Eamonn McCann in Lebanon

[Louis P. Burns aka Lugh]

Eamonn McCann in Lebanon:

'There’s no profit in peace for Raytheon'

When an Israeli warplane killed 28 civilians sheltering in Qana, south Lebanon, activists in Derry occupied the offices of the arms maker Raytheon. A year later Eamonn McCann reports from the village on a moving tribute

It was the sudden eruption at the back of the room upstairs at Sandino’s bar which brought us eventually to the burial ground at Qana. At the edge of the Lebanese village, pictures of each of the 28 victims were displayed on a wall around the canopied space where the graves are laid out in a precise, neat pattern by the spot where the building they were crushed under once stood.

Mayor Mohammed Atiya made a formal speech of welcome while relatives of the dead stood sentinel by the graves. Shane Cullen, who had designed the memorial plaque we’d brought over, explained that it had been hewn from Irish blue limestone because we wanted “to leave a little bit of Ireland here in Qana, as a sign of our sorrow”.

I talked of how we’d heard of the massacre and why we’d occupied the Raytheon arms facility in Derry in response. Goretti Horgan sang a Gaelic lament. Jimmy Kelly played the tin whistle.

Afterwards, we were invited into the homes of some of the victims where we sat around awkwardly and sipped the glasses of sweet tea that were offered to us everywhere in Lebanon.

Our hearts grieve with yours, I told Maryam Shaloub, who had moved into the home of her sister to look after what was left of the family. Five had been among the 28 who’d perished in the basement when a Raytheon bunker-buster had brought the house where they’d sought shelter tumbling down.

Some were squashed to death, some choked on dirt and debris. Most were children.

She bustled around, affecting crossness with two teenage survivors for being tardy with the tea, then beaming with pride at how well they are doing in school.

We grieve for our loneliness that those we loved are not here, she said with a determined smile of seeming serenity. But we do not grieve that they are dead. We are joyful to know they are in paradise. They are martyrs now.

But there was no semblance of joy from Hala, who had lost her husband, her two children, her mother and father, sitting on the sofa alongside me, stiff, immobile, unspeaking, impenetrable, her face a mask of frozen pain.

Although we’d had no real appreciation at the time of the depth of the anguish which had hollowed happiness out from the families of Qana, this was the reason we’d trashed the Raytheon plant.

The meeting had been called by the Derry Anti-War Coalition (DAWC) on 2 August last year to hear from Joshua Casteel, a former US army interrogator at Abu Ghraib, and Iraqi lawyer Hani Lazim. But the focus of discussion turned quickly to Lebanon and Qana.

For two days, television bulletins and newspapers had featured pictures of children being carried in dripping bundles from the crumpled ruin.

“We have to do something,” came the angry roar from the rear. “Raytheon’s down the road. Derry’s a total disgrace.”

The meeting voted to protest at the Raytheon premises, and scheduled a gathering five days later to decide on the detail of what would be done.

US company Raytheon is one of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers, with 73,000 employees in 45 countries and 2006 sales of $20.3 billion.

It specialises in electronic guidance and control systems for weapons, including the Patriot, the Sidewinder, the Sea Sparrow, the Tomahawk, the Maverick, and the bunker-buster Paveway used at Qana, which carries 945 pounds of explosive tritonal, about 80 percent TNT, 20 percent aluminium.

In April this year, Israel ordered 2,000 more units to replenish stores depleted in last year’s bombing of Lebanon.

The arrival of Raytheon in Derry was announced in August 1999 by John Hume and David Trimble on their first joint appearance after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

This was hailed as a down-payment on the “peace dividend” arising from the Belfast Agreement signed the previous year. Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party quickly joined the peace laureates’ parties in praising the company for creating new jobs. None of the parties has flinched from this position.

Everyone at Sandino’s knew it very likely that Raytheon software had guided the Qana bomb (proof, in the form of the code-numbers on fuselage fragments, was soon to come to hand).

We knew also that it would be futile to appeal to the political mainstream to speak against the company’s role.

Nine of us were arrested after eight hours barricaded inside the plant, during which we hurled computers from the windows, used fire extinguishers to put the mainframe out of action and destroyed any paperwork and computer discs we could find. We appeared in court on arraignment on Monday of this week.

