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International Women’s Day – 2004

International Women’s Day: On Saturday 6th March 2004 I photographed an event in Trafalgar Square to celebrate International Women’s Day which was the following Monday, 8th March.

First celebrated in 1909 by the Socialist Party of America, International Women’s Day was established in 1910 by the Second International following a proposal by Clara Zetkin, although the date only became 8 March in 1913 when peace rallies were held on that day shortly before the First World War. IWD rallies led to the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and Lenin made the day an official “holiday”, although it remained a working day there until 1965. The UN adopted it in 1975 and in 2005 the TUC called for it to be made a UK public holiday.

This year, 2025, the 8th March is a Saturday and there will be an all-women march in London, Million Women Rise, demanding an end to male violence to women and girls, beginning on Oxford Street and marching to a rally in Trafalgar Square. I photographed the first London Million Women Rise in 2008 and have covered the event working from the sidelines most years since.

I had photographed International Women’s Day events in some earlier years, and there are also a few pictures from 2003 on My London Diary, but I think 2004 was the first more extended post. Here with the usual corrections to case and spelling etc is what I wrote in 2004.

Woman’s Court Puts Bush and Blair On Trial

There are various events in London around the start of March connected with International Woman’s Day on the 8 March. In Trafalgar Square on Saturday 6th a Woman’s Court put George Bush and Tony Blair on trial for crimes against women, children and men. The event was a part of the 5th Global Women’s Strike.

Events started with a a short play by a group from Crossroads Women’s Centre in North London highlighting the racist immigration policy of Fortress Europe, typical agit-prop, enlivened as always by some individual performances that relied more on personality than script.

All good fun with the villains being George W Bush and our very own Tony Blair.

Good fun if it wasn’t for the fact that the consequences of the actions of these men and the interests they stand for were felt around the world.

Selma James, widow of C L R James, then opened the trial of Bush and Blair, represented in their absence by large puppets. One of the first witnesses was Elsa T, an Eritrean rape victim whose moving testimony was given us in translation.

Another moving speech came from Jocelyn Hurndall, the mother of Tom Hurndall who was shot by an Israeli soldier while trying to protect children in Palestine. The clothing he was wearing to identify himself as a non-combatant apparently made him into a target.

Other speakers included representatives from the Black Women’s Rape Action project, a Native American woman, a woman soldier, Mrs N from Zimbabwe whose son died in a British prison, and several men including Brian Haw from the 24/7 picket in Parliament Square.

A few more pictures on My London Diary.

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Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March – 2005

Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March: Another post from the past – 20 years ago on Saturday 12th February 2005- which has perhaps added resonance now that Trump and President Musk have condemned humanity to death with their climate roasting rejection of our last chances of survival. Though like some of his multi-billionaire friends he perhaps trusts inhumanity will survive in their climate bunkers with their heavily armed guards to keep out the rest of us. And as a small bonus I’ll add the anti-consumerist Valentines Day Reclaim Love which I photographed later the same day around Eros.

So here again is the text from 2005, suitably recapitalised and slightly corrected, along with a few of the pictures and linked to the rest. And the odd link to add context which people may have now forgotten.

Campaign against Climate Change Kyoto Climate March

When I talked about the dangers of increasing CO2 emission and the need to cut down use of fossil fuels 35 years ago, I was a crank. Now everyone except the USA oil lobby and their political poodles recognises that climate change is for real.

Even Blair has recognised it as the most vital issue facing us, threatening the future of the planet, although actually taking effective action still is a step too far for him. However he did call for a conference to examine the problem, which told him and us that we had perhaps ten years to take action before it would be to late.

*4x4s waste fuel and endanger pedestrians and cyclists*

Kyoto is history now thanks to the US boycott, (although it comes into effect this week), but it should have been the first inadequate step on the road to action.

*Displaying flags of the 141 countries who have adopted Kyoto*

Every journey has to start somehow, and even a half-hearted step is better than none, and would have led the way to others. What got in its way was Texan oil interests, whose political face is George W Bush.

I’ve photographed most of the Campaign Against Climate Change’s Kyoto marches over the past few years. This one was probably the largest, and certainly excited more media interest, truly a sign that the issue has become news.

*Police stand guard as Lucy Wills berates ExxonMobil for their lies on climate change which drives US policy*

Starting in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the march stopped first outside the UK offices of Exxonmobil, on the corner of Kingsway for a brief declaration,

then for a longer demonstration outside the Australian High Commission in Aldwych (with guest appearances by its PM ‘John Howard‘ and an Australian ‘Grim Reaper’ with cork decorated hat),

*Uncle Sam as the Grim Reaper in Trafalgar Square*

before making its way past Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus to the Us Embassy.
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O-I-L One in Love – Reclaim Love, Eros, Piccadilly Circus

I left the climate march in Picadilly and returned to Eros, where O-I-L, One In Love, were organising a small gathering to “reclaim love” and “send love and healing to all the beings in the world” on the eve of Valentine’s day. It’s something we could all do with, and it was good to see people enjoying themselves around the statue of Eros (Anteros for pedants) in what is usually one of the most depressing spots on London’s tourist circuit.

*Irish poet Venus CuMara who founded and organised these free street party*

There was the samba band again, Rhythms Of Resistance, (hi guys) and dancing and people generally being happy and friendly and free Reclaim Love t shirts and apart from the occasional showers it was harmless fun.

*The circle to send love and healing to all the beings in this world*

Rather to my surprise, the police either didn’t notice it or decided to ignore it, an unusually sensible strategy

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Guantanamo Day – 11th January

Guantanamo Day – 11th January: Today is the 23rd anniversary of the setting up by U.S. President George W. Bush of the illegal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay inside the US Naval base on Cuba.

