Blair shaken after peace march
RASHMEE Z AHMED

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2003 08:28:35 PM ]

LONDON: Tony Blair's Labour Party has been asked to back him as the British government struggles to regain its nerve on the morning after the largest public protests in history in London, Glasgow and nearly 250 other British cities.

As controversy rages over the credentials of a pro-war Iraqi student quoted by Blair ahead of the anti-war rally, a large and committed contingent of British Indians congratulated themselves on "standing up and being counted" as part of British public life.

Said Harish Patel, who had travelled to London from Leicester, "My father says there are dharnas in India. This is the way we do things here in Britain and I'm glad I've stood up and said, the war is not in my name."

Zafar from Dewsbury, north-west England, said, "I wanted to add my voice."

On Sunday afternoon, Blair's deputy, old-style Labour bruiser John Prescott exhorted the starkly-divided governing party to back its embattled leader, in the face of worldwide protests and British opinion polls showing Blair at his most unpopular.

In the first immediate aftermath of the unprecedented anti-war protests, Precott recalled the Falklands war and said he had never agreed with it.

"War is ugly, the Labour movement has never supported it... we stand up to murderous dictators... it is controversial and never popular," Prescott said.

John Reid, Labour Party chairman, said the party was "engaged and listening."

Blair's decision to quote a pro-war letter from a 19-year-old Iraqi student at Cambridge, Rania Kashi, has also come in for criticism.

Sunday morning saw Kashi touring TV studios admitting she had never been to Iraq, was born in Kuwait of Iraqi refugee parents and had arrived in Britain at the age of three months.

Her pro-war letter to Blair, quoted by the prime minister to make a "moral case for war and removing Saddam" said, "I want to ask those who support the anti-war movement their motives and reasons behind such support... you are still blind to the bigger truths in Iraq... Saddam has murdered more than 1 m people Iraqis... Are you willing to allow him to kill another million?"

But Kashi has been attacked by, among others, veteran socialist and anti-war Labour MP Tony Benn, who said she had no credentials for advising the West to kill innocent Iraqis in war.

Meanwhile, Indian marchers at the London and Glasgow protests said the majority was made up of Gujarati Muslims, while Buddhists and third-generation immigrant students also made their first forays into the politics of protest.

The Gujarati marchers flooding the streets of London on the 3.5-mile march on Saturday, came from Leicester in the English Midlands and Batley in the north-west of England, the hometown of the three British Gujaratis who died in last year's Gujarat riots.

The huge Gujarati Muslim population in British foreign secretary Jack Straw's constituency, Blackburn in Lancashire, also took part in the protests, but in Glasgow, Scotland, where at least 30,000 marchers took to the streets
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