UK Reservist ready to refuse call-up

Reservist ready to refuse call-up

Ed Vulliamy and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday January 19, 2005

Guardian
The first British soldier has come forward to urge mass refusal among the ranks to serve in Iraq, saying he would rather go to prison than accept a call-up to war.

Speaking ahead of a press conference today, Lance Corporal George Solomou, from the London regiment of the Territorial Army, said: "I am not going to Iraq, point-blank. I am a conscientious objector to this war, and I am going to see how the army plays it from there. I would rather spend a year in prison than a minute in Iraq as part of an illegal war."

He spoke out as the Ministry of Defence said it was unable to provide details of serious injuries sustained by 790 British troops evacuated since the invasion of Iraq. Their injuries were as a result of "hostile actions, accidents, and other incidents", Ivor Caplin, the junior defence minister, told MPs earlier this month.

Mr Solomou describes an atmosphere of restlessness over Iraq in the increasingly deployed reservist TA, saying: "I want to act as a beacon for other soldiers to come out and say they are against the war, or at least that they are not prepared to go. There are so many more soldiers out there who believe what I believe.

"I have always wanted to be a soldier and I still want to be a soldier," he added. "But I want to be used in the correct manner. We are not just pieces of flesh to be moved about on a chessboard."

Mr Solomou, 38, a worker for the emergency services in east London, said he had always opposed the war in Iraq, and had marched against it in February 2003 with a group of TA colleagues.

Citing his objections yesterday, he said: "I believe the occupation of Iraq to be illegal. They have tried everything - weapons of mass destruction, the connection to al-Qaida - none of it was true.

"Now the fundamental bedrocks of democracy are being trampled by this war, with the American treatment of prisoners. Added to that, the Iraqis can see oil tanker after oil tanker coming out of Iraq while they haven't even got electricity. This war is a turning point in history and is about America setting itself on a course to control the world's petroleum."

Mr Solomou started his TA career as an infantryman, but transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps attached to the London Irish Rifles.

He will present his case at a press conference at Westminster today, convened by Military Families Against the War, and led by Rose Gentle from Glasgow, whose 19-year-old son Gordon was killed in Iraq in June last year.

Most of the 790 injuries sustained by British service personnel since March 2003 were caused by shrapnel, defence sources suggested yesterday. The MoD said it could not give any further information. It is known that a number have had limbs amputated. They include two Royal Signals soldiers who lost their legs in a suicide bomber attack on the Black Watch battlegroup south of Baghdad in November.

Seveny-three members of the armed forces have been killed in Iraq, more than half the result of accidents and, in at least one case, suicide, according to the latest MoD figures on fatalities.

Mr Caplin also told MPs earlier this month that there are about 400 British military medical personnel in Iraq, including surgeons, dentists, physiotherapists and mental health specialists.

In separate parliamentary answers, the Foreign Office minister, Bill Rammell, said the government had "no reliable of ascertaining the number of Iraqi civilians injured by military or terrorist action" since May 2003.

But he said that according to the Iraqi health minister, figures based on records from some 180 hospitals, showed that between April and October last year 15,517 Iraqi civilians were injured, and 3,853 killed.

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