On Thursday 3rd December, I joined around one hundred others on Cornmarket Street in a candlelit vigil of solidarity with the Syrian and Iraqi peoples. Groups across the university and city had called it together in reaction to the previous night’s Parliamentary decision to launch air strikes on the Syrian region.
A few hours before, I told a friend about the vigil. She asked why it was happening, considering that the vote was over. Well-meaning though this was, it made me think about how poorly equipped we are to express resistance and solidarity outside of parliamentary votes and debates.
Solidarity with the Syrian people does not stop now that some of the bombs come with our Parliament’s stamp of approval. Rather instead, it is now more than ever that these horrors ought to remain at the forefront of our minds. That evening Barnaby Raine, on behalf of the Oxford Students’ Palestine Society, spoke of the perversion of telling the Syrian people that our bombs are better than their bombs.
Still those against the strikes are told that the interventionists see a complexity in these bombs, a complexity lost on us. The groups present in force that evening gave an entirely different story. The Arab Cultural Society named those otherwise nameless towns and cities which will be visited with British bombs. The OUSU Campaign for Racial Awareness and Equality reminded us how much easier it is to see bodies as collateral damage when those bodies are black and brown. Rhodes Must Fall Oxford addressed the colonialism to which the Middle East has long been subject, and how this follows through to this very moment. All emphasised the imperative to open our borders.
Interventionists have failed to show how airstrikes would defeat ISIS, instead exploiting the kneejerk urgency to do ‘something’ – but note that this ‘something’ is never a radical rethink of how Britain welcomes refugees. It is because of this mindless urgency that Hilary Benn can receive rapturous applause when he makes a statesmanlike yet spurious case for bombing. It all speaks of how this debate has centred on British feelings of faraway impotence in a brutal situation.
Yet those feelings are nothing compared to living in that brutal situation. That was why we must stand with this vigil and cause: to centre the voiceless, the homeless, and the stateless. Bombs will fall on their homes long after their victims have fallen off our front pages. Any hope for change rests – as far as we outside their world are concerned – on continuing our efforts to remember them.
