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The Vicar of Baghdad, peacemaker or powerbroker ?

Danny | 29.05.2007 19:25 | Analysis | Iraq | Palestine

The five Britons kidnapped in Baghdad work for Garda World, a Canadian security firm. Channel 4 news tonight led with a feature on them, where Jon Snow was pretty sceptical about their chances of survival due to their profession. There are 20,000 foriegn 'private security guards' in Iraq who are widely hated for acting like private mercenaries unconstrained by laws or morals. Jon seemed surprised to hear a few hundred of them have already been killed.

Canon Andrew White was then interviewed by telephone from Baghdad. He said all his missions work had stopped and they were now focussed on releasing the hostages. He also mentioned that these kidnapped men also provided the security for the mission where he and they live. It seemed a bit odd to house mercenaries in a church, so I searched a bit on Cannon White. He works for the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (FRRME). He used to work for the Archbishop of Canterbury - much like Terry Waite did when he was kidnapped for being used by the CIA to spy in Lebanon.

"BUT though the book argues that Mr. Waite was a well-meaning victim, it also depicts him as a conceited Henry Kissinger wannabe who single-handedly sought to make his church a major actor on the world political stage. He believed his own press notices, the author says. Enjoying his celebrity status to an excessive degree, Mr. Hewitt writes, Mr. Waite made an unsuccessful bid to become the host of a television talk show. Then, says Mr. Hewitt, he played fast and loose in the intelligence world against the advice of his church by participating in briefings at which C.I.A. agents were present, permitting Mr. North to plan his trips and once even allowing a C.I.A. official to buy him a suit when his suitcase was mislaid on a flight to Cyprus. In the end, Mr. Hewitt concludes, Mr. Waite became little more than a disposable pawn. " [1]

The parallels between Waite and White seem uncanny, as if the Church has learned nothing. "The hat that has attracted most attention in the UK is his role as Anglican vicar of Baghdad (strictly limited at present to the international zone - his church, St George's, just a mile away from the high-security area, is out of bounds). But it is his other job that accounts for the contact with the Pentagon and State Department - as head of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East, a free-ranging role that allows him to act as the link between US power-brokers and the region's indigenous movers and shakers." [2]

"As Vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White oversees the spiritual and physical needs of the entire Anglican Communion in Iraq including St. George's and the various Coalition chapels within the International Zone." [3]

FRRME also award a peace prize. So far they have only awarded it once - to Garda World, their bodyguards. So the only people a British Christian organisation can find in Iraq to honour with a peaceprize are their British bodyguards ? It has certainly been used as corporate PR to boost their stockmarket value. [4] I wonder if the Anglicans invest in that corporation.

Until recently the Anglicans certainly invested in Caterpillar, the corporation that makes the killdozers that were used to flatten Jenin and Fallujah, and which were used to murder Rachel Corrie among many hundreds of others. They disinvested in Caterpillar in 2005 after an Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN) report into the daily brutality that the Palestinians face. [5]

You'd expect a 'peacemaker' like Cannon White to welcome such a report and disinvestment from an arms manufacturer wouldn't you ? After all he has been praised by the Dalai Lama.

But, no seemingly he was opposed to any criticism of Israel and worked behind the scenes to oppose any church disinvestment from Caterpillar. I can see his reasoning - after all, how much more money he could have to rebuild his church in Baghdad once the Americans had boought Caterpillars to bulldoze the mosques in Fallujah.

"And then a journalist friend gave me Andrew White's details again last year and we have never looked back. Much of his work is secret, so I can't divulge it here. But I can say that he came up to Manchester to try and persuade the Bishops here to work with me on interfaith matters, and especially on Israel. And he also told the rabbis he met at my house that it is imperative to work with both sides and that they should beware Christians who say they love us, but out of selfish motives. He thought the ACC decision to 'welcome' the APJN report on Jerusalem dire. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury actually voted for divestment from Caterpillar in February, Andrew rang me six times in all from Iraq and begged me not to give up on the Church. And quoted what every previous Archbishop had said about the Jews, which had been positive. Because he knew that I was to give a talk the next day in Manchester's Anglican Cathedral in celebration of the 350th anniversary of our return to England, so what an irony. He called the Synod vote 'sanctimonious claptrap' and said he was 'ashamed to be an Anglican' and that he wouldn't work with the Church in England if it carried on like this. He also wrote to the Ehtical Investments Advisory Group and had meetings with Canon Guy Wilkinson, the ABC's Interfaith Advisor (also to feature on this blog in the future)." [6]