Bush had issued a military order in November 2001 “for the indefinite detention of foreign nationals without charge and preventing them from legally challenging their detention” and to their shame the US Department of Justice claimed that the principle of ‘habeas corpus‘ did not apply to the camp as it was not on US territory.

At first a temporary camp called ‘Camp X-Ray’ was set up at Guantanamo and the first twenty detainees arrived there on 11 January 2002. Later they were moved to a more permanent Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

The US administration argued that the site was not US territory as it was only held under a lease from Cuba last updated in 1934 “under which Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty but the U.S. exercises sole jurisdiction.” Cuba since the 1959 revolution has argued that the US presence there is illegal and has called repeatedly for them to leave and return the territory to Cuba.

The USA also argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to ‘unlawful enemy combatants’, and went ahead holding prisoners there in cruel, inhumane and degrading conditions and torturing them. The Wikipedia article gives some details of the condemnations by the Red Cross and human rights organisations as well as the testimonies of released prisoners.

There was little if any evidence against great majority of the at least 780 men who were held in Guantanamo and most were finally released without charge, although today 15 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay. Nine died while being held there. Only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offences. Most were just foreigners who were in Afghanistan for various reasons and were captured and sold to the US forces by bounty hunters.

The last detainee with a British connection to be released was Shaker Aamer, born in Saudi Arabia but with British Resident status and a wife and family in Battersea, London who had gone to Afghanistan as a charity worker. He was captured by bandits and sold to the US in December 2001 and transferred to Guantanamo on 14 February 2002 after having been interrogated and tortured in the prison at the US Bagram air base. He was eventually released in October 2015 having been held for over thirteen years.

Some large protests against Guantanamo took place in London over the years, as well as smaller regular vigils at the US Embassy and in front of Parliament. I photographed many of these over the years, putting accounts and pictures on My London Diary as well as sending them to agencies. The pictures here come from my post about a small protest by active campaigners against the camp at the US Embassy on Monday 11th January 2010, Guantanamo Bay – 8 Shameful Years.

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Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003

Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003 – On 22nd March 2003 several hundred thousand people marched through London against the invasion of Iraq which had begun four days earlier on on 19th March 2003.

I’d missed the huge worldwide protests the previous month, when on the weekend of 15-16th February according to the BBC, always conservative (I think a euphemism for deliberately lying) on protest numbers reported that a million people had marched in London on the Saturday among between six and ten million in 60 countries around the world.

I’d come out of hospital the previous day, February 14th, and was still very weak following a minor heart operation that had gone slightly wrong. So I could only wave to my wife and elder son as they set off to the station to join the other 1.5 or 2 million marchers.

I think it was March 6th that my doctor signed me off as fit to work, though I was still not back to normal, but I covered my first protest after the op two days later, cutting down the weight of my camera bag as much as I could to two cameras and five lenses – all primes.

I’d spent some of my time recovering getting used to the Nikon D100 I had bought just a few weeks before going into hospital. It was the first digital camera I’d owned capable of professional results, and the first with interchangeable lenses, though I only then owned one in a Nikon fitting I’d bought with the camera, a 24-85mm.

As well as taking colour pictures on the D100, I was also taking black and white film using a rangefinder camera, probably a Konica Hexar RF, the kind of camera Leica should have produced but never did. It featured automatic film advance and rewind and had accurate auto-exposure and has been described as “the most powerful M mount camera there is.” And very much cheaper than a Leica. The nine pictures from the day I sent to the library I was then using were all black and white 8×10″ prints from the pictures made with the Hexar RF, as in 2003 they were still not taking digital files.

Here you can see some of the digital images I took on 22nd March 2003 with that single zoom lens. It was the first zoom lens I had used for over 25 years, having been rather disappointed with a telephoto zoom I bought soon after I got my Olympus OM1. The image quality on the Nikon zoom – about the cheapest lens in their range and light and relatively small – was fine if not quite up to the Leica lenses on the Hexar, but it gave some distortion – barrel at 24mm and pincushion at 85mm.

But the Nikon D100 was a DX format camera, and on this the widest angle of view marked as 24mm actually was equivalent to 35mm on my film camera. Hardly wide-angle at all, and on film I was often working with 15mm or 21mm lenses.

The digital images are shown here as I put them on-line in 2003, and I think I would get the colour rather better now. And of course digital cameras have improved tremendously since then, with much better dynamic range, and the software for processing digital images is also far better. Also with download speeds generally much lower in 2003 they were put on line at a much poorer jpeg quality so they would download faster – and also spread over a number of pages with perhaps just half a dozen images on each page.

The marchers met on the Embankment and marched to a rally in Hyde Park. I think I only used the D100 before and on the march and photographed the rally entirely in black and white. Probably this was a decision I made, but it could have been because the battery ran out. But I think I had decided just to use it to photograph people on the march.

We now know that Blair lied to take us to war and made use of the fake “dodgy dossier” to swing the vote in Parliament. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq – and the UN had found none because there was nothing to find. But the US had been gearing up to attack over the past year and were not going to let the facts put them off, and Blair was their lap dog.

You can read more about the Invasion of Iraq on Wikipedia. While the US had prepared for war, they had made little or no preparation for what was to follow after President George W Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” on May 1st. Iraq was still in a mess when the US troops finally withdrew in 2011 and remains so today. It was as I wrote in 2003, the wrong war at the wrong time – and by 2023 over 60% of US citizens were prepared to state that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq.

More on the March 2003 page of My London Diary where you can also find pictures of another protest against the war on Saturday 29th March calling for more balanced coverage by the BBC.

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