Stephen Hawking to Lead Anti-War Protest on Election Day
by Andy McSmith
Stephen Hawking, Britain's most eminent scientist, has become the
latest prominent opponent of the Iraq war by agreeing to take the lead
role in a ceremonial protest to coincide with the United States
presidential election.
Peace protesters will gather in Trafalgar Square at 5pm on Tuesday,
where they will read out the names of 5,000 Iraqi men, women and
children known to have died in the conflict.
The full death toll was put last week as high as 100,000.
Playwrights Harold Pinter and David Hare, actress Juliet Stevenson,
the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and relatives of British
soldiers killed in action in Iraq have all agreed to take part.
Professor Hawking, the author of the best-selling book A Brief History
of Time, is wheelchair-bound as a sufferer from motor neurone disease.
He recorded a message on Friday that will be broadcast at the start of
the rally.
The oldest protester in Trafalgar Square is likely to be a fellow
scientist, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Sir Joseph Rotblat. In the
1940s, he resigned from his job developing the world's first atomic
bomb on moral grounds.
Sir Joseph, who will be 96 on Thursday, said: "In this nuclear age, we
simply cannot allow others to start military action unless everything
else has ... been tried and has failed."
The rally comes at a time when its organizers from the Stop the War
Coalition have been embroiled in controversy with one of its biggest
backers, the giant public sector union Unison, which has links with
the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, (IFTU) whose general secretary,
Subhi al-Mashadani, spent more than 10 years in prison under Saddam
Hussein.
Unison leaders were appalled when Mr Mashadani was barracked and
jostled at a London conference two weeks ago by left-wing delegates
who accused him of being a stooge for the US and British governments.
The row is threatening to become an issue inside Unison, where an
election is taking place for the post of general secretary - the most
powerful job in the trade union movement.
Left-wing activists in the union are trying to unseat the current
general secretary, Dave Prentis, for being too close to Tony Blair.
Jon Rogers, the left-wing challenger, has accused two of Mr Prentis's
senior advisers, Maggie Jones and Nick Sigler, of trying to split the
union from the anti-war movement. Ms Jones, who is Unison's policy
director, is a former Labour Party chairman and is expected to become
Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent at the next election.
Mr Sigler, who heads the union's international department, worked for
many years at Labour Party headquarters.
"It is not in the best interests of Unison for circumstances to arise
in which it can appear that our union is being used as a vehicle by
the Labour Party leadership to sow division in the anti-war movement,"
Mr Rogers claimed in a letter to Mr Prentis, leaked to The Independent
on Sunday.
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