Note: Apologies for the delay, holiday meant there was a backlog of e-mail to sort through and this slipped back a bit.
Dundee East and West branches of the Scottish Socialist party organised a public meeting in the city’s Queens Hotel on the evening of Wednesday, September 23, to protest at the continuing war in Afghanistan, and calling for the troops to be brought home.
It was a particularly poignant time to hold this meeting in Dundee, as two young soldiers from the area, one from Dundee itself and the other from nearby Monifieth, had lost their lives in the fighting in Afghanistan during the previous three weeks, in this pointless and senseless war.
Street stalls were held on the five days leading up to the meeting and the reaction from the public was overwhelmingly against the war and agreeing with the SSP‘s position.
Many of those signing our petitions and pledging support for our stance told us that they were either family or friends of service personnel currently on duty in Afghanistan.
In the two days leading up to the meeting, Dundee West member Angela Gorrie was interviewed on the two local radio stations, Radio Tay and Wave 102, giving her the opportunity to state the Scottish Socialist Party’s case against the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.
The meeting itself was well attended with around thirty members of the pbulic turning out to show their anger at Britain’s continuing involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
Speakers at the meeting were Colin Fox, national spokesperson of the Scottish Socialist Party; former MP and MSP and Scottish Socialist Party member John McAllion; and Mohammad Asif, of the Scottish Afghan Society.
First to speak was John McAllion, who highlighted the enormity of the lies and deceptions surrounding the war, while the next speaker, Mohammad Asif, told of the countless unnamed Afghan casualties who never seem to rate a mention as victims of a war being fought on their own soil.
In the final speech of the evening Colin Fox stated that on the run-up to next year’s general election the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing crisis of captitalism would be the main issues on which the election would be fought.
Following their speeches, the speakers then answered various questions from the floor of the meeting.
As regards further anti-war activity, it was agreed that we should use the time between now and the anti-war demonstration in Edinburgh on November 14 to build for the demo, and we should attempt to get the maximum number of people from Dundee through to Edinburgh for the event in order to keep up the pressure on the government.