'This is just the beginning,' peace activists warn Tony Blair on Chilcot report
The Chilcot report was a long time coming but anyone who hoped this was the end will be bitterly disappointed. For the protestors at Westminster, the damning verdict, reached after so many years, is just the beginning.
Waving placards such as "Out damned spot" and "Bliar", activists who have fought their corner year after year, often in the face of ridicule and contempt from the mainstream, continued their protests at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre.
They seemed at times to be outnumbered by the police and media presence, their chants drowned out by the incongruously joyful ringing out of the bells of Westminster Abbey.
Gordon, from the Methodist Peace Fellowship, said: "God does not see war as the way of solving problems. We take the Christian point of view, the Christian pacifist point of view. I'm not sure there has ever been a just war and I certainly don't think that war has ever solved any problems. It's just created more."
Angie, ordained a deacon on Sunday, said: "I really want truth, whatever that may be, and justice for people who have not had justice, whether that is Iraqi families or military families. We should never have gone to war. We don't know enough about the Middle East. Just go back in the Bible, it goes back over thousands of years, the problems in the Middle East, and we as westerners are not going to solve those problems."
Stop the War activist Jan Woolf, who was working as a teacher during the war, and who organised a series of anti-war plays at the Royal Court in 2013, said the conflict caused terrible distress among her colleagues and pupils and that had been replicated nationwide. "As someone who is part of the peace movement as well as work collectives, this is important and to be welcomed. This is just the beginning of the process."
The anti-war poet John, who served in the Army in Northern Ireland, said: "I'm here to try to pursue justice for Tony Blair, to ensure that he answers for the crimes that he has committed over many years, the millions of lives he has altered."
