First published by The Truth Pursuit- The Future of the Gulf

BP has promised to emerge from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico “smaller and wiser”. And with the replacement of CEO Tony Hayward with self-professed ‘Son of the Gulf’ Bob Dudley, announced on Monday, a new mood has swept through BP, one focused on pushing to the future. Starting anew.

But the disaster in the Gulf is not over. BP’s recovery may be measured by its bottom line, but for the population of the Gulf the process of rebuilding is fraught with obstacles and there is no clear line to map its progress.

Nervousness hovers unnaturally within the vibrant communities of Louisiana. It has swept in with the tide of oil, along with confusion, distrust and misinformation, and has done little to help the image of the British oil giant who promised to “make whole” the communities and the environment of the Gulf. The same promise Exxon made 21 years ago to the communities of the Prince William Sound in Alaska.

Exxon employed an army of 23,500 to clean up the oil that washed up on the rocky shoreline of Alaska after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef in the early hours of Good Friday 1989 spilling its cargo into the pristine waters of the Prince William Sound. It was the biggest environmental disaster in US history, until the disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico eclipsed it after 37 days.

The story of the cleanup effort dominated the headlines during the summer of 1989. But when the press slouched away as the looming threat of Alaska’s harsh winter brought the cleanup to a close, Exxon’s legal might revved into action. The dance that Exxon choreographed through the courts lasted 19 years with the final punitive damages settlement only reached two years ago. Exxon fought the original damage settlement of $5 billion for 14 years until the amount was cut to $507 million. Exxon was also fined $150 million under the Clean Water Act, but only paid $25 million. Both amounts were reduced in recognition of Exxon’s cooperation in cleaning up the spill.

BP doesn’t have the “appetite” for litigation that Exxon has, said an industry insider, and frequently chooses to settle out of court. But cooperation, as well as the amount of oil actually spilt, are key factors in deciding BP’s liability when this disaster moves out of the cleanup phase.

The emotions from the summer of 1989 remain raw in Alaska and the protracted legal battles have kept the wounds open. In the years after the spill the small town of Cordova, with a population of less than 2,000, saw a massive rise in domestic violence, drug abuse and alcoholism. There were divorces that happened post spill and the promise of the compensation from the litigation was written into the divorce settlements, leaving them hanging over people for 20 years. There were also suicides.

“I think because we made the conscious decision not to be the victims of the spill, we were able to see other opportunities and we left,” said Sylvia Lange, a fisherwoman from Cordova, Alaska, who together with her husband and new baby, left Cordova half way through the summer of 1989 to fish out West. “Some people got real active. Some people got real rich. And some people just ruined their lives and just sat here and couldn’t let go.”

The spill of 1989 offered a short-term boom as spending on the cleanup jump-started the Alaskan economy out of recession. Locals still refer to “spillionaires” who were paid small fortunes to help clear up the mess, and stories circulate of people who traveled to Washington State to buy new boats to hire them out to Exxon. They made their money back in three months the story goes.

“That fall you saw brand new pick up trucks and Cadillacs on the roads, and new boats in the harbour,” said Joanne LeRue, a long time resident of Valdez.

Sylvia Lange recalls a conversation with a fisherman that summer. “I asked him, ‘Are you going to go work for Exxon?’ and he said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone this rich to fuck up this badly’.” He got rich that summer. Spent it. Then he left.

Cracks appeared in the small communities of the Prince William Sound; divisions between those who wanted to help and those who wanted money. Between the outsiders and the residents. Between the fishermen and the oil industry. Between Exxon and the local government.

John Devens who was mayor of Valdez in 1989, remembers fighting to get into Exxon’s “information loop” that summer. “It was like someone coming into your home and spilling something nasty on your carpet. And then saying, ‘Get out of the house, I’ll clean it up and you better be satisfied with what I do’,” said Devens, “I think they felt they could muscle the communities into line and it probably cost them millions of dollars more by being that arrogant.”

As the cleanup response progressed, Devens’ frustrations grew as he found himself repeatedly coming into conflict with Exxon and Federal officials. Sitting next to Ted Stevens, Alaska’s long serving Republican Senator, at a press conference, Devens recalls Stevens turning to him. “John, you don’t understand, your priorities are different from ours. You’re worrying about the locals. We’re worrying about the reputation of the country,” he said.