[1] From Knight to Pawn  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1D81539F935A25751C0A964958260

[2] 'I don't just work with nice people'  http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1822288,00.html

[3] FRRME Iraq  http://frrme.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=iraq

[4] GardaWorld Awarded First "Peace Prize" from the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East for its Work in Iraq  http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=252400

[5] 2005 - Report of APJN Deliberations in Jerusalem  http://www.aco.org/apjn/  http://www.aco.org/apjn/APJN_Jersualem.pdf

[6] Tsaddik no. 18: Canon Andrew White, vicar in Iraq  http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/tsaddik_no_18_c.html

Danny

Comments

Hide the following 4 comments

Mercenary Numbers

30.05.2007 09:37

I should have kept track of the sources, but from memory it's more like 140,000 to 150.000 "private contractors" in Iraq, not all of these are on the "frontline".

An article linked to from  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/ a week or more ago reported in the region of 400 deaths of "contractors".

Somewhere else I read that there are 6 times as many British mercenaries in Iraq then regular troops.

There is a new book out on Blackwater and the guy who wrote it has been on  http://flashpoints.net/ -- it sounds very good, one to order from the library...

Thanks for writing and researching the article above.

whitewater


excuse me???

30.05.2007 15:30



Maybe if people were not that stupid, then they would realise that these five British people were actually kidnapped not by "Insurgents" or "terrorists" but by British and American trained members of the Iraqi Police Force, which as we all know was set up by the US and UK.

How ironic, that the media are telling us that the "kidnappers" used "authentic looking" identity cards etc and were able to moblise around 40 vehicles to use in this opperation, yet no member of the British or American military seemed to notice???

Why don't people start asking the Media and Communications Department at the Foreign and Common Wealth Office how was this so?

And maybe questions should also be raised into the British loyalty to Mr. Maliki because if the "kidnappers" were part of the Mehdi Army, as it is claimed, then it should not be too difficult as Malliki and Al-Sadr and part of the same political trend, serving the same master.

Also, in the same light, why does the UK allow into Britain active members of terrorist death squads, from organisations such as Mehdi, Badr etc, when they are going through Iraq ethnically cleansing people??? (NOT OPINION BUT FACT)

It's situations like this that I hear Gertrude Bell and T.E.Lawrence are quite glad to be dead but somehow I doubt the Foreign Office would even know who these two are, never mind know how to spell their names.

Iraqi


Mercenary Numbers

30.05.2007 20:27

Thanks for the correction, the 20,000 figure was a typo, I meant to type 120,000. According to the Scotsman today it is 126,000, nearly 20 times the number of British troops. And the wages they earn are phenomenal compared to the average squaddies wage. On Channel 4 news tonight a former 'security consultant' said they would treat every Iraqi policeman as a terrorist - if asked to get out the car by a policeman they wouldn't. They were asked 'But surely that means this huge army of contractors is roaming Iraq effectively beyond the law' , which they agreed with.

Oh, and Iraqi, and I'm grateful for the reference to Gertrude Bell who I'd never heard of. I see she was familiar with the Sadr family:

March 14, 1920: It's a problem here how to get into touch with the Shiahs, not the tribal people in the country; we're on intimate terms with all of them, but the grimly devout citizens of the holy towns and more especially the leaders of religious opinion, the Mujtahids, who can loose and bind with a word by authority which rests on an intimate acquaintance with accumulated knowledge entirely irrelevant to human affairs and worthless in any branch of human activity. There they sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -- nor can they. And for the most part they are very hostile to us, a feeling we can't alter…There's a group of these worthies in Kadhimain, the holy city, 8 miles from Baghdad, bitterly pan-Islamic, anti-British…Chief among them are a family called Sadr, possibly more distinguished for religious learning than any other family in the whole Shiah world….I went yesterday [to visit them] accompanied by an advanced Shiah of Baghdad whom I knew well. - Gertrude Bell

Danny


I'll never engage in creating kings again

30.05.2007 22:14

Five years before death, from an overdose of sleeping pills aged 57 in 1926, I wrote:

"You may rely upon one thing — I'll never engage in creating kings again,"

If only Tony Blair and the Foreign Office had taken this advice!

Gertrude


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