The good war?? Afghanistan in the media

So David Miliband believes war in Afghanistan will ‘make us safer here’. 

Furthermore:  This is a mission that’s been developed with a very clear strategy: above all, to make us safer here because we know these areas of Afghanistan and its neighbour Pakistan are used to launch terrorism around the world. So the mission for us is clear.

Well, David Miliband what about the safety of the people of Afghanistan? We know how many soldiers have died but how many thousands of Afghans have died? Over the past week it has been patently clear how unimportant the lives of dead Afghans are as opposed to dead British soldiers.

What about the 140 civilians massacred in Granai on the 4th May 2009? The report into this massacre orchestrated by the American military amounted to a white-wash and cover-up. Maybe Miliband should be forced to view the photographs and video footage of the devastated and destroyed village taken by photojournalist Guy Smallman.

I saw them this evening and listened to Guy’s talk about documenting testimony from villagers in Granai. Photographs of the children were heartbreaking, their eyes deadened to the world. These children are traumatised and numbed by the horrors of war. One picture showed an eight year old who had lost his whole family in this bombing. Truly harrowing and shocking being confronted with the visual narrative of the vileness and barbarism of war.

The military ‘claim’ that they bombed Taliban fighters, around 65 and between 20-30 civilians. Yet the Red Cross estimated that 93 out of the 140 civilians were children. 

There had been a battle battle between Taliban and NATO fighters but it had finished an hour before the B1 bomber attacked the mosque (at 8:44pm)  as people were leaving after evening prayers. The American military ‘claim’ that the mosque was being used by the Taliban, yet there is no evidence that this was the case.

Footage taken by the NATO fighters of Granai  is still secret and classified. Why is that? What are they hiding?

People fleeing from the bombing of the mosque took shelter. At 9.12pm a B1 bomber dropped a 2,000lb guided bomb, people in the epicentre of the blast would have been reduced to dust.

Again, the pictures that show the burial sites are upsetting (one grave has 55 people buried together as they were literally blown to pieces) along with the footage given to Guy by a man who videoed the aftermath of the bombing where you witness men, women and children searching through the bodies to find loved ones. Words cannot describe the scene. I felt overwhelmed with sadness and anger.

If you ever get a chance I recommend that you look at Guy’s photos (he has an exceptional body of photographic work, I have immense respect and admiration for the comrade).

The meeting, as well, had embedded journalist Stephen Grey speak. The military controls who gets access to the occupied areas, there are restrictions on what can be reported, and journalists have to send their copy to the MoD to get clearance, if they don’t like what you write it’s censored! The reasoning behind this censorship and vetting procedure is ‘operational security’……..

Seumas Milne made an excellent intervention. He quoted former defence secretary, Des Browne, who called the war in Afghanistan as a ‘noble cause’. And Gordon Brown describing it as ‘patriotic duty’…. 

Btw: Parliament was ‘debating’ Afghanistan today.

The war is escalating, more British and American troops are being deployed and therefore more violence.There has been an increase in violence against women since the occupation and modest gains won have now reversed. Last year around 2,000 civilians were killed. And the media acts as the propaganda state war machine, along with this embedded reportage.

A poll conducted by ITN show that 59% want to the troops out of Afghanistan immediately. Yet the military has maintained that they will stay for decades! Or in the words of General Dannatt, Iraq and Afghanistan are not aberrations – they are signposts for the future.

There are thousands of refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ‘war on terror’ has spilled into Pakistan (AfPak conflict). Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam and Pakistan could be his Cambodia.

The ‘war on terror’ has seen an orgy of torture, kidnappings and secret trials. All reflecting western imperialist interests while exerting the usual dominance.

The only solution is immediate troop withdrawal.

Women’s suffrage and trade unionism

No cause can be won between dinner and tea, and most of us who were married had to work with one hand tied behind us. (Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up).

Women do not want their political power to enable them to boast that they are on equal terms with the men. They want to use it for the same purpose as men – to get better conditions. Every woman in England is longing for her political freedom in order to make the lot of the worker pleasanter and to bring about reforms which are wanted. We do not want it as a mere plaything…(Selina Cooper – 1906 from Wigan Observer)

The history of the women’s suffrage movement during the 20^thcentury has been overshadowed and dominated by the middle class suffragettes of the Pankhursts and the select few, predominantly London-centric (even though Pankhursts started off the suffrage campaign based in Manchester).

What about working class women activists? Who were they?  Many were active in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. Many of these activists were campaigning around pay issues and other matters. And many of these women were active in the textile unions.

 Women’s suffrage wasn’t just a middle class pre-occupation, for working class women it was hand in glove with the labour movement.

Working class women trade unionists included:

Selina Cooper – textile worker from age of 10. She stood up at LP conferences arguing for women’s suffrage.

 Helen Silcock: She took the demand for women’s suffrage into the male dominated TUC congresses.

 Sarah Reddish: She was based in Bolton, union organiser and Suffragist.

 Sarah Dickenson: Based in Salford, another leading TU organiser.

 Ada Chew: worked as a tailoress and exposed the sweated labour in her local paper. Also a  TU organiser.

Women looked to the TU movement and vehicles like the Women’s TU Council and Women’s TU League. Petitions were organised in places like Lancashire and Blackburn.

During 1900, women organised open air meetings at local guilds, Labour churches and ILP branches.  They got 15,000 signatures women cotton workers.

Woolworkers in summer 1901, cotton and silk workers in Cheshire organised petitions for supporting women’s suffrage. In Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire around 311,000 women ( 217,000 men ) worked in textiles yet they were disenfranchised and therefore voiceless.