But the disconnect between local concerns, government priorities and corporate motivation is a byproduct of a deeper disconnect inherent within today’s cleanup effort in the Gulf, as it was in Alaska in 1989: That an oil spill can be cleaned up. That the environment can be made right.

“They would have done more good flying over in a 747 and dumping the $2.2billion right over the top of the oil spill itself,” says Dune Lankard, an Eyak native and fisherman from Cordova, Alaska who in 1989 joined the cleanup effort, “They haven’t learnt a damn thing from the Exxon Valdez. They haven’t learnt that everything that we’ve gone through, everything that we’ve learnt, is that everything their doing doesn’t work. There’s no way that they can clean it up. There’s no way that they can make our lives whole again. They’ve no way.”

As Exxon endeavored to make right the Prince William Sound, they focused on rebuilding the size of the salmon population that sustained the local economy. And within 5 years the area had regained its position as the largest fish producer in US, and the fifth largest in the world. But the Alaskan waters are producing larger quantities of lesser quality hatchery salmon with fewer, bigger boats. The size and diversity of the wild salmon populations have never returned, neither have the herring. The natural cycle of the fishing season that defined the year for much of Alaska’s coastal population has never been restored.

John Devens Jnr, son of Mayor John Devens, worked for Exxon cleaning up the Sound’s oiled shoreline during the summer of 1989. “We knew the cleanup was going to be evaluated not on what was actually done but how many man hours and how much money they spent on it,” he said. And likewise, the long-term restoration effort in Alaska has been focused on quantifiable goals.

Today trailers, motor homes and boats adorned with ‘For Sale’ signs litter the parking lots throughout Valdez, the namesake town of the now-infamous tanker. ‘For Rent’ signs bleached of their color hang in the windows of long empty shops. The campaign banners line the streets in preparation for the midterm elections in November as if demanding a better future.

Everyone in Prince William Sound has a story to tell about the summer of 1989. “My father missed my birth,” says Jen Smith, 21. She was born a month after the Exxon Valdez hit Blythe Reef. “He was cleaning oil.”

In the Gulf the uncertainty of what’s to come hangs over the coastal communities.

Walter Gisclair, 52, stands on the dock with one rubber booted foot on a crate of crab. “I usually have 70 boxes by now,” he says gesturing at the 14 boxes that surround him, “But I hope I don’t get any more. I can’t sell them. Who wants to eat fish from where the oil’s at?” He says he doesn’t think the oysters will return in his lifetime.

Amanda Domangue, owner of a specialist oil trucking company called Justice Transport in Houma, Louisiana, is barely making ends meet since the moratorium cut business by 80 per cent. Oil industry workers fall into a grey area. They don’t qualify to file a claim under the $20 billion escrow fund or $100 million claims program specifically set up for rig workers. The only option left to Amanda is a lawsuit, but Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the escrow fund, admitted at a town hall meeting in Houma on July 15 that they were unlikely to win a case against the federal government.

“There’s no option. There’s really nothing,” said Amanda, “File a lawsuit that he [Feinberg] says there really no chance of winning. So that’s nothing. And we have no recourse. We have nothing.” 330,000 people fall into this grey area in Louisiana alone.

In August the permits that Amanda requires to operate her business, including a $20,000 down payment for insurance, come up for renewal. She has to make the decision now whether to make that investment, or write off the entire year.

“2010 was going to be all about change,” said Lorrie Grimaldi, of St Bernard, Louisiana, as she cracks open a crab with the practiced dexterity of a fisherman’s wife. Lorrie and her family moved into a new house in March of this year. They had lived in a FEMA trailer for five years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. “I thought it was going to be the best year of my life, ever. And then, guess what. But the hardest part is not knowing what’s going to happen next.”

My article about President Jammeh’s ‘back to the land’ policy was published today by The Samosa: Back to the land with nothing to eat.

I spent a couple of weeks in The Gambia in October 2009. I left deeply saddened. The Gambia is a tiny, beautiful country nestled within Senegal in West Africa. Largely forgotten by the rest of the world, this small nation is slowly collapsing in on itself like a pack of cards. It’s not dramatic and it will go largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Certainly the rest of the international media.

