‘We occupied, we trashed the place, and we were right’
EAMONN McCANN, a prominent freelance in Northern Ireland, has been sensationally acquitted over £300,000 of damage he and a group of anti-war campaigners caused to an arms company office in Derry.
Eammon McCann and eight others broke into the Derry premises of US arms manufacturers Raytheon, destroying its computer mainframe, damaging PCs and throwing documents out the window to supporters below. They barricaded themselves in the building with office furniture for eight hours.
Their defence was that Raytheon had supplied weapons to Israel during its 2006 conflict in Lebanon — specifically that a Raytheon-guided “bunker-buster” bomb killed 28 Lebanese civilians, mostly children, sheltering in a basement in the village of Qana.
The “Raytheon 9” set out to impede the company’s ability to produce weapons and occupied the building for nine hours, wrecking computer equipment. Only six faced charges, and all were acquitted at Belfast Crown Court in June of affray and causing criminal damage. They said they were proud of their actions, and claimed they were not criminal.
“Our example was that if you walk past a house and hear a child being brutalised inside and you kick the door in, could you be prosecuted for breaking and entering?” Eamonn McCann said. “No you couldn’t, because you were trying to prevent crime. We convinced the jury that was true in this case.”
In a statement read outside the court he said: “The jury has accepted that we were reasonable in our belief that: the Israel Defence Forces were guilty of war crimes in Lebanon in the summer of 2006; that the Raytheon company, including its facility in Derry, was aiding and abetting the commission of these crimes; and that the action we took was intended to have, and did have, the effect of hampering or delaying the commission of war crimes.”
Eamonn McCann, who is a member of the NUJ national executive and had the support of the union’s Irish Executive Council, was convicted of stealing two computer disks belonging to the company, for which he received a 12-month conditional discharge. He said the incident was a “very minor thing” and is not concerned about having a criminal record — regarding it instead as a “badge of honour” from a successful attempt to destroy Raytheon’s facilities in Derry. He has “no idea” what was on the disks, and later returned them to the company.
“We took the action we did in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter of innocents in Qana on July 30 2006.
“The people of Qana are our neighbours. Their children are the children of our neighbours. We trashed Raytheon to help protect our neighbours. The court has found that that was not a crime. This is what the Raytheon case has been about.”
Members of the Derry Anti-War Coalition, which is continuing its campaign to remove Raytheon from their city, visited Qana last year and established links between their communities.