Alice Mahon

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Alice Mahon (born September 28, 1937) is an English politician, trade unionist and Labour Party politician. She was Member of Parliament for Halifax from 1987 until 2005, when she stepped down because of her opposition to the Iraq War. She is a left-winger, being a member of the Socialist Campaign Group. She was a frequent rebel against the Labour government since 1997, and is a Eurosceptic.

She is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

Mahon stepped down from the House of Commons at the 2005 general election.

In November, 2005, a film documentary by Sigfrido Ranucci of Italy's Rai News 24, The Hidden Massacre, claimed that the US military had used White Phosphorus (WP) as an incendiary weapon, including against civilians in Fallujah during operation Phantom Fury^{[#endnote_rainews24]}. The RAI documentary also quoted a 13 June 2005 UK Ministry of Defense letter^{[#endnote_letter]} to former Labour MP Alice Mahon stating that "The US destroyed its remaining stock of Vietnam era napalm in 2001 but, according to the reports for 1 Marine Expeditionary Force (1 MEF) serving in Iraq in 2003, they used a total of 30 MK 77 weapons in Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003, against military targets away from civilian areas. The MK 