15 years into his reign, President Jammeh has implemented a series of policy that line his pockets and do little for the people. This is couple with a terrifying press freedom record and its accompanying propaganda barrage that leaves the population with little information, opinion or ability to chance either. One Gambian journalist I spoke to said of the situation, “Human development is stagnant. Jammeh keeps them just stupid enough.”

Developing nations have reacted furiously to a leaked draft agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, once again raising questions as to whether a lasting agreement can be reached in Denmark.

The document was leaked to a British newspaper, The Guardian, on Tuesday, and outlines a response to climate change that gives greater power to developed nations while marginalizing the UN’s role within the debate.

The G77 bloc of developing nations have responded angrily to the text, accusing the West of “carbon colonialism”. The G77′s chair, Lumumba Stanislaus Di Aping of Sudan, told journalists in Copenhagen that the so-called Danish Text “seemed to secure 60 per cent of the global atmospheric space for 20 per cent of the world’s wealthiest nations”.

However, conflicting reports have emerged about the importance and accuracy of the document. The Guardian newspaper reported that it was a “finalized draft agreement” written by a group of rich nation, known as the “circle of commitment”. But the head of the UN Climate change Secretariat said that the document was out of date and was unlikely to constitute part of the final agreement.

This leaked document is the second text that has emerged in recent weeks that has threatened to derail talks in Copenhagen. On November 17, a series of hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK, a leading climate change research centre, were published online. The emails appeared to show that scientists had manipulated data to prove that the climate was heating up.

Vocal Climate change skeptic, Republican senator Jim Inhofe, seized on the emails as proof that climate change was a lie. “Now we see that that science has been pretty well debunked,” Inhofe told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room.

Respected climate change author, George Monbiot, in an interview with The Real News Network said that while the emails don’t disprove climate change suppressing skeptics was unacceptable.

Possibly taking Monbiot’s cue, Sarah Palin, aired her opinion in The Washington Post and accused climate scientists of playing a dangerous highly politicized game that threatened to ruin the American economy.

New York Times commentator, Thomas L. Friedman, took the opposite tack. In an op-ed on Wednesday derisively titled “Going Cheney on Climate”, Friedman stated that “even if Climate change turns out to be a hoax… a clean power economy… is stronger, more innovative and more energy independent.”

Chris Horner of the Washington Examiner described “Climategate”, as the leaked emails have become known, as a highly politicized action, and this latest leak in Denmark appears to be of the same political vein.

My article was recently published in Wired magazine (UK). It’s on the newsstands across the UK or you can see at
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/10/start/exposed-wikileaks%27-secrets.aspx

A press release today from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has warned that current UN estimates regarding the cost of climate change are way below what the actual cost will be. This warning comes 3 months before the Copenhagen Climate Change conference. IIED suggest that the UN climate negotiations should aim for substantially more funding.

LONDON – 27 August 2009. Scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn today that the UN negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to its impacts.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be 2-3 times greater than estimates made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), say Professor Martin Parry and colleagues in a new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

The report adds that costs will be even more when the full range of climate impacts on human activities is considered.

Parry and colleagues warn that this underestimate of the cost of adaptation threatens to weaken the outcome of UNFCCC negotiations, which are due to culminate in Copenhagen in December with a global deal aimed at tackling climate change.

“The amount of money on the table at Copenhagen is one of the key factors that will determine whether we achieve a climate change agreement,” says Professor Parry, visiting research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. “But previous estimates of adaptation costs have substantially misjudged the scale of funds needed.”

The UNFCCC has estimated annual global costs of adapting to climate change to be US$40-170 billion, or the cost of about three Olympic Games per year.

But the report’s authors warn that these estimates were produced too quickly and did not include key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, retailing, mining, tourism and ecosystems. Other sectors that the UNFCCC did include were only partially covered.

“Just looking in depth at the sectors the UNFCCC did study, we estimate adaptation costs to be 2-3 higher, and when you include the sectors the UNFCCC left out the true cost is probably much greater,” warns Parry, who co-chaired the IPCC working group on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation between 2002 and 2008.

