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When I first heard George Galloway
on Palestine television in 2002, I began to wonder
whether I was hallucinating. For the first time in my
life, I was completely bowled over by the words of a
politician; words that resonated with truth and which
were fearlessly delivered. Here was one of those rarest
of men who appear to rank empirical justice before their
own careers.
Speaking
from Gaza, he said with his famous passion: "I still
have the dust of Jenin on my shoes and for me this dust
is more precious than gold, not because of the crime
that was committed there, but because I have walked on
the dust of many crimes committed by this barbarian and
because of the courage and heroism of the resistance of
the crime…."
And it was
during this speech that Galloway made his views clear on
the US/UK-led sanctions on Iraq. "We've killed a million
children in Iraq in the name of implementing the United
Nations resolutions," he said. "We're killing Iraqi
children because they say that Iraq might have weapons
of mass destruction, while Israel is sitting on a
mountain of weapons of mass destruction…"
Galloway's
commitment to the Palestinian cause is well known to
Arabs. Indeed, he once twinned Dundee in Scotland with
the Palestinian town of Nablus, which resulted in Dundee
City Hall being the first British city to fly the
Palestinian standard and named his home "Jabaliya" after
the so-named Palestinian refugee camp. He was later to
wed a Palestinian scientist. But for Britons, he was
still far from being a household name.
The run-up
to the invasion of Iraq, however, thrust Galloway to the
forefront. On August 8, 2002, he flew to Baghdad to meet
with Saddam Hussein. During that meeting he urged the
former dictator, whose oppressive regime he had long
publicly opposed, to allow UN weapons inspectors to
resume their duties so as to avert war. When he later
learned the invasion was indelibly written on the Bush
administration's cards, he was to regret not only that
visit but the powers of his own persuasion.
During a
2003 interview on Abu Dhabi television, he referred to
George W. Bush and Tony Blair as "wolves" and encouraged
British troops to disobey what he called "illegal
orders". In October that year, he was officially
expelled from Britain's Labour Party but as unrepentant:
"I want to apologise to the wolf. Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair
are a jackal and a jackass," he said. "I will ensure Mr.
Blair regrets this day".
A lesser
man confronted with censure from his own party and much
of the press, which termed him a traitor, might have
been cowed, but not Galloway. Rather than slink away
into a safe bolthole, he decided to take on the
establishment head on and promptly set-up a new party,
one which represented the principles he held so dear. He
called it "Respect".
But by
then the establishment knives had come out for this
Scottish Robin Hood out to deprive the powerful of their
puissance so as to empower the helpless. People
everywhere now knew there were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. They understood the false claims of
links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
carefully crafted by Bush administration head honchos.
Suddenly, Galloway morphed into an icon of the anti-war
lobby and whereas Blairites once chuckled over
Galloway's fledgling party, which didn't have a hope in
hell, it was now perceived as an election threat.
Galloway
was now a one-man target. The Christian Science
Monitor accused him of receiving large sums from
Saddam, based on fake documents purportedly handed over
by a former Iraqi general. And one of the Daily
Telegraph's Baghdad correspondents just happened to
stumble across another such damning document in a
burnt-out Iraqi ministry. In both cases Galloway
instituted libel suits in the courts and won, walking
away with substantial sums in costs and damages.
Triumphant, in 2004, Galloway once more went on Abu
Dhabi television breathing fire and brimstone: "The
people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered
more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war
will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in
history will be branded as killers and war criminals for
all time.
"Fallujah
is a Guernica, Fallujah is a Stalingrad, and Iraq is in
flames as a result of the actions of these criminals,"
he said, adding, "not the resistance, not anybody else
but these criminals who invaded and fell like wolves
upon the people of Iraq".
With a
British election nearing, the media did its best to
discredit the unstoppable Mr. Galloway. During a
pre-election interview on ITN, a video showing Galloway
placing nice with Saddam Hussein during his earlier
mentioned visit to Baghdad was aired, prompting the
straight-talking Scot to tear off his earpiece and exit
the studio, complaining the video had been shown out of
context. Indeed, it had been.
The
Sunday Times couldn't resist getting in on the bash
Galloway act just hours before Britons were due to cast
their votes. The paper went for the jugular by
dissecting the MP's personal life in a story headlined
"Galloway's wife seeks divorce on election eve" but when
Adam Boulton of Sky News brought up the subject with a
smirk, Galloway instantly shot him down with "people in
glass houses shouldn't throw stones'.
Galloway
has hinted that outside agencies are behind the break-up
of his marriage by getting unknown individuals to
telephone his wife with a pack of lies centring on his
alleged infidelities.
Against
all odds, Galloway fought for one of the Labour Party's
safest seats, managing to oust the once popular pro-war
incumbent Oona King, by 10,000 votes.
The
contest held in a poor London borough with a large
Muslim community was vitriolic with name-calling,
threats, egg-throwing and even fisticuffs. When the
votes were finally tallied, Galloway came out the
winner. This was his moment of glory and an opportunity
for sweet revenge on the party, which had so cavalierly
written him off.
"Mr.
Blair. All the people you killed, all the lies you told
have come back to haunt you," boomed Galloway in his
acceptance speech before accusing the powers that be of
attempting to skew the ballot count in Ms. King's
favour. It was a shocking and unprecedented upset for
Blair and the Labour Party.
