The Reassurance of Politicians: Evicting Protesters from Britain's Parliament Square (Hari)

Johann Hari writes for The Independent of London:

At the edge of Parliament Square, Winston Churchill squints –-- hunched and impervious and marble –-- over the gothic heart of British democracy. Usually, his only company is the smoggy traffic and snapping tourists. But, for the past three months, he has been joined by another symbol, and another style of democracy.

In May, a smattering of tents was set up on this diesel-tinted green by citizens protesting against the war in Afghanistan. When I first saw them they were a mixture of students and activists and professors, voicing the conviction of 70 per cent of British people that the war is unwinnable and should end. One of them, Maria Gallasetgui, said: "We have a responsibility to stand up to what they're doing. It's immoral." She added: "We support the troops, that's why we want to bring them home. They" –-- she pointed to Parliament –-- "are the ones sending them to die."

They held up signs with pictures of maimed Afghan children, and waved them at the MPs as they walked to work. The MPs invariably looked down and away and they hurried through Parliament's iron gates.

These protesters are needed: despite the clear will of the British and American people, the war is being escalated, with an increase in slaughtered civilians of 23 per cent in the past year.

As I looked out over this rag-tag of tents and posters, I realised that they didn't only express the will of the people here – they were expressing the will of the people we are invading and bombing. The International Council on Security and Development just conducted an opinion poll of ordinary Afghans in Kandahar and Helmand, the places where these MPs have sent a surge of troops. Some 70 per cent of them stand with the tents and camp-fires, saying the military operation is harming them and should stop.

So just a few metres from where the Prime Minister lives, people sat on an open green barbecuing food and sharing drinks and calling for that Prime Minister to be indicted for war crimes. They had daily meetings where they shared out the responsibilities, while every 15 minutes, Big Ben bonged.

In that first month, I saw a group of Chinese tourists staring at the camp in disbelief.

"This would never be allowed in China," one of them said to me. "Not anywhere. Never mind at the centre of power. This is what democracy really means."

As the months went on, the tent city developed and mutated each time I visited. More protesters arrived, with a more eclectic range of grievances. A man appeared announcing he was starving himself because the courts wouldn't let him see his children: he hasn't eaten for more than 20 days.

Read what happened next....

Comments

[Dave]

“This would never be allowed in China,” one of them said to me. “Not anywhere. Never mind at the centre of power. This is what democracy really means.”

********

But what about democracy for the Afghan people? Don't they deserve to have democratic institutions and a type of political culture that fosters free thinking? -- the same kind that the protesters have in their own lands? Would the protesters rather see a return of the fundamentalist theocratic elements that were forced on the Afghan people after the Soviet withdrawal instead? Is that a preferable outcome?

I think history will repeat itself in Afghanistan if we choose to ignore it and run away.

[ScottLucas11]

Reader Jeff Weintraub has e-mailed us the following comment....

Hari's piece is partly about the protest encampment outside Parliament. But it also made an argument about protesters' main substantive target --- British, and more generally NATO, military involvement in Afghanistan (which Hari describes as a "crazy" and "unwinnable" war that results only in "slaughtered civilians" and "maimed Afghan children").

Hari, of course, has long favored a western pullout from Afghanistan <http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-three-fallacies-that-have-driven-the-war-in-afghanistan-1806191.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentato...>, for considered reasons that he finds convincing, and in this piece he once again advocates that policy. OK. But he also claims repeatedly that most Afghans want this, too, and that the available evidence --- especially opinion polls conducted in Afghanistan --- supports this claim.

Unfortunately, that's not true. At the very least, the situation is a lot more complicated than that. In fact, the the bulk of available evidence actually suggests that most Afghans do NOT want western troops to abandon the country any time soon. But Hari simply ignores or obfuscates any evidence that doesn't fit his polemical agenda, so that the overall picture he presents is, to put it mildly, deceptive. This is propaganda, not analysis.

Generally speaking, I like Hari. He's a sharp, intense, and often perceptive analyst and polemics .. and most of the time, in my opinion, his heart is in the right place (and often his head, too). Unfortunately, he also has a overly frequent tendency to play fast and loose with evidence to support his polemics. In the case of the item you cross-posted, his treatment of the available evidence is sufficiently careless, misleading, distorted, and tendentious that I would have to describe it as being dishonest --- or, to be as generous as possible, right at the edge of outright dishonesty.

I'm not sure I agree with Hari's position on Afghanistan, though I recognize there are plausible grounds for it. But that's not the point. The point, as I indicated to him, is that he doesn't need to distort and cherry-pick the evidence in order to make his argument.