A decade ago, as Baghdad shuddered under the onslaught of Operation Shock and Awe, Eric Levy was huddled with a dozen peace campaigners in an air-raid shelter at the Dura oil refinery. The Londoner was one of the so-called human shields who had travelled to Iraq during the build-up to war. ‘The idea behind the human shield movement was to use the racist way in which Western lives are valued more than Iraqi lives either to stop the invasion or, failing that, to protect crucial civilian infrastructure sites,’ veteran activist Levy recalls 10 years on. ‘We may not have achieved the first objective, but none of the seven sites where the shields were staying were bombed.’
Many will remember the original group of human shield volunteers setting off from London’s Tower Bridge aboard two double-decker buses in a blaze of media coverage. Indeed, in the weeks before the invasion there were as many as 500 human shields in Baghdad. But as war drew nearer, some decided to leave. ‘I had taken residence at the South Baghdad electricity power plant but I found that I was very afraid,’ recalls Godfrey Meynell, a former British colonial administrator, now aged 78, who had travelled to Iraq on the convoy. ‘It is a matter of great personal shame for me. Not that I went to Iraq with the human shields, but that I didn’t have the courage to stay the distance.’
