The Chilcot Report
Richard Stewart reports on the response of one Quaker Meeting
Several months before the publication of the Chilcot Report our Ipswich Meeting decided to organise a silent vigil in the middle of town. We picked Friday 8 July, which gave enough time to analyse the main findings of the report.
A series of posters was designed and produced by Paul Hodgkin, then refined by others as regards wording, colour and format. We also included an old battered poster to emphasise that this was a Quaker vigil, though the Friends’ logo did appear on each new poster. The emphasis was on easy-to-read messages such as ‘Silent Vigil For All Victims Of The Iraq War’ and ‘What Did The War In Iraq Mean For You?’ One included the well-known phrase ‘Not In My Name’. A further one gave the total for the number of British soldiers killed in the war, which was 179, and the figure for innocent Iraqi civilians killed, which was at least 240,000.
We were twice asked to move by business interests but for the whole of the three-hour vigil we were present in central Ipswich. I estimated that eighty people on average passed by each minute, giving a total of well over 10,000 for the whole of the vigil. Eight Friends from our Meeting were involved at different times and although at least two initially professed some reservations about the vigil being silent, they were convinced at the end: one compared it to our Sunday Meeting for Worship.
In reality, the silence was often broken by people coming over to us, though most who responded did so at a distance, stopping to read the posters then giving us a ‘thumbs up’ or a few words of support before walking on. There were very few negative comments: one about migrants, one about the Labour Party and one suggesting Iraq would have done the same to us, given the chance. Several exchanges occurred when people came over to talk. One person’s son had served in Afghanistan and they mentioned the Iraq Veterans Against the War group. Another woman with two children spent some time reading the posters and then said she was glad we were showing there was a difference between the common people and their elected representatives. Another stood with us for a short time and then explained that she had to go as her husband was in hospital. We also talked to a man who had lived in Iraq during the 1950s and an Iranian who said he came to our country as a student in 1968. His family had been persecuted and lost everything under regimes supported by western nations. He wanted to know about campaigning organisations and we gave him three websites to explore.
Everyone felt the vigil had been a powerful experience of personal ministry to our Peace Testimony. On a more practical note, the rota system of a coffee break and the use of the one stool were particularly welcome. As a follow-up, the posters were displayed in our Meeting room the following Sunday and on the same day Paul Hodgkin gave a ten-minute interview to BBC Radio Suffolk; also, from the perspective of ‘spreading the message’, we noted that several people took photos and, hopefully soon, some might end up on social media sites.
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