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On 11 June, nine peace activists who broke into a Raytheon arms factory in Derry, Northern Ireland, and who destroyed computers causing damage valued at £350,000, were found not guilty by a Belfast jury. Eamonn McCann, journalist and activist, was one of the Raytheon Nine.
Raytheon 9 acquitted!
Eamonn McCann
Those who make the bombs are as guilty as those who drop them. That’s the message of the acquittal of the Raytheon Nine last month after a three-week trial at Belfast Crown Court.
The nine, members of the Derry Anti-War Coalition, were cleared of affray and criminal damage arising from their occupation of Raytheon’s Derry premises on 9 August 2006 and destruction of the facility’s computer system.
The DAWC activists didn’t deny the prosecution’s account but maintained that they had acted to thwart the commission of war crimes by the Israeli Defence Forces in Lebanon.
One factor in our favour was the arrogance of Raytheon witnesses. Some members of the jury seemed visibly shocked by their careless dismissal of the casualties inflicted by their weapons.
It had been the Israeli bombing of Qana in southern on 30 July 2006 which prompted nonviolent direct action against the company.
War crime
Television footage of distraught civilians consumed by grief and civil defence workers stumbling from the rubble cradling babies in dripping bundles had made it plain that a war crime had taken place.
28 people from two extended families, 16 of them children, sheltering in a basement, had been crushed and choked to death when a “bunker-buster” ploughed down through three stories to erupt in the earth beneath them.
Raytheon is Israel’s largest supplier of bunker-busters.
Four days earlier, the British government had protested (mildly) to the US about two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes en route for Israel filled with Raytheon bomb units having landed at Prestwick for refuelling without official permission.
US newspapers reported that this had been a rush order, the IDF having almost run out of guided bomb units after three weeks of pummelling Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the British and US governments turned a deaf ear to widespread appeals at least to call for ceasefire.
The “peace dividend"
There had been controversy in Derry over Raytheon since 1999, when Nobel Peace Prize winners John Hume and David Trimble had hailed the arms giant’s arrival as an instalment of a “peace dividend”
We were getting an arms company as reward for making peace!
Local SDLP and Sinn Fein councillors—the two nationalist parties dominate Derry politics—claimed to have had assurances of no arms-related production in Derry.
By 2006, the DAWC and the local Foyle Ethical Investment Campaign had shown irrefutably that these assurances were phoney.
Neither party, however, mindful of the imperative to behave “responsibly” in the new era of power-sharing, was willing to tell Raytheon to get out. Direct action was the only viable way forward.
The legal tests
We had to show we had a genuine belief with a basis in evidence that war crimes were being committed and were likely to continue to be committed, as a result of which innocent people were in urgent need of protection; that Raytheon, including its Derry plant through its integration into the company worldwide, was aiding and abetting these crimes by continuing to supply the means of committing them; and that our action had had the effect of delaying or hampering the commission of crimes.
Had we fallen down on any of the steps in this defence, we would have been convicted and, almost certainly jailed.
Our case, then, does not provide a general defence for action against arms companies. But it does provide clear guidelines for circumstances in which a successful defence can be made.
Following our acquittal, we called on all elected representatives in Derry at last to say in unequivocal terms that Raytheon isn’t welcome in our city.
We urged the crown prosecution service to institute an investigation into the operation of Raytheon across the UK, with a view to determining whether this amounts to criminal activity.
We added: “We believe that one day the world will look back on the arms trade as we look back today on the slave trade, and wonder how it came about that such evil could abound in respectable society.
“We took the action we did in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter of innocents in Qana. The people of Qana are our neighbours.
“Their children are the children of our neighbours. We trashed Raytheon to help protect our neighbours. This is what this case has been about.”
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