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.
