Mother who lost son in war leads opposition
Matthew McAllester NEWSDAY
GLASGOW, Scotland -- Tony Blair's letter of condolence dropped through the letterbox that morning at 52 Templeland Road, the run-down, government-owned apartment in one of the poorest corners of Britain that was home to 19-year-old Gordon Gentle.
"It is a heavy responsibility to send young soldiers into war and I assure you I didn't take the decision lightly," Blair had written to Gentle's parents, Rose and George.
Only hours later, Rose found herself in Blair's home at 10 Downing St., sitting on a plush couch next to Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who was filling in for Blair while the prime minister was on vacation in Italy.
"You can give that back to Tony Blair; it's no good to me," she told Prescott as she threw Blair's letter at him. Her son was the last coalition soldier killed before the handover of power to the interim Iraqi government on June 28. He was the 60th British soldier to die in Iraq. He was Gentle's only son. And she had come to London that day earlier this month to vent her fury and to beg the prime minister to pull Britain's troops out of Iraq so no more mothers would have to go through her hell.
Surprising Prescott, the bereaved mother, who works as a cleaner at a shopping center, stood up and walked out on the acting prime minister of her country. Her daughter Maxine, 14, left behind another letter to await the return of the absent Blair.
"I don't just blame his death on the Iraqis that made the bomb," Maxine wrote to Blair. "I blame you, for agreeing with Bush that we had to go to war when we didn't."
By the time the Gentle family woke up the next morning, Rose and Maxine's words, and photographs of them leaving Blair's office, were all over the national news media. Blair and his Labor Party government have long faced massive public opposition to his decision to join the United States in the war in Iraq, but never before had the issue of British casualties struck such a chord. As the months pass and the casualties climb, the parents of soldiers are beginning to speak up -- often against the war. This time, the passion of one grieving mother appeared to carry more weight than any of the antiwar protests mounted by demonstrators in recent months.
"Rose has become the face of ... the moral authority because she has paid the price and in a very short time she has become a representative for the pain and the anger and the outrage that this war has provoked," said the Rev. John Mann, minister at the Gentles' local church, St. James'.
Mann is an American Presbyterian minister who left Minneapolis to come to Glasgow, Britain's poorest city, in January so he could "serve a church where no one had voted for George Bush."
Gentle followed up her visit to Downing Street by declaring that she wasn't going to fade away, that she was going to put together an antiwar coalition of other parents of British troops killed in Iraq. And Tuesday she is due to announce the details of a lawsuit she plans to file against the British government claiming that the army did not do all it could have and should have to protect her son from the kind of roadside bomb that killed him in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
Grieving mothers of soldiers killed in unpopular wars often find that their voices carry more weight than anyone else's in debates about the justification for war. Four Israeli mothers whose sons died in the occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s sparked off an ultimately successful campaign to bring about the end of that part of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And director Michael Moore devotes much of the latter portion of his film "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the mother of a soldier from Michigan killed in Iraq.
Critics of both Moore's film and Gentle's public fury have argued that soldiers like Gordon Gentle were adults who made knowing, adult decisions to volunteer for the military. In Gentle's case, he joined the British Army in November 2003, long after the United States and Great Britain had led the coalition to liberate the Iraq people.
One commentator in Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper wrote: "Soldiers are not like ordinary civilians. They forfeit the right to make the vital decisions over their own lives."
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A4 |
