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Red Cross clinic, Kabul
I’m watching Boys and Girls Alone on Channel 4. It’s about a hand picked gangle of 8 -11 year old kids, forced to live on their own in a Sussex reversion of ‘Lord of the Flies’ – but with girls, for god’s sake.
It made me laugh and occasionally made good comment on our younger generation, and their very confused parents.
But it also made me think how lucky these kids are compared with some children of the same age I met in Afghanistan. The child above has polio, and those below have had their legs blown off by landmines.
Landmine victims, Kabul
Number 1 Terrorist
It was fantastic to watch the inauguration this week, hearing the leavened President Obama being so publicly scathing about George Bush and his legacy. I know everybody talks about how impossible the task ahead for Obama is, and how he can’t live up to expectations, but it would be hard to imagine that he won’t make a vast improvement on the mess that Bush has left behind.
This image is from the Stop the War march in London in 2006, protesting against the bombing of southern Lebanon.
On a related topic, I’ve just heard the news that the BBC has refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee’s appeal for Gaza, on the grounds that it will jeopardise their impartiality. What has got into them? They’ve broadcast previous appeals for peoples around the world that have been devastated by military action. Why is this different?
Donate to the DEC Gaza appeal.
Yazove and Younger
This was the first arms verification meetings between Russia and the UK.
Yazov was to return to Russia to organise the 1990 coup to oust Gorbachev.
Helicopters
In the early 1980s the UK government tried to expand Stornoway airfield into one of the largest airbases in the Northern Hemisphere. They had already spent £40 million on a runway, when Ronnie met Gorby and the plans were shelved.
The Islanders who had been fighting the expansion (through the group Keep Nato Out) didn’t complain, as they got the largest runway in the west coast of Scotland.
More photographs will follow on the struggles of KNO.
Gruinaird
Sculptor, George Wyllie at the re-opening of Gruiniard Island.
During the Second World War, the government tested biological weapons on this island, rendering it deadly infectious with Anthrax.
The man defiantly wrestling the sign to the ground in the background is Michael Nubert, then Tory Under-Secretary of State for Defence Procurement, who came to the island on April 24th, 1990 to announce its safety after 48 years of quarantine.
Although the world’s press was there at the invitation of the government to witness this historical event, George hijacked the proceedings.
He erected a spire in the centre of the island to celebrate ‘the air, the sea, the stone and the equilibrium of understanding’. Then, from a large bottle of whisky, he poured drams for the media, while a very wet and bemused Tory Minister looked on from the seashore.