Instead of
congratulating the newly returned MP, once again, the
media went on the attack. "Mr. Galloway, are you proud
of having got rid of one of the very few black women in
Parliament?" asked the BBC's Jeremy Paxman.
Flushed
with success at just having won his seat, Galloway's
broad smile disappeared. "What a preposterous question,"
he retorted. "I know it is very late in the night but
wouldn't you be better starting by congratulating me for
one of the most sensational election results in modern
history?"
Paxman
repeated the question. Galloway told him to move on, but
the interviewer came at him like a dog with a bone,
finally to conclude "You're not answering that one?"
"No.
Because I don't believe that people get elected because
of the colour of their skin," answered Galloway. "I
believe people get elected because of their record and
their policies." As before during the interview with ITN,
he marched out of the studio but not before calling his
parliamentary colleagues "spineless" and "supine" and
not forgetting to point fingers at Blair and Oona King
for the deaths of countless Iraqis.
In the
meantime, A US Senate sub-committee investigating
corruption in the UN Oil-for-Food program had condemned
Galloway, along with a former French minister, for
receiving millions of barrels of Iraqi oil in exchange
for their support of the former Iraqi regime.
The
committee's chairman Republican Norm Coleman said: "The
oil-for-food program was designed to let Saddam's
government sell oil in exchange for humanitarian goods
to help the Iraqi people cope with UN sanctions imposed
in 1991 following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But Saddam
manipulated the multi-billion-dollar program to earn
illegal revenues and peddle influence, by awarding
former government officials, activists, UN officials and
journalists vouchers for Iraqi oil that could then be
resold at a profit."
The
committee cited Galloway as having received allocations
worth 20 million barrels from 2000 to 2003 via a
children's leukaemia charity that Galloway had set up to
help a small Iraqi girl receive treatment and claimed
Galloway's name featured on an incriminating document.
As far as
the Senate committee was concerned Galloway had been
judged and labelled corrupt in absentia but the fighting
Scot was having none of it. He said he had never even
been contacted by the committee nor invited to give his
side of things before it. Coleman then made the mistake
of inviting Galloway to do just that never thinking for
one minute that the latter would take him at his word.
And so it
was that George Galloway flew to Washington instead of
attending the re-opening of Parliament. Get your
ringside seats, Galloway told the media scrum. They were
not disappointed.
Blaming
the committee for traducing his reputation around the
world without asking him a single question, Galloway
gave a combative performance of the likes hitherto
unseen in the gentile Senate. He told US senators that
their claims were the "mother of all smokescreens",
adding, "I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader
and neither has anyone on my behalf". He told them
their so-called evidence was false and based on fake
documentation in the same way that flouted by the
Christian Science Monitor and the Daily Telegraph
had been.
In the
event it wasn't Galloway who was on trial but the Bush
administration. In response to accusations that he was
too friendly with Saddam Hussein, he answered: "I have
met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as
Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald
Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns…I met him to try and
persuade him to let…the United Nations weapons
inspectors back into the country."
"Have a
look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal," he said. "Have a
look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the
first 14 months when US$8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth
went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton
and other American corporations that stole not only
Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
"Have a
look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you
were shipping out of the country and selling, the
proceeds of which went who knows where. Have a look at
the US$800 million you gave to American military
commanders to hand out around the country without even
counting it or weighing it…
"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today,
revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee.
That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or
Russian politicians or French politicians. The real
sanctions busters were your own companies with the
connivance of your own Government."
"I gave my
heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I
gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass
killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq, which killed
one million Iraqis, most of them children…and I told the
world that your case for the war was a pack of lies…"
The
senators looked confused and perplexed. They ignored the
charges against them and their government and brought
the confrontation to a swift conclusion. Galloway
returned home a hero. In a climate of denial he had said
the unthinkable: the truth as he saw it. It isn't,
therefore, surprising that Galloway's testimony has
literally been airbrushed from all public Senate records
and websites. Further, it was heavily edited or omitted
by much of the US mainstream media.
Since, the
Respect MP has received more than 20,000 congratulatory
emails as well as "countless letters" and has termed his
appearance before the committee as "a blessing in
disguise".
Rather than
rest on his laurels, he has recently launched a
publishing company and is working on a book titled "The
Battle of Bethnal Green" focusing on how his
parliamentary seat was won. He describes it as a book
that burns and already Galloway has accused Labour Party
supporters of vote-rigging, the subject of an ongoing
investigation.
America
beckons once again for Galloway later this summer when
he will embark upon a speaking tour of various
universities, putting forward his anti-war stance.
Mary
MacElveen of New York says in a letter to Scotland on
Sunday says "I would stand on any line to hear more
of what Mr. Galloway has to say with regard to the Iraq
war and the perpetual lies that were told to me by my
government…
"As Mr.
Galloway laid into our Senate subcommittee with his
blistering smack-down on how our government was not
truthful with the American people, a sense of enthusiasm
and awe came over me. I just wish for once that my
elected leaders could be just like Mr. Galloway. Then
the world would be better for it." Some would say,
including the writer, that she may have a point.
Adore him
or despise him, as surely one cannot ignore him, George
Galloway has to be up there with the world's gutsiest
politicians. Thus far, he's taken on his opponents and
emerged smelling like roses but their swords are still
unsheathed and not a day will go by when he won't have
to watch his back. Like elephants, wolves have long
memories too.
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