'No war' banner from tank peace camp
Court report: Day 3
Our volunteers today told Southampton Magistrates Court that they had been prepared to stay chained to ministry of defence property as long as possible, in order to prevent war in Iraq.
The activists attached themselves to tanks inside the Marchwood Military Port, and to the facility's front gates, in February 2003 - when the UK government was preparing to follow the US into war.
Defendant Richard Watson told the court that considering the military was preparing to take equipment from Marchwood to Iraq, and use it to "blow up innocent people", he was prepared to damage a small section of chain-link fence, "in order to save lives".
Ashby Smith, from the USA, said she took action on the day in question because she wanted to stop the war, in part by physically preventing a tank from going to the Gulf, and also by trying to influence the UK government, as the US president had said he might not go to war without British backing.
Fellow defendant Oliver Knowles said he thought long and hard about taking action, and decided to do so after imagining what it would be like if another country had launched a military attack on his homeland, killing his family and destroying his neighbourhood. Such a war, he said, would almost certainly encourage terrorism. "For me the war was counter-productive - it actually served to make the world a more dangerous place".
Laura Yates told the court that just days before she went to Marchwood, she had read that the US and UK might use nuclear weapons in Iraq. "The threat that nuclear weapons may be used in the war was something that greatly concerned me," she said.
Robin Oakley said the weapons used in the conflict and the tactics employed by the US - such as large-scale attacks with cluster bombs and daisy cutters - would "amount to war crimes". These and other fears led to his decision to take action, in a bid to encourage others to do the same, and thus put so much pressure on the government that the domestic cost of going to war would be too great for Tony Blair to ignore.
Executive director Stephen Tindale was called to give evidence regarding Greenpeace's position on the war, and the events leading up to 4th February. He described how we had been issued with an injunction ordering our activists not to board any military vessels in the area. In addition, the Rainbow Warrior's anchor chain had been cut and it was towed from the area. These events turned our thoughts to doing actions on land.
We were against the war for several reasons, mainly because "we feared it would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster" and we "doubted whether the war was necessary to achieve the professed aim of dealing with weapons of mass destruction." Greenpeace has worked on the issue of weapons of mass destruction for 30 years, and we know that the international protocols in place to deal with them are being undermined by the Bush administration itself.
"We felt that the alleged concern about weapons of mass destruction could not be a key motive for invading Iraq," Tindale said. "In our view, the key motive was to gain control of Iraqi oil reserves."
Both the US and UK are dependant on oil, and a Deutsche Bank report found that if weapons inspectors succeeded, French, Russian and Chinese oil companies would benefit most, because they had already agreed contracts with Saddam Hussein. "If there was regime change, the US oil companies and BP would be extremely well placed to win lucrative contracts."
Finally, we believed that the war was illegal without a second UN resolution.
The hearing will continue tomorrow, and District Judge Woollard is expected to hand down his ruling next Tuesday.
