Greenham Common women inspired many
BY MARGARET ALLUM
We say no to the threat of global holocaust,
no to the arms race, no to death.
We say yes to a world where people,
animals, plants and the earth itself
are respected and valued.
Women's Peace Camp poem.
On September 9, the last of the women protesters at Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England, left the site, ending a protest which had lasted 19 years.
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was set up in 1981, after women marched 180 kilometres from Cardiff, Wales, to Greenham Common to protest the British government's decision to allow 96 cruise missiles to be deployed at the Greenham Common US Air Force base.
Leaving Cardiff on August 28, 1981, they set up the peace camp outside the main gate of the base upon arrival on September 5. The camp became known as Yellow Gate when satellite camps sprung up around the base perimeter, each distinguished by a colour of the rainbow.
From the start it was a women-only action, a decision with which not everyone agreed. This decision was seen by many as a way to empower women and rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament described the decision: There was some opposition within CND and the wider peace movement to the fact that men were barred from the camp, but this largely melted away as the determination, imagination and the energy of the Greenham Women became clear. In spite of press hostility and physical abuse including repeated, often quite brutal evictions, they stayed at the base, sometimes in their thousands, sometimes a few dozen only, but never giving up.
On November 14, 1983, the cruise missiles arrived. Women arrived from all parts of Britain and began determined non-violent direct action to rid the common of nuclear weapons and the military. The common was an ancient common land where occupiers of homes adjacent to the land were granted the right to use it. When it was taken over by the military it was not deregistered as a common, which meant that it still belonged to the people, and trespass laws could not be applied.
In April 1985, the British secretary of state for the ministry of defence, Michael Heseltine, made by-laws for Greenham Common under the 1892 Military Lands Act which allowed for the arrest and criminalisation of the women. Over the years, hundreds of women were arrested, detained, convicted and imprisoned under these RAF by-laws.
In March 1991, the last of the cruise missiles were flown back to the US, and in September the following year, the US Air Force left Greenham Common. In 1994, the last of the satellite camps closed. The women at Yellow Gate camp turned their attention to the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston and Burghfield, 13 kilometres away, and campaigned against convoys carrying nuclear weapons through England and Scotland. The last organised push was the Greenham Common Millennium Initiative, through which they promoted their anti-nuclear campaign throughout Britain, Europe and North America.
With the base no longer active, the military tried to deregister the common so that it could sell it to developers. This was fought on the common and in the courts by the Greenham women, a number of whom also challenged the legality of the arrests made since the introduction of the by-laws. Developers paid vandals to wreck the camp and disperse the women, but the women refused to be moved.
Women from the camp participated in other campaigns against injustice, including speaking out at rallies against the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill designed to increase police powers and criminalise peaceful protest.
On July 6, 1993, the Women's Nuclear Test Ban Network, which included some women from the Greenham Common protests, scaled a high wall of Buckingham Palace to protest the nuclear testing Britain was conducting in the US Nevada desert on the lands of the Western Shoshone people.
More recently it has been revealed that the ill health that some of the camp participants reported, including nausea and headaches, may have been the result of nuclear contamination of the common. Declassified British ministry of defence reports confirm scientific evidence of radioactivity on the base. Thousands of women were contaminated by radiation in the soil, left from when a nuclear weapon burned in an accident at the airbase in 1958.
The women's protest camp inspired many campaigners over the two decades it lasted. While not everyone agreed with all the tactics used, the courage and tenacity of the Greenham Common women have been one of the high points of the anti-war, anti-nuclear and women's liberation movements.
As a participant in the camp explained in 1983: What is really great about the movement and those who fight back, with everything to gain and nothing to lose, is that new human relations exist in it. People's values and attitudes change, they seem to move beyond the constraints and conditioning that society imposes on us. I think that inspires me above anything, to see the transformation in people.