Republican News · Thursday 24 April 2003

The fight against Empire

BY ROISIN DE ROSA

The Easter events in Dublin began with a meeting on Thursday evening in Liberty Hall, appropriately on "The Fight against Empire".

Aengus ó Snodaigh TD spoke of the flouting, by the Dublin government of international law governing the rights of neutral countries; the need to reform the UN; the need to define our neutrality in the face of the monstrous store of weapons of mass destruction held by the US, Britain and Israel.

Ali Halimeh, the Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland, spoke forcefully and with anguish of the war on Iraq, highlighting "the killing and murder of old, young, women and children, the aimless destruction of infrastructure upon which all depend for livelihoods, and the wanton despoiliation of hundreds of years of history and its monuments".

"Are the oilfields being looted?" he asked. "They have never shown the world the armed robbery of the wealth of Iraq. When the first US troops arrived they went first to the oil ministry. They allowed all of the other ministries to be burned.

"They could have come to liberate the Palestinian people. Instead they have supported the fascist state of Israel and the occupation of Palestine. Iraq is another Palestine. And now they are talking of Syria - though Syria was never a friend of Iraq. Some people may celebrate now and think the war is over, until they wake up and see what the new colonial powers will do."

It was a theme taken up by Ella O'Dwyer, author of recently published The Rising of the Moon. "The British say they want us to say the war is over. Does the empire ever say the war is over?"

"It may be thought", she went on, "that we are going through a process of decolonisation. Watch out for the process of recolonisation, which happens through the colonisation of the mind, the spirit, the word - recolonisation through revisionism."