The DAWC had thought it appropriate to send a delegation to Qana on the anniversary of the massacre to lay a memorial stone.

The inscription on the stone, in Arabic and English, comprised two lines from the narrative of Bloody Sunday in the Museum of Free Derry and two lines from Patti Smith’s poem, Qana:


Qana, Derry,
The dead lie in familiar shapes.
No-one who yearns for justice
is a stranger,
No-one who dies for justice
is forgotten.
Derry, Qana,
The miracle is love.
One world, one struggle.

The 28 who’d perished came from two extended families, the Hashems and the Shaloubs. They’d been sheltering in a three-storey building at the edge of the village, because it was relatively new and built in the lee of a hill.

They reasoned that it offered better protection than their less sturdy homes. Villages in a strip along the Israeli border had been shelled and attacked by Israeli aircraft for more than two weeks. Qana had been repeatedly hit.

But the two families were among many who had been too frightened to flee to the nearest town, Tyre. The seven-mile highway was a junkyard of houses in rubble and burnt-out cars.

On streets around the Imam Ali mosque today, chunks of concrete and mortar still dangle precariously from crooked iron rods jutting out from rubble and dust.

But much of the village – the location, many believe, of a miracle when Jesus turned water into wine for a wedding feast – has either been rebuilt or resembles a construction site.

On every roof, it seems, young men are hauling buckets of cement and cinder blocks up by pulley. They look mildly curious when our group straggles into view, smile and return thumbs-up signs.

The assault on Lebanon had begun on 12 July, when Hizbollah fighters crossed the border, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. They claimed they intended to bargain the captured men for some of the hundreds of Lebanese held without charge in Israeli jails.

Israel responded by launching a land, sea and air bombardment against southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and south Beirut, and against the infrastructure of Lebanon generally – roads, bridges, ports, power stations, fuel stores, Beirut airport, factories.

Nowhere was remote from the targets. Nowhere was safe.

Lebanon is smaller than Northern Ireland, 135 miles by 50 – hemmed in by Israel, Syria, and the Mediterranean Sea, it has a population of four million.

In the course of the 34 day conflict, Hizbollah was to fire 3,900 rockets into Israel, according to the Israeli government killing 44 civilians and 106 soldiers.

The Israeli airforce, meanwhile, flew 12,000 combat missions and its army fired 100,000 shells, killing 1,200 Lebanese, including 250 fighters, according to Hizbollah, 530 according to Israel.

Villages along the southern border were attacked with particular ferocity – Tiri, Kafra, Zebquin, Aita al-Shaab, Bint Jbiel, Tebnin. But Qana struck a particular chord.

Ten years previously, more than 106 Qana people, 41 of them under 16, had been killed in an Israeli attack on the United Nations (UN) compound where they’d sought refuge.

There had been a chorus of protest across the world, although neither the UN (because of the certainty of a US veto) nor any Western country issued a formal condemnation.

Now the death storm of Israel had swirled across the border again.

At around one in the morning in the house where the two families huddled, as two of the men were making tea, a bomb slammed into the structure.

Perhaps five minutes later, as local people rushed towards the scene and adults inside scrambled amid the smoke and screams to find who’d survived, a second bomb gouged into the earth alongside and exploded.

It seems almost certain it was this second bomb that toppled the building.

Launched

The Israelis claimed their target had been Hizbollah positions nearby from which rockets had earlier been launched.

Ghazi Udaybi rushed to the house when it was hit. He says he and others pulled a number of people clear after the first strike, but could do little after the second bomb struck.

He’s scornful of the Israeli explanation: “If Hizbollah was firing near the house, would a family of over 50 people just sit there?”

Another man recalls voices calling from inside the debris, “Don’t die, Don’t die!” or crying for fathers, mothers, brothers, “Ali! Mohammed! Mama!”

Sanna Shalhoub, 18, round face, bright brown eyes, a smile of instant friendship to greet us, who lost her mother, father, older sister and two younger brothers, readily recites her story for us and an Al Jazeera TV crew covering the anniversary:

“I was scared, but normally when I’m scared I cry out for my mother or father. I stood up and shouted ‘Mum, Dad’. I said, ‘If you can hear me, answer me’. I screamed and screamed but no one answered...

