Protests against war with Iraq are just beginning

As soon as Tony Blair announced earlier this week that the weapons inspectors in Iraq must be given "more time", it felt as though a breathing space had been won. And yet on the ground the build up to war continued, and the American leaders continued their relentless rhetoric.

The sense that so many people have of a growing distance from politics has never been so clearly shown as by this apparently inexorable movement towards war. Here we are, living in a country where at least 40 per cent of the population are not in favour of this war, and another 20 per cent are undecided, and yet ships are already being chartered to move tanks and weapons to the Gulf.

But the fury that one might expect to arise from such a situation has not yet erupted; the protests are muted and the political debate around the war remains surreptitious, full of unattributed predictions and rumoured rebellions. Wait and see, our politicians tell us; and we do.

Those who are against war seem to be looking to other, more powerful people to raise the issues for them; dissenting ministers, for example, or the leaders of other countries. And you can see why that is.

Against such potential sources of resistance, what power does your average demo have? Could it possibly be that Blair will be moved by the forthcoming action at Northwood military base? Is there any chance that Geoff Hoon will have his conscience pricked by the promised multi-faith service at the gates of the base?

But that does not make the actions of protesters pointless. The form of protest that has hit the headlines in recent days is that of those British and American people who have decided to travel to Iraq. There is a contingent of them who call themselves "human shields" and who seem to believe that the very presence of a few Westerners in Baghdad will turn our leaders back from dropping their bombs.

But most of those people whom I have spoken to who have returned from Iraq or who are planning to go there as part of anti-war protests are not taken by this naive idea of being a "human shield", either for Saddam Hussein or for the Iraqi people. Rather than turning themselves into shields, they want to be messengers.

As Matt Barr, who is planning to leave for Iraq in a few days, told me: "I see my main role as trying to change public consciousness at home." Above all, the protesters I have spoken to want to remind people of that pressing moral truth: that any civilian who is killed in war or terror has equal value, whether they are a fireman in New York or a child in Baghdad.

Too easily do our politicians and commentators discount the deaths that may be caused by a war, the irreducible terror that a war creates, moment by moment, whatever its final outcome.

Colleen Kelly, who has travelled to Iraq with a group called Peaceful Tomorrows, lost her brother at the World Trade Centre. "It has struck me," she said before she left for the Middle East, "how many people in this country were so very moved by The New York Times's Portraits of Grief. We all got to see the faces and learn about the lives of those lost on 11 September. I am going to Iraq for this very same reason. I want to see the faces of the Iraqi people."

Talking recently to some British and American people who have come back from Iraq or who are planning to go there with another group, called Voices in the Wilderness, I heard this theme again and again. What these protesters say they want to do is centre the debate in the West on the real people who are hurt by war.

This may sound fantastically obvious, but it is actually incredibly difficult. For instance, who is talking about the fact that, due to the devastation of the economy that has already occurred in Iraq, the bulk of the population are dependent on government rations for survival? If those are disrupted, then ordinary families will face terrible suffering. How can we be sure that such suffering, aside from deaths caused directly by the war, will be made worthwhile by the final outcome?

It is easy to damn such protesters for being naive, and glossing over the violence that Saddam Hussein does, daily, to his own people. But that is to assume that war is the best way to deal with such violence. All the Iraqis in exile that I have spoken to tell me that their friends and families see war not as a possible route to safety, but as the great terror ahead. Who is really naive, those who believe that war is a route to peace, or those who believe that war is irreducibly war?

Perhaps the first objective of any protest right now is, as these protesters put it to me, simply to try shift the focus of the debate, so that we speak less about the electoral outcomes for George Bush or possible splits in the Labour Party, and more about the real, grounded effects of any war.

But there is also another objective: to remind politicians that there will certainly come a point when more and more people will start to turn from apathy to action. As war gets closer, there will be far more activity on the streets that will reflect the growing frustration of people who are tired of being able to voice their dissent only to pollsters. This may be, in more ways than one, the lull before the storm.

n.walter@btinternet.com