Saddam's little helper
The Daily Telegraph ^ | April 22, 2003
It doesn't get much worse than this. George Galloway is Britain's most active and visible peace campaigner. The Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin did not just oppose the recent campaign against Saddam Hussein; he lobbied equally aggressively against the first Gulf war, and – during the years in between – for an end to sanctions.
Yesterday, The Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Baghdad, David Blair, unearthed papers detailing alleged payments from Saddam's intelligence service to Mr Galloway through a Jordanian intermediary.
There is a word for taking money from enemy regimes: treason. What makes this allegation especially worrying, however, is that the documents suggest that the money has been coming out of Iraq's oil-for-food programme. In other words, the alleged payments did not come from some personal bank account of Saddam's, but out of the revenue intended to pay for food and medicines for Iraqi civilians: the very people whom Mr Galloway has been so fond of invoking.
Speaking from abroad yesterday, Mr Galloway was reduced to suggesting that the whole thing was a Daily Telegraph forgery, but the files could hardly be more specific. One memo comments: "His projects and future plans for the benefit of the country need financial support to become a motive for him to do more work, and because of the sensitivity of getting money directly from Iraq it is necessary to grant him oil contracts and special commercial opportunities to provide him with a financial income under commercial cover without being connected to him directly."
It is hard to think of a graver setback to the British anti-war movement. How would you feel if you were one of the many well-meaning peace protesters who had followed Mr Galloway's lead? What would your emotions be if you had given money to his Mariam Appeal, thinking that you were paying to treat a young Iraqi girl for leukaemia and wondering now how your money had been used?
For months, anti-war campaigners have been imputing the basest of motives to their adversaries. The whole campaign, they argued, was really about money and oil.
Yet what if it turns out that they, rather than their opponents, had hidden pecuniary motives? What if it was actually the supporters of the campaign who were acting on behalf of Iraqi civilians, while antiwar activists - or at least their leaders - were acting for profit?
If it is a bad day for the "not in my name" brigade, it is also a bad day for British Intelligence. If Baghdad was paying one of our MPs, did our security services know about it? If so, what action did they take? If not, what does it say about their competence? Is it possible that they were using Mr Galloway as an unwitting intermediary, probing to see whether Saddam might settle without a war?
Both the Labour Party and the Stop the War Coalition will, no doubt, be following the revelations nervously. To be fair to Labour, there had already been talk of disciplinary action against the man who recently described the British Government as being made up of "liars, forgers, war criminals and murderers". There was a huge row during a recent parliamentary debate when a Labour frontbencher described Mr Galloway as "Saddam's mouthpiece".
"Gorgeous George" has plenty of form, including allegations that he had misused funds as director of War on Want in the mid-1980s (he was later cleared after paying back £1,720). But, like Jeffrey Archer, his energy, combined with a readiness to litigate, saw him through many incidents that might have done for other politicians. Many, from all wings of the Labour Party, have nursed their doubts about the Glasgow MP, peering suspiciously at his natty suits and winter suntan. Yet they have never been able to pin their doubts on anything concrete.
If the allegations in the documents are borne out, however, expulsion from Labour is the least Mr Galloway should expect. Indeed, he would be lucky to get away with expulsion from the House of Commons.
There is precedent in the case of Arthur Lynch, an Irish Nationalist MP who had served against the British state during the Boer War, and who, following his election, was sentenced to death (the sentence was commuted, and he was eventually pardoned; interestingly, he later became a British patriot, and recruited in Ireland for volunteers during the First World War).
In order to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights, Tony Blair has abolished the death penalty in treason cases; but collaborating with a hostile regime remains the most serious of offences.
If it is unfair to blame Labour for Mr Galloway, the anti-war movement is far more culpable. To put it as neutrally as possible, it has a great deal of explaining to do. Last month, a letter in this newspaper from Dr Julian Lewis, a Tory defence spokesman, revealed that the chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray, was an active communist and supporter of North Korea [letter, March 26].
Mr Murray made no attempt to deny the charge, writing back that "my politics have been clear to the tens of thousands who have attended the many anti-war meetings I have addressed" [letter, March 27]. The result of this exposure? Absolutely nothing.
If supporters of the peace movement were unsettled by having a supporter of nuclear-armed North Korea at their head, they did not show it.
By the same token, although they would be quick to put the boot in to Mr Galloway - as much for the crime of profiting from oil as anything else - hardcore peace campaigners would not be disheartened by the evidence that he was paid by one of the vilest regimes on earth. After all, there was little fuss when it turned out that the Communist Party of Great Britain, CND's chief sponsor, had been funded by Moscow during the Cold War.
There is, it seems, a kind of negative McCarthysim at work, whereby to hold communist sympathies against someone is seen as the height of bad taste.
The vicious anti-Americans at the heart of the peace movement will be unperturbed. They may well join Mr Galloway in claiming that the letters are a Telegraph conspiracy. The next time Britain and the US deploy force, they will march as though nothing had changed, for their convictions are beyond argument. But some of those who demonstrated for peace did so open-mindedly, from decent motives, believing that the war was, on balance, the greater evil.
Such people may be prepared to extrapolate from today's revelations. The chief argument deployed by the handful of Left-wing commentators who supported the war – Nick Cohen of the Observer, for example, or John Lloyd, late of the New Statesman – was that the peaceniks were effectively propping up Saddam Hussein.
This charge was much resented by the protesters, who argued that they – unlike Western governments – had no past record of supporting Saddam. Yet the accusation suddenly seems much harder to dismiss. Certainly it was Saddam's view that the anti-war movement was an ally of the Ba'athist regime – so much so, it seems, that he was prepared to divert money away from hungry children in order to finance it.
It is just possible that, like the British Communists who tore up their membership cards following the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, some of these people may recant their support. They may feel misled. They may even, as they see how much more the occupying forces are doing for Iraqi civilians than the old regime ever did, feel guilty. Above all, they may be reluctant to march in support of this kingdom's enemies in future. |