“Before my parents died, it wasn’t like this. We were all together. But after I lost them, my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, there was no love anymore. There are times when I don’t just feel alone in the house or the village, I feel alone in the whole world.

“If I could have just one moment from the time when my mother and father were alive, for them to talk to me or just call my name, I would feel the luckiest person alive.

“Although the place has been knocked down and is just land, I like to go there and sit thinking that this is the place I was sleeping. Here, my brother and I used to eat. Here, my father and mother and I used to sleep. There are still some of their clothes by the side of the road. I look at them and remember how we used to live here.

“Everyone says that we should change these thoughts in our heads and that we must forget, especially the day of the massacre. Before the war, I didn’t believe that there was an enemy watching our every move.

“I didn’t know there was an enemy that was so desperate to destroy Hizbollah. Now, all my thoughts are political. I wonder if the day will come when I will seek revenge against the Americans and the Israelis.

“Could it happen that the tables will turn and I will see myself avenging my parents’ death with my own hands? Inshallah, God willing, it will happen like this.

“When I am lonely, I feel I must change this feeling, so I go to the graveyard. I read the Quran for my parents, talk to my brothers and sister. It makes me feel happier.”

It was 6.30am before ambulances and rescue crews made it through from Tyre, having been turned back three times by continuing bombing.

Bodies dragged from the devastation lay waiting to be loaded into a refrigerated truck. There was a flurry of hope when a baby, Abbas Ahmad Hashim, was cradled out by a medic, tongue protruding from a mouth filled with dirt, but he couldn’t be revived.

By evening, the bodies had been tagged and bagged in plastic and laid out on a floor at the hospital in Tyre.

The women shrouded in black who sat by the grave stones in the gathering dusk as we left, murmuring prayers from the Quran, glanced up and nodded as we presumptuously took pictures and faintly acknowledged our goodbyes.

Children scampering at the edge of the burial place waved and smiled. A man whose back had been broken in the blast and was sitting in a wheelchair, waved and pointed to his lapel to show he was wearing the Black Shamrock badge, symbol of the Irish anti-war movement, which we’d given him earlier.

As our minibus lurched out onto what passes for a main road, we all swivelled and looked back until the village of Qana had passed out of sight.

“I’ll tell you,” volunteered Kieran Gallagher, “Fucking up Raytheon was the best thing I ever did in my life.”

Me, too.


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The victims
Ahmad Mahmud Shaloub, 55; Ibrahim Hashim, 65; Hasna Hashim, 75; Ali Ahmad Hashim, 3; Abbas Ahmad Hashim, 9 months; Hura Muhammad Qassim Shaloub, 12; Mahdi Mahmud Hashim, 68; Zahra Muhammad Qassim Shaloub, 12; Ibrahim Ahmad Hashim, 7; Jafar Mahmud Hashim, 10; Lina Muhammad Mahmud Shaloub, 30; Nabila Ali Amin Shaloub, 40; Ula Ahmad Mahmud Shaloub, 25; Khadija Ali Yusif, 31; Taysir Ali Shaloub, 39; Zaynab Muhammad Ali Amin Shaloub, 6; Fatima Muhammad Hashim, 4; Ali Ahmad Mahmud Shaloub, 17; Maryam Hassan Muhsin, 30; Afaf al-Zabad, 45; Yahya Muhammad Qassim Shaloub, 9; Ali Muhammad Kassim Shaloub, 10; Yusif Ahmad Mahmud Shaloub, 6; Qassim Samih Shaloub, 9; Hussain Ahmad Hashim, 12; Qassim Muhammad Shaloub, 7; Raqiyya Mahmud Shaloub, 7; Raqiyya Muhammad Hashim, unknown

The following should be read alongside this article:
» Maps expose Israeli claims on Qana massacre


For more on the Raytheon campaign go to » www.raytheon9.org


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Source = http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=12935

[Louis P. Burns aka Lugh]

On 11 June 2008, by a unanimous verdict of the jury, the Raytheon 9 were found not guilty of three counts of criminal damage at the Raytheon offices, Derry Northern Ireland on 9 August 2006.

