Roger Harrison • Arab News Staff

Arab News recently interviewed George Galloway, the British MP at the center of allegations of financial involvement with Saddam Hussein’s regime. These are based largely on documents allegedly discovered by a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in a burned-out building in Baghdad. They purport to support accusations of a relationship involving millions of dollars. Galloway has strenuously denied involvement and maintains the documents are forgeries. He is currently suing the Telegraph as well as two other papers. This is the first of a two-part interview.

LONDON, 17 June 2003 — “It’s a change to have a conversation uninterrupted.” Galloway reflected on the apparent oxymoron as we parted, a comment on the barrage of media commentary and criticism he has received since the alleged discovery of documents in Baghdad that seek to link him financially to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In his office in Portcullis House in the shadow of Big Ben, he had just described the origins and history of his sympathy with Arab causes. That open sympathy, easy to use in sound bites to support accusations of dubious links with Iraq, has been pounced on by his detractors and accusers as supporting their allegations. Few have bothered to explore the background.

The son of a teacher and trade union activist in Dundee, he attended one of Scotland’s best grammar schools and controversially, joined Labour Party at 13. “I was a veteran by then, working on school gates,” he said.

After a period of menial work in a Michelin tire factory, he entered local politics and, displaying formidable skills in oratory and energy enough for the rough and tumble of the Glaswegian hustings, rose by the age of 26 to be chairman of the local Labour Party.

His involvement in Arab causes was, as he puts it, “serendipitous.” In a Labour Party office in Dundee in 1974 — when Galloway was 20 — a local Palestinian student leader entered and asked to speak to one of the party leaders. “There was only me,” he said. “After two hours I was a signed-up member of the Palestinian revolution. He mesmerized me with the story and the scale of the tragedy.”

“We were on the Palestinian side, though that had not always been true of the left. It was strongly Zionist in the 40s through 60s — even 70s — but it had begun to change.”

This meeting established the foundations for his lifelong involvement with Arab causes. He campaigned vigorously on the Palestinian issue and became a popular target for criticism and opposition. It was only a short time since the PLO had carried out the assassination of Israeli athletes at Munich Olympics. The PLO was a very high- profile symbol for terrorism and hijacking.

“At that time to say you were with the PLO had the same kind of shock as to say that you were with Osama Bin Laden would have today. It was a very tough time to declare yourself,” he said.

He visited Beirut with a delegation in 1977, his first visit to an Arab country, and liked the place so much he stayed on when the rest returned to England. He was 23 years old and, by his own admission, impressionable.

“It was a time of music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air, beautiful girls with Kalashnikovs, the romance and the violence...” he recalled. “I became close to Arafat and strongly committed to the Palestinian cause — indeed, umbilically connected — and I remain so.”

From that connection with the Palestinian issue, there developed a wider involvement with Arab issues in general. “Although I had disagreements with this or that Arab regime, in general you could say I am with the Arabs.”

Galloway contends that there are historically two charges that are made against those who are “with the Arabs.”

“You are with the Arab for one — or both — of two reasons. First, the money and second, homosexuality. I can show you the volume of my poison-pen mail, dwarfed by the positive mail, which implies some sort of homosexual connection between me and the Arab world. In fact I am not a homosexual, never have been and actually have never met an Arab homosexual.”

He sees these as the two routine smears that have been aimed at Arab sympathizers for the best part of a century and admits that he gave the other side many reasons to hate him.

He was a leading figure in Labour politics, fighting for the PLO and fighting for the Palestinian cause. In 1980 he twinned Dundee with Nablus, raised the first Palestinian flag to fly on a public building anywhere in the Western world and brought the mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shakar to the city.

“Shakar’s legs had been blown off by an Israeli terrorist car bomb,” Galloway said. Such things were at that time extraordinarily contentious. “It was a very fierce and confrontational period,” he said. “I can show you my scars.”

From the late 1970s, Galloway developed links with the exiled Iraqi opposition and was one of the founder members of political structures against repression and for democratic rights in Iraq.

