GEORGE GALLOWAY: They're a farce. They're rigged. An
election held under foreign military occupation is always, by
definition, utterly flawed. But one which is held in the kind
of conditions in which this one is being held is flawed beyond
redemption. The facts are that it is simply impossible to hold
an election when there is a full-scale war going on between
the occupying armies and the resistance forces. The Sunni
Muslim population, which if you add the Sunni Kurds and the
Sunni Arabs together, is some 40% of the population, are
deeply anxious about the way in which the occupying forces are
deliberately trying to divide the country along confessional
lines. The Sunni Arab population has boycotted the election
almost in their entirety. The Iraqis living outside for whom
security was not an issue, three quarters of them have voted
with their feet and boycotted the election. Less than a
quarter of the eligible voters have registered to vote and
fewer still have cast their votes. So, this is a festival, a
farce that's been held to validate the American-British
invasion and occupation of Iraq. But it will not validate it,
neither in the eyes of the world opinion, nor, more
importantly, in the eyes of those Iraqis who are resisting the
foreign occupation and the war will go on, I'm sorry to say.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you see is going to happen,
and what are you calling for?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, there’s a very great danger
of what I call the Yugoslavization of Iraq, the petrifying of
the population on ethnic and confessional lines and the
country beginning a process of breaking up into three Iraqs
which is itself pregnant with many real dangers for the
surrounding countries, not just Arab countries, but Turkey and
Iran and which could very well lead to fighting over oil
resources, and spreading of the conflagration which already
exists there. We have a simple demand. We say that the two
leaders who caused this disaster cannot possibly be a part of
its solution. Bush and Blair and their forces will have to go
from Iraq. That is an absolute precondition for any resolution
of this conflict and they must talk with the resistance about
how they're going to do that, over what period of time, it
would have to be a short period of time. But I’m sure it
could be organized by agreement with the resistance forces.
That sounds far fetched today. But it will one day have to be
agreed. Just like the American forces had to withdraw from
Vietnam, so the American and British forces will have to
withdraw from Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the population in
Britain now? And what about today? Here we are at the BBC,
hearing all day the voices of people talking about going to
vote and how exhilarated they are.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, we would like all the people
of the Arab world to be able to go and vote in democratic
elections. That's why, if we'd been alive, we would have
opposed the British and French and other European colonization
of Arab countries where incidentally there was never a single
election held that could remotely be described as a free and
fair election, and it is why we're against all the
dictatorships in the Arab world, who rule the Arab world
almost without exception, from the Atlantic to the Gulf,
mostly with the full support of Britain and the United States.
And we want democratic elections in Iraq, too, but these are
not democratic elections and these elections will solve
nothing and may even add to the problem. But in Britain now,
29% of the population support the Iraq war, down from
something like 68% at the height of the fighting and the fall
of the regime in Baghdad. That's a pretty spectacular fall and
it will fall further still.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, was it the Times of
London, which newspaper settled with you and apologized?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, how long have you got? All of
them have settled and apologized, and The Daily Telegraph
is the one I think you refer to which was my biggest victory.
They had to pay me 150,000 pounds in damages and 1.6 million
pounds in damages.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Because they falsely claimed that I
was in the pay of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship. The same
kind of smear utterly baseless, gigantic smear that they
leveled at so many sections of the anti-war movement. What
they can't take, you see, is that we were right and they were
wrong. They were the bugle blowers for one of the most
disastrous foreign policy decisions ever taken by Britain or
America, and I was amongst those who was telling them that
this is going to end precisely in the way that it has ended,
and they don't like that.
AMY GOODMAN: Your comment on the latest -- we know
about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from U.S. soldiers. You
have your own scandal with British soldiers and then the
Guantanamo prisoners returning home here to Britain.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, you see, the ironclad
consensus of the mainstream political parties, the front
benches and the BBC and the other mainstream media outlets
like to reassure each other that this is conduct
unrepresentative of British occupation forces. But I'm sorry
to tell you it is entirely representative. When Britain
suppressed the Mao Mao freedom struggle in Kenya, they killed
100,000 Kenyans. Almost exactly the same number of Iraqis have
been killed in the war and occupation. They used to cut off
the limbs of Kikuyu tribes people and pin them to the wall and
take photographs of them. They used to pay British soldiers
five pounds per body for Kikuyu that they brought in. In
Malaya when we crushed the Malayan revolt for freedom, we
killed 10,000 Malays. I’ve seen pictures of British soldiers
holding the severed heads of Malay people for the cameras.
This is how all occupations end. These things don't happen
because the soldiers in question are American or British
anymore than general Sharon's army behaves as it does because
it is Israeli, still less because it's Jewish. They behave
like that because they are occupying armies, and all
occupations end this way. They end in the demonization, the
subhumanization of the occupied people, a belief in the
inherent superiority of the occupied forces; otherwise, why
should we be there reorganizing their societies? And that
inevitably leads when you're dealing with 17, 19, 21-year-old
young men with weaponry against helpless civilian populations,
it always ends in an Abu Ghraib.
