THE HAMMER BLOW:
How 10 women disarmed a war plane
By Andrea Needham
Peace News. 310 pages. £10.00
ISBN 978 0 946 409 204
Slashing your neighbour’s tyres is wrong. But if he is speeding to plant a terrorist bomb targeting hundreds of people, would a judge or jury view your crime differently? More than that; if you have the means to disable the car but then do nothing, isn’t that itself a crime?
So ran one legal argument of the ‘Ploughshare’ women who in 1996, with ordinary hammers, effectively disarmed a Hawk bomber to prevent it from killing the people of East Timor. Britain was selling the planes to the brutal Indonesian Government, and these unlikely hammer-wielders had done their homework on a regime demonstrably guilty of genocide.
Gripping stuff
Whichever side you take, this is a gripping and moving story of some bravely resourceful women which, when you have dried your tears and reached a final smile, raises many moral questions. What, if any, are the biblical arguments for breaking laws which we would normally obey? Who are the real criminals?
Christians touch the fringe of the action as both heroes and villains; Roman Catholics and Quakers come off best. If the RC prison chaplains share chocolate eggs at Easter while Anglicans offer cards saying ‘Christ is risen’, we may rate the second more important, but there’s no doubt which speaks more clearly to the inmates. As for singing ‘Tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more’ – maybe not the most sensitive choice?
But, from our war-saturated bookshops, readers of any persuasion can now relive the often dramatic adventures on to the site, into the hangar, awaiting the verdicts of the jury and the media, and then coping with both. Their actual ‘seeds of hope’ scattered on the planes became a powerful parable, not without precedent.