His first visit to Iraq was in company with the now Father of the House Tam Dalyell — a staunch anti-war campaigner — and under scrutiny from Parliament as a result of his opposition to the war in May 1993.

“I had opposed the Gulf War in 1991, although I fully condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I had these extensive differences with the Iraqi regime but had bigger differences with the US and British invasion and destruction of an Arab country. That put me on the anti-war side.”

Two more visits in 1994 and 1998 drew him “extremely close” to Iraq.

“It’s extraordinary for me, for after spending decades traveling in the Arab world, and purposefully avoiding Iraq that I became very committed to the Iraqi cause,” he said.

Galloway said that his change of heart came in much the same way as in Beirut in 1977. “Once you can put a face to an abstract construct, everything looks different. After I had lived there, when I used to hear the Israelis saying they had attacked terrorist bases in Lebanon, I knew they were refugee camps. When they said they attacked terrorists, I knew the people they were talking about.”

In his time in Iraq, he realized that Iraq was “twenty three million people who were not Saddam Hussein. It’s now held to be true but it wasn’t so when I first campaigned on it. It leaves you in a very exposed position. I realized that this was one of the crimes of the 20th century — being perpetrated on 23 million innocent people. The sanctions were killing an Iraqi child every six minutes of every day, people who were guilty of nothing. Most died before they even knew they were Iraqis. They died for no other reason than that they were Iraqis. They didn’t choose Saddam Hussein, they didn’t invade Kuwait and were not responsible for anything. Entirely innocent people were being slaughtered by sanctions.”

He admits that it would be disingenuous to separate the people from the regime entirely, however. It was, he says an efficiently ruthless and ruthlessly efficient regime. He pointed to the fact that after the Gulf War of 1991, the country was rebuilt and services in place much quicker that they are reappearing now.

Galloway believes that the 12 years of sanctions actually strengthened Saddam’s regime rather than weakened it, because it drove the people and the regime closer together. “The interface between the regime and the people was total — everything that one needed to live was handed out by the state,” he said. Britain and America, by and large, like vicious dictatorships, he said. “What they don’t like is vicious dictatorships that don’t obey their orders.”

While demonstrating outside the Iraqi Embassy for human rights, the British government described him as a “commie troublemaker” for disrupting the profitable trade in arms between Britain and Saddam Hussein.

“They were not against the vicious dictatorship then, they did everything they could to make it more efficiently vicious. Whilst I was with the opposition, they were with the regime.”

He agreed that the Iraqi regime was bad, but not as bad as was made out. Saddam was a vicious dictator but not as vicious as people said and not the only vicious dictator. “The Iraqi Baath regime committed many crimes — even more blunders.” He sees the invasion of Iran as their critical mistake.

“If they hadn’t made that blunder, they would not have ended the 80s in the hungry situation they did, and not ready to commit their biggest crime, the invasion and occupation of Kuwait. If they had done neither of those things, Iraq would not be the basket case that it currently is.”

Galloway maintains that he had no personal relationships with the Iraqi leadership, except in one case. “I met Saddam exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him.

The difference is that Rumsfeld was meeting him to sell him weapons and I was meeting him to try and get rid of the weapons to avoid the war.”

In August last year he helped persuade Saddam to allow the arms inspectors back in. “I’ll never forget how he fixed me with his eyes and asked me if I was really giving this advice in good faith and could I honestly put my hand on my heart — he asked me that — and say that if Iraq let the weapons inspectors back in, that Britain and America would not invade and occupy the country.” At that stage Galloway believes Saddam was very close to making a decision one way or the other.

He returned to England and voiced the opinion that he believed that Iraq was in a position to allow the inspectors back.

“I have to tell you now that I am haunted by the fact that in a way, I fooled him, because it is now clear that Britain and America had already decided to invade Iraq, irrespective of the issue of weapons, irrespective of Hans Blix, irrespective of Mohammed El-Baradei. It’s becoming daily more clear that the whole weapons issue was a canard, a deliberate canard, “a bureaucratic construct” as Wolfowitz called it.”