Eamonn McCann - On fucking up the arms trade

Back in June 2008, I was one of nine defendants in the dock in Belfast charged with causing damage of around £300,000 to the Derry plant of the US arms company Raytheon. We admitted doing everything the prosecution alleged we had done, but after nine days of evidence were acquitted, the jury having unanimously accepted our argument that Raytheon had been culpably involved in war crimes and that, far from committing a crime, we had been trying to prevent a greater one.

BOMBING OF YEMEN

Our assault on Raytheon had been prompted by the killing of 28 people in Qana in southern Lebanon in August 2006, crumpled and crushed as they huddled into the basement of a three-storey house for shelter, as they thought, from Israeli war planes. A guided bomb unit (GBU) – “barrack buster” – ploughed down through the building and exploded on impact in the basement

The dead were members of two extended families, the Hashems and the Shaloubs, ages ranging from 75 to nine months.

Raytheon is the fourth largest arms company in the world, the third biggest in the US, and is the sole supplier of GBUs to Israel. In an ideal or even a minimally rational world, a body found by a court to have been complicit in the slaughter of innocent children, women and men would be shunned, unable to show its face in decent company. But not a bit of it. Raytheon is among the largest exhibiters at the annual Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair in Docklands in East London, which ran from September 11th to 15th.

In a pitch to potential buyers, the organisers of the bazaar said that they “have full collaboration and support from the UK Secretary of State for Defence and his ministerial team, and, once again, expect unprecedented levels of attendance from UK government Defence and Home Office ministers, service chiefs of staff and senior MoD officials.” The chiefs of all four of the UK’s armed services will be on hand, as well as five cabinet ministers.

Other countries which sent high-level political and military delegations include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates Turkey, Israel, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Pakistan, India… Another India-Pakistan war would be a veritable bonanza time for Raytheon, Lockheed (Hellfire, Javelin missiles), BAE Systems (Typhoon fighter jets), Airbus (Tornados), MBDA (Brimstone missiles) etc., etc.

The Saudi dictatorship has been using mainly UK weapons in reducing Yemen to rubble and blood. Thousands have perished, millions have fled, four fifths of the population is in dire need of aid, famine is tightening its grip, misery and despair everywhere. The UK has licenced the sale to the Saudis of £3.3 billion of weaponry since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015. Every bomb which splatters an innocent family can readily be replaced. More where them came from…

RAYTHEON GONE

All arms companies have a business interest in bloodshed.

Those on the receiving end of the death machines on display in Docklands are the likes of Sanna Shaloub. She lost a dozen members of her extended family in the Qana atrocity, including her mother and father. I sat with her sipping sweet tea in her home on a visit to Qana some months after we’d been charged. She was 18. I wrote here about her when I came back. She told me: “Normally when I am scared I cry out for my mother and father. I stood up and shouted, ‘Mum, dad, 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… If I could have just one moment from the time they were alive, 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. There are still some of their clothes by the side of the road. I look at them and remember…

“Now all my thoughts are political… Could it happen that the day will come when I will seek revenge against the Americans and the Israelis… Could it happen that I will see myself avenging my parents’ death with my own hands? 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 sisters. It makes me feel happier.”

There is all we need to know about hatred in the Middle East, and where its source is to be located.

Of course, the destruction of lives and the blight forever on the lives of those left behind didn't disturb the business-like calm at Docklands. The world is full of implacable people with stone hearts and murder in mind, most of them in good suits.

Raytheon is gone from Derry, chased out in the end by nine women who re-occupied their plant in 2009 and spelt it out that they’d be back and back again until the death-makers skedaddled.

Doing my bit to fuck up Raytheon was the best thing I’ve ever done. Fucking up the arms trade remains a high duty for the whole world.