Radical suffragists rejected the aim of the tradidional women’s suffrage societies led by Millicent Fawcett  (National Union of Women Suffrage Societies) - property based vote. Their demand was simple: ‘womanhood suffrage’…

You had the coming together of radical suffragists during the 1890s, support rapidly grew, there was factory meetings, women’s suffrage motions put through union branches and trade councils.

Women suffragists encountered friction and hostility within the labour movement regarding the vote. Expectation that women were there to fulfil a function – traditional gender role as woman in the background, as Hannah Mitchell observed:

Even my Sunday leisure was gone as a wife and mother for I soon found that a lot of Socialists talk about freedom was only talk and these socialist young men expected Sunday dinners and huge teas with home made cakes potted meats and pies, exactly like their reactionary fellows.

Unfortunately groups such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) opposed women’s suffrage:  Bourgeois fad of feminism (1884).

TUC Congress was male dominated at Congress in 1901 – suffrage motion by Helen Silcock, President of the Wigan Weavers. It was defeated.

 Tactics were different for 1902 Congress – Silcock seconded the motion, it was proposed by Allan Gee, Huddersfield Sec. of Wool Workers’ Union, on the national executive of LRC. It was defeated again.

Women’s suffrage motions (1901, 1902) were defeated at TU Congress in favour of adult suffrage motions. Suffragists were accused of ‘sex prejudice’ or ‘class prejudice’…. (and to be honest, from my own political perspective, I can’t understand how fighting for basic feminist demands counterposes class. It doesn’t).

These arguments put many women in a quandary. Suffragists like Selina Cooper went to speak to a group in Tunbridge Wells and was told ‘not to let that class hatred and bitterness come into your heart again’. The Pankhursts’ (Emmeline and Christabel) started to reject their labour movement connections and especially alienated the ILP (All belonged to the aristocracy of the Suffragettes, argued Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline: No member of the WSPU divides her attention between suffrage and other social reforms)

Undeterred, radical suffragists carried on building the women’s suffrage movement by  addressing TU meetings. They asked members to be balloted on women’s suffrage. Majority support – Weavers’ union in Burnley instructed committee to bring women’s suffrage before TUC and Labour candidates supported by textile unions to introduce women’s suffrage bill if elected. This started to build up support from working class women workers – suffrage group started to shoot up. The winter of 1904-1905 4,000 people attended a meeting regarding women’s suffrage at Manchester Free Trade Hall.

The popularity of our movement gives us great hope. Esther Roper.

The LRC Conference in 1904 passed a resolution supporting women’s suffrage but the following year  conference passes an ‘adult suffrage’ motion as opposed to women’s suffrage.

Not the place of the LRC to place sex first; we have to put Labour first in every case… (Harry Quelch, SDF member and Trades Council delegate)

In 1907 Labour Party conference defeated a motion on women’s suffrage. Keir Hardie spoke (as ever) in favour of it. It was 1912 when support for women’s suffrage was eventually adopted!

Friction developed between the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union formed in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst) and ILP – 1906 Cockermouth by-election WSPU spoke but didn’t encourage the male voters to vote for Labour candidate. Tha Pankhursts moved to London from Manchester in 1906.

Radical suffragists didn’t support direct action of violence and arson. Horrified by it. They preferred, instead, to build alliances, organise within the mass organisations of the working class.

The WSPU  was London-centric has no real base outside London. At peak they had 88 branches, 34 in London. Majority of membership MC, no industrial base.

Procession, organised by the NUWSS, in Feb 1907 known as the ‘Mud March’ as 3-4,000 women battled and marched through the mud. In June 1908, 2,000 working women marched in Manchester. demanding the vote. Aims ‘to protect their Labour, improve their wages and defend their industrial and TU interests’.

Women eventually won the vote in 1918 (and even then it was for women over 30). Why? Because of the shortage of male workers due to the First World War, therefore women were entering the job market doing traditional male jobs. It gave women more opportunities. The suffrage movement during the war was suspended though majority of the radical suffragists opposed it.

Even after women were granted the vote – it didn’t stop the radical suffragists from campaigning for other feminist demands such as equal pay, contraception, child care, child benefits (the parallels between the demands now and then!)

How will the fight for women’s suffrage be remembered?

The direct action of the Suffragettes, brought the campaign to the forefront of consciousness, along with the dogged and courageous struggles by TU women activists campaigning for women’s suffrage in the labour movement. Direct action gave it public attention but no substitute for mass organisation and building support. Though direct action does have its place, and lets not forget the appalling vicious treatment women experienced while in prison (force feeding and later, the misogynistic, Cat and Mouse Act of 1913). And even though I question the tactics, I still admire the bravery and defiance of these women at a time when behaviour like this was considered ‘unladylike’ and the pressures on these women to conform to traditional roles were immense.

Sheila Rowbotham makes the point as well when she writes that the direct action and violence of the suffragettes was born out of despair. It must have been soul destroying and demoralising when the labour movement  consistently fails (support was fragmented) to stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight for universal women’s suffrage. 

Hannah Mitchell puts it in perspective when she writes:  When the women began to destroy letter-boxes and set fire to churches, I could not bring myself to blame them. Those who do so, should remember the long years of peaceful propaganda, the insolence of politicians, the brutality of stewards, the indifference of the police, the prison sentences, ‘forcible feeding’ with all its horrors, The Cat and Mouse Act which repeatedly sent women back to prison, and caused many to flee from this country to some freer state.

These women have been written out, hidden from history of the women’s suffrage movement, no recognisable trace has been left. These anonymous and invisible women had names and political spirit and courage.

We remember Sylvia Pankhurst but what about Hannah Mitchell, Cissy Foley, Selina Cooper, Sarah Reddish, Sarah Dickenson and Ada Nield Chew. It is time to remember the contribution of these committed brave working class women and to give them the lasting recognition these so deserve.

In 2009 : women still have an uphill struggle for true recognition, liberation and equality.