I think that the essence of Greenham Common was the links and connections that we made with other campaigns and political groups. Women came to Greenham from all over the world. No-one had to make an appointment, or arrange a meeting they could just show up to talk about Cruise Missiles, or their campaign or connection to the nuclear arms race. Of course this had its downsides. Visitors might turn up in the pouring rain, we might have had a terrible night and be finding it hard to hang onto our sanity never mind good manners.
Links at Greenham were made to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement through women such as Zohl de Ishtar who lived at the camp. Women from Iraq came to visit us at the camp and we joined their campaign for a just and free society before the chaos of the Gulf Wars unfolded. Lorna Richardson made a connection to SWAPO (South West African Peoples' Organisation)in Namibia where uranium was being extracted at huge environmental cost to be shipped to the UK while Namibia remained a client state of apartheild era South Africa. Both British and US weapons testing in the 1980's and 90's continued on the traditional lands of the Western Shoshone Nation in the South West USA in violation of their treaty rights.
How we made and developed these and many more links is outlined in 'Righteous Anger'. Pictures and information about the Western Shoshone that is too detailed for the book are posted elsewhere in this website.
Margaret Thatcher used the British police in a shocking and blatant way to support government policy. I was shocked by how the police behaved at Greenham. When I meet them on demonstrations elsewhere I realised that the personal relations that we had managed to build with many individual officers over the years generally made a difference to how we were treated. Other protestors were treated brutally. Rather than list page after page I think that this link below illustrates the climate for those who opposed Thatcher's Britain in the 1980's.
