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A voice in the wilderness?
For peace protester Brian Haw, the remembrance service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London on Friday to honour 179 British soldiers killed in the six-year Iraq mission tells only part of a bigger story about the act of war itself.
“It’s bloody awful, isn’t it? If you are one of their relatives, if you are one of their loved ones, it’s terrible,” he said. “We didn’t count the civilian dead — the people of Iraq. Why don’t those people matter? Our soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan.”
Haw has been protesting in Parliament Square since June 2, 2001, when he set up a camp to boycott United Nations-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq initially intended to pressure the country to withdraw from Kuwait.
Haw’s protest morphed into a more generic one against the War on Terror after Sept. 11, 2001. He won several legal victories that allowed him to stay camped out across from the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.
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The Wall