The new report’s key findings include:

• Water: The UNFCCC estimate of US$11 billion excluded costs of adapting to floods and assumes no costs for transferring water within nations from areas of surplus to areas of deficit. The underestimate could be substantial, according to the new report.

• Health: The UNFCCC estimate of US$5 billion excluded developed nations, and assessed only malaria, diarrhoea and malnutrition. This could cover only 30-50% of the global total disease burden, according to the new report.

• Infrastructure: The UNFCCC estimate of US$8-130 billion assumed that low levels of investment in infrastructure will continue to characterise development in Africa and other relatively poor parts of the world. But the new report points out that such investment must increase in order to reduce poverty and thus avoid continuing high levels of vulnerability to climate change. It says the costs of adapting this upgraded infrastructure to climate change could be eight times more costly than the higher estimates predicted by the UNFCCC.

• Coastal zones: The UNFCCC estimate of US$11 billion excluded increased storm intensity and used low IPCC predictions of sea level rise. Considering research on sea level rise published since the 2007 IPCC report, and including storms, the new report suggests costs could be about three times greater than predicted.

• Ecosystems: The UNFCCC excluded from its estimates the costs of protecting ecosystems and the services they can provide for human society. The new report concludes that that this is an important source of under-estimation, which could cost over US$350 billion, including both protected and non-protected areas.

The report calls for detailed case studies of what adaptation costs will be, and points out that the few that already exist suggest that costs will be considerable.

It adds that the UNFCCC estimates do not include the cost of bearing ‘residual damage’ that will arise from situations where adaptation is not technically feasible or simply too expensive.

“Finance is the key that will unlock the negotiations in Copenhagen but if governments are working with the wrong numbers, we could end up with a false deal that fails to cover the costs of adaptation to climate change,“ says Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, which co-published the report.

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, which co-published the report, says: “The costs of adapting to live with a changing climate are very uncertain. However, this new report suggests that previous attempts to figure out the costs have drastically under-estimated how expensive this could be. With such large sums potentially involved, the pressure to act now to reduce the extent of climate change is greater than ever.”

The new report was reviewed by seven of the world’s foremost adaptation scientists, including the lead authors of the original UNFCCC study. Following this, close to 100 adaptation policy and research experts were invited to comment on the pre-publication draft.

The report’s authors are: Professor Martin Parry (Imperial College London), Professors Nigel Arnell (University of Reading), Richard Tiffin (University of Reading) and Tim Wheeler (University of Reading), Dr Pam Berry (University of Oxford), Drs David Dodman and David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development), Dr Sam Fankhauser (London School of Economics), Dr Chris Hope (University of Cambridge), Dr Sari Kovats (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Professor Robert Nicholls (University of Southampton).

The report will be launched on 27 August at a press conference, which will be attended by Professor Martin Parry (Imperial College London), Professors Nigel Arnell, Richard Tiffin, Dr Pam Berry (University of Oxford), Drs David Dodman and David Satterthwaite (International Institute for Environment and Development), Dr Sam Fankhauser (London School of Economics), Dr Chris Hope (University of Cambridge).

Rob Reynolds doesn’t pull any punches in his acerbic explanation of the latest the wave of anti-Obama sentiments that has swept the US over the last month. He offers an explanation for many Americans’ attitude towards the current president by calling on the evidence of history, soundly concluding that the “town-hall hatemongers, gun-toting “patriots” and whacked-out conspiracy theorists on your TV… are not merely common, garden variety lunatics, but heirs to a rich and time-honoured American tradition”.

Read the article at

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/08/200982075754210254.html

Imagine a world where you can be sued for what you say on your blog. We are one step closer to that world today after a landmark ruling in New York that has forced Google to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who called the 37 year-old Canadian model Liskula Cohen a ‘skank’.

Cohen sought legal action against Google after a torrent of abusive comments were made on the Skanks in NYC blog. Cohen now plans to launch a libel case against the no longer anonymous blogger.

This is a worrying new development in the on-going war for online privacy. At a time when many in the supposed developed world are critical of the likes of Iran, China and Egypt for suppressing bloggers and access to social networking sites such as twitter, I think that what is happening quietly under our noses is of equal, if not greater, concern.

