enemy is at home”.
Their approach has erased the agency of Syrian people engaged in struggle with the regime. Outright apologists for the Assad regime have been ‘central to developing Stop the War position on the conflict’. This comes as little surprise, as Stop the War’s vice-president is Kamal Majid, who previously described the Assad family as rulers “with a long history of resisting imperialism” who must be supported “because their defeat will pave the way for a pro-Western and pro-US regime”. Moreover George Galloway, a high profile and central figure within Stop the War, has previously hailed General Assad as the ‘last arab leader’ and praised the leaders ‘reforming zeal’.
Stop the War are extremely skilled organisers, and their emotive sloganeering captures the imaginations of the agitated, mainly young, but broad Corbynite left. But behind the placards with blood-stained imagery and cries of ‘give peace a chance’, lies a group who have repeatedly silenced the Syrian civilians groups they claim to fight for. For their words ‘Don’t Bomb Syria’, to have any meaning, they mustn’t be sung by a group who dance to a Baathist tune.
Stop the War repeatedly invites openly pro-Assad speakers to their events. These have included Issa Chaer, who previously described Assad on Iranian state television as “the person who is now uniting the country. The Syrian people have confidence in President Assad and this confidence gives President Assad the strength to carry on”.
They’ve also invited Mother Agnes, a Catholic nun working in Syria to speak alongside the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. She has been on record as saying that the video of the August 21 sarin gas attack on Ghouta in Damascus by the regime, was staged by the Syrian opposition.
She claimed that the corpses of gassed children that appear in the video were not really corpses at all, but rather ‘seem mostly sleeping’ and ‘under anaesthesia’.
Peter Bouckaer of Human Rights Watch has refuted her claims: ‘There’s just no basis for the claims advanced by Mother Agnes’ and ‘no evidence to indicate any of the videos were fabricated’.
Stop the War have also prevented Syrian activists and victims of Assad’s crimes to speak at their anti-war events. StW argued later that it was “not appropriate” to hear from Syrians if they did not clearly oppose military intervention.
Stop the War’s treatment of anti-Assad Syrian democrats and left-wingers has been shameful. The Syrian revolution did not fit with the frameworks and alliances that dominated the British anti-war movement, so they created an insidious narrative in which the US and British governments’ desire to topple Assad was presented as the main threat to Syria.
By framing the Syrian opposition has nothing but jihadi extremists and agents of imperialism, they have betrayed the non-violent, secular, democratic, local community and non-aligned opposition to the regimes tyranny.
I hope that some of my friends who attended the Stop the War led demonstration outside the House of Parliament on the 2nd of December read this article. Many of my friends felt strongly about protecting the lives of civilians and deeply cared for the people of Syria. I hope they understand that Stop the War does not represent their views. I hope to instead point them towards the Syria Campaign, Syrian Solidarity UK and Planet Syria, and the valuable work these groups are doing.
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Stop the War Coalition formed in 2001 in response to the NATO invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. Originally a broad coalition, Stop the War soon fell under the effective control of the Socialist Worker’s Party in 2003. Senior members of the SWP, Lindsey German, Chris Nineham and John Rees organised the founding meetings, and are still all kicking about in senior roles within the organisation today.
Stop the War’s high-water mark was in 2003, when they helped organise the demonstration against the invasion of Iraq, when famously over a million people marched in the streets of London. However since then the fortunes of the organisation have fluctuated. For a long while they were seen as being on the hard-left periphery of British Politics, but the election of their Chairman Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader has changed this somewhat. Stop the Wars’ outlook and foreign policy stance is now firmly in favour within Corbyn’s leadership clique.
I believe this is damaging not only to the Labour Party but to the Left in Britain as a whole. Since that day in 2003, Stop of War have repeatedly discredited themselves and their name, and in doing so, have tarnished the anti-war movement in this country.
The warning signs were there already in heady days of 2003. Nick Cohen plotted early on the worrying trend perpetuated by Stop the War and others, in silencing the democratic movement in Iraq that wanted regime change. Soon after the invasion of Iraq things got worse, denial of democratic forces turned into outright collusion with their enemy. John Rees, a leader of Stop of War and Respect wrote this in 2006: “Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.”
During the Iraq War, Stop the War threw support around the fascistic Iraqi ‘resistance’, wishing them on to victory by ‘any means necessary’. This was a resistance that had murdered trade unionists, attacked polling stations, and raged jihad against the wrong sort of Muslim.
When Labour Friends of Iraq endorsed “the UN-backed elections and constitution-building process”, they were accused of being quislings by George Galloway — another high profile member of Stop the War.
The apologia, the denial and reductionism of tyranny — these things all disgusted me. I thought the Left stood for internationalism against all forms of tyranny, no matter who they were or where they lived.
It was my repulsion of comment like this that help me find my political feet. I had always seen myself as a socialist and of the Left, but this wasn’t my socialism.
Stop the War have posted articles on their website advocating war with Israel; take this into consideration when you wonder if their pacifism is pure. They continue that dark trend amongst the Left in recent years, a barely concealed anti-semitism frothing at the mouth.
A few years later as Jeremy Corbyn surged to a lead in the polls for the Labour party leadership I kicked and screamed and begged my friends not to support him. Here stood a man so lost in his high ideals, that he stands shoulder to shoulder with violent reactionaries and cannot see a problem with it.
Under the guise of Palestinian solidarity, Jeremy Corbyn has praised Hamas, an organisation which cites the Qur’an in its Covenant when justifying the eradication of Israel and the extirpation its citizens. Hamas, who shut down and murdered trade unionists in Gaza. When he invited them to Parliament, I said, along with many others, ‘Not in my name’.
Even now Stop the War continues to bring more shame upon itself. Their membership may have declined since 03 but the leadership has stayed essentially the same — their mindsets’ fixed, they sink deeper into anti-imperialist self-flagellation. Moments after the horrific attacks in Paris last month, Stop the War posted a comment on their official twitter suggesting victims of the Paris attacks were “reaping the whirlwind of western support for extremist violence”. Now, there is little I can add to this disgraceful comment, but I feel this quote represents my very clear view –
“I absolutely refuse to associate myself with anyone who cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference between theocratic fascism and liberal secular democracy, even less do I want to engage with those who are incapable of recognizing the basic moral distinction between premeditated mass murder and unintentional killing.” — Christopher Hitchens
I refuse to associate myself with Stop the War and urge my friends and comrades to do the same. When a left-wing and anti-war organisation praises theocratic fascists for their “internationalism and solidarity”, they are lost. Stop the War’s moral compass has well and truly been ground to dust, there is no way back.