Immediately afterwards, the defendants addressed supporters and press outside Belfast’s Laganside Court. Colm Bryce began:

The Raytheon 9 have been aquitted today in Belfast for their action in decommissioning the Raytheon offices in Derry in August 2006. 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.

Their unimaginable loss was foremost in our minds when we took the action we did on 9 August, and the injustice that they and the many thousands of victims of war crimes in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered, will spur us on to continue to campaign against war and the arms trade that profits from it.

We said from the beginning that we came to this court not as the accused but as the accusers of Raytheon. This court case proved that Raytheon in Derry is an integral part of the global Raytheon company and its military production. This is no longer a secret or in doubt. Raytheon have treated the truth, peaceful protest, local democracy and this court with complete contempt. The most senior executive who appeared said that the charge that Raytheon had ‘aided and abetted’ the commission of crimes against humanity was “not an issue” for him. Raytheon should have that contempt repaid in full and be driven out of Derry and every other place they have settled. They are war criminals, plain and simple. They have no place in our society and shame on all those in positions of power or influence who would hand them public funds, turn a blind eye to their crimes, cover their tracks or make excuses for them.

These crimes continue daily and hourly in the Middle East. It is up to those of us who oppose those wars of domination and occupation to build a movement that matches the enormity of what is being done by Western governments. We hope that this victory gives courage and heart to all those involved in that movement and the many more who need to be for us to achieve our aim of stopping these wars. Until then, the very least we can do, to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the Middle East is to dissociate ourselves from the corrupt governments of the US and Britain. That means opposing the visit to Belfast of the world’s biggest war criminal, George W Bush on 16 June.

We feel totally vindicated by this decision and wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of those who gave us support, especially to our families and friends, to the members of the Derry Anti War Coalition and the Irish Anti-War Movement , to our excellent legal teams. Of course, we particularly want to thank the jury who listened intently through three weeks of evidence before ensuring that justice was done today.




Eamonn McCann then addressed supporters and press saying:

The outcome of this case has profound implications.

The jury has accepted that we were reasonable in our belief that: the Israel Defence Forces were guilty of war crimes in Lebanon in the summer of 2006; that the Raytheon company, including its facility in Derry, was aiding and abetting the commission of these crimes; and that the action we took was intended to have, and did have, the effect of hampering or delaying the commission of war crimes.

We have been vindicated.

We reject entirely and with contempt the statement by Raytheon this evening suggesting that the result of the trial gives them concern about the safety of their employees. This is an abject attempt to divert attention from the significance of the outcome. Not a shed of evidence was produced that we presented the slightest danger to Raytheon workers. The charge of affray was thrown out by the court without waiting to hear defence evidence.

Our target has always been Raytheon as a corporate entity and its shareholders and directors who profit from misery and death.

There is now no hiding place for those who have said that they support the presence of Raytheon in Derry on the basis that the company is not involved in Derry in arms-related production. We have established that not only is the Derry plant involved in arms-related production, it is also, through its integration into Raytheon as a whole, involved in war crimes.

We call on all elected representatives in Derry, and on the citizens of Derry, to say now in unequivocal terms that the war criminal Raytheon is not welcome in our city.

We call on the office of the Attorney General and the Crown Prosecution Service, in light of this verdict, to institute an investigation into the activities of Raytheon at its various plants across the UK, with a view to determining whether Raytheon is, as we say it is, a criminal enterprise.

We believe that one day the world will look back on the arms trade as we look back today on the slave trade, and wonder how it came about that such evil could abound in respectable society. If we have advanced by a mere moment the day when the arms trade is put beyond the law, what we have done will have been worthwhile.

We took the action we did in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter of innocents in Qana on July 30th 2006. The people of Qana are our neighbours. Their children are the children of our neighbours. We trashed Raytheon to help protect our neighbours. The court has found that that was not a crime. This what the Raytheon case has been about.

We have not denied or apologised for what we did at the Raytheon plant in the summer of 2006. All of us believe that it was the best thing we ever did in our lives.

Source = http://www.raytheon9.org/