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Over the years, the World Bank’s policy of promoting water privatisation has been met with strong opposition. And today, the word privatisation is considered a bad word (in relation to public services).

But rather than changing tack and thinking up a new way to tackle the world’s water problems, the World Bank has merely renamed water privatisation “mulitple contract schemes” or sometimes, “private public partnership”, PPP for short.

In 2007, Mumbai’s residents fought against the World Bank’s plan to privatise Mumbai’s water supply. The privatisation scheme would have lead to higher tariffs and little improvement in the distribution of water to the city’s residents.

The World Bank and the French consultancy firm Castalia were accused by the local population and water activists of presenting a report based on inflated data in order to push through water privatization. “Castalia’s findings supported privatization, but were based on insufficient research, unreliable technology, inaccurate methodology and specious logic,” said Afsar Jafri, a research assistant with Focus on the Global South.

But Mumbai’s victory against the privatisation scheme has been short lived, and the World Bank has returned to Mumbai now advocating “multiple contract schemes” as a solution to Mumbai’s water problems. Currently only the pipe maintenance of Mumbai’s water system is looked after by multiple different contracts, and Afsar said that this scheme is costing Mumbai far more than when the system was maintained by the municipal government. Despite this evidence, the World Bank is pushing for other areas of Mumbai’s water system to be shared by multiple contracts.

Over the last five years, the World Bank has encouraged and supported the signing of 97 water utility contacts with 28 governments from developing countries. This brings the total number of people reliant on private water companies for their water and sanitation needs to 545 million.

Despite the World Bank’s push of water privatization schemes, there has been little improvement in water access in developing countries. Based on the World Bank’s current policy on water issues, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water by 2015 will not be reached, according to research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The World Bank has advocated water privatization since the 1990s as a means of improving access to clean water and sanitation in developing countries. And despite overwhelming evidence exposing the failings of water privatization schemes, the World Bank continues to encourage privatization, often requiring government in developing countries to sign onto privatization schemes as a condition a loan.

In recent years, the number of water privatization schemes in developing countries has dropped as high profile cases, such as the Bolivian water wars, have sullied the general public’s opinion of the private sector. The World Bank’s response to this seems to be to just rename the policy and try again!

I have just been told that I have won the UNESCO student journalist competition. I can’t believe it!

Below is my article.

Is the Western media impeding press freedom in those countries that need it most?

War raged in Gaza for 22 days. The battle for media coverage raged still longer. Western journalists viewed the war from a corralled position on a hill in Israel overlooking Gaza. The local journalists were inside, surrounded by the realities of the war. But did we hear their story?

Israel stopped foreign journalists from entering Gaza, and in doing so placed iron shackles around the Palestinian journalists. The BBC, CBC and CNN were reliant on journalists inside Gaza for images and information, but they handled all images and reports that came out of the territory with suspicion because they couldn’t verify the facts themselves. When they aired reports from Gaza, they placed a disclaimer on the images that came from Palestinian journalists stating that no foreign journalist had been able to check the images’ authenticity. In doing so they questioned the images’ legitimacy, and the legitimacy of the Palestinian journalists.

Israel careful handled the Western media to promote their own version of the Gaza war. “It was about who was important to Israel when it came to getting their message out,” said Sherine Tadros, a British journalist with Al Jazeera English, “And Israel were more interested in their message being filtered through the Western media than the local media.” But, the effects of Israel’s controlling hand on the Western journalists had a butterfly effect on all journalists inside Gaza.

Sherine Tadros was in Gaza for the duration of the war. She had entered the territory two months earlier and had stayed to support her colleague Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera English’s permanent Gaza correspondent.

“We really felt like we were the only ones there,” said Sherine, “The Western broadcasters were sending correspondents to Gaza sporadically. Suddenly there was this war and everyone wanted to get in, but Gaza was a story before that.”

When the war began everything changed for Sherine and the Palestinian journalists working along side her. The story they were living, along with the 1.5 million Gaza residents, was in the international media everyday, but it was not the same story they were witnessing. It was as if the largely Arabic media inside Gaza were experiencing a different war to the one that the Western press were reporting on from Israel.

Israel capitalised on the commercial monopoly that the established Western press has over the media globally. And the Western media became the modus operandi for Israel’s press office. The status that the international news broadcasters hold granted them a legitimacy that caused the reports coming out of Gaza, produced by international Arabic and local news channels, to be dismissed by many as sensationalist.

“If the same image had been taken by a Western journalist, from CNN or BBC, it would have been considered much more powerful within international public opinion,” said Soazig Dollet, head of Reporters Without Borders North Africa and Middle-East Desk, “When you take an photo of your own people suffering, people think that you are not as objective as a photographer from outside would be.”

But can this argument be applied to any local journalist reporting on a local story? Or is the argument only applicable to Palestinian and Arabic journalists whose style of journalism is different from that of the Western media?

Soazig commented that when she went to Gaza after the war, the Palestinian journalists said that they should have told more stories rather than just showing woman crying, bloodied bodies and devastated houses. “That would have had more emotional play, they told me,” said Soazig, “As their reports would have been more inline with the Western style of journalism.”

But why is the different style of journalism that the Palestinian journalists have from the Western press used against them, ultimately at the detriment of the story and global awareness of the plight of the Gazan people? This question seems unanswerable.

Reporters without Borders wrote a report about the media environment in Gaza during the war. They interviewed a number of Palestinian journalists who complained that they were not seen as “real journalists”. The manager of Ramattan, the Palestinian news agency that provided footage for the BBC, CNN, Channel 4, France 24, told Reporters Without Borders: “We are not credible because we are Palestinian. Anyone is considered to be better than us and this is even if we have many years of media experience.”

The International Federation of Journalism commented, “It is important to note that the conditions of journalism in Palestine have been severely compromised in recent years by political divisions.” But once again, why should the political factions of Gaza be used to discredit the journalism of the Palestinian journalists?

Gaza needs a voice. Gaza does not need a voice mediated by Hamas. Gaza does not need a voice mediated by Israel. Gaza does not need a voice mediated by the Western press. But through a sophisticated application of public relations, Israel sought to limit the press freedom in Gaza by mediating all the voices that spoke of the war.

It appears that Palestinian journalists have been paralysed by years of inaction by the international press and the actions of the Israeli government. “For press freedom to flourish in Gaza, Palestinian journalists need investment,” said Sherine Tadros, “Having local people reporting is increasingly what the big international broadcasters are doing. But that is certainly not happening in Gaza.”

Maybe the detrimental effect that Israel’s blockade of foreign journalists had on the international coverage of the war will encourage foreign editors to invest more in Gaza in the future. And finally the Western media will be able to promote local Palestinian journalists as their colleagues rather than silencing them through distrust of their work.

“The Israelis won the propaganda battle of the Gaza war but in a very crude sense it backfired,” said William Horsley, international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at Sheffield University, “The unquestioning support that Israel enjoyed is now being questioned by journalists and the world.” Hopefully as Israel is questioned, Palestinian journalists will be able to find their voice.

The retired Anglican bishop of Jerusalem wanted to join George Galloway’s Viva Palestina Gaza aid convoy but was refused permission by the Israeli government.

Bishop Riah called Galloway on his return to the UK on Thursday to congratulate him on the success of the Viva Palestina aid convoy he had organised and led.

“I was very touched by the call from the Bishop Riah, the Bishop of Jerusalem, who is an old friend,” said Galloway, “I very much wish he had been able to join us in Gaza. He has long opposed Israeli policy in the region and stood up for the rights of the Palestinians. It really is outrageous that a man of such standing should have been prevented from entering Gaza but this underlines the stranglehold that the Israeli government continues to exercise over the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there.”

Galloway’s aid convoy to Gaza not only provided much need humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza, but was also a symbolic breach of the governmental sanctions against the territory. Galloway gave £25,000 in cash to Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, on Tuesday morning. His gesture was an overt violation of the EU sanctions against Gaza.

Galloway’s aid convoy arrived in Gaza on Tuesday three weeks after leaving London. The mile long convoy travelled over 6,000 miles across north Africa to reach Gaza. It tripled in size as supporters and other charities joined the convoy on route. In Lybia, the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, run by the son of the Libyan leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, gave a significant contribution of vehicles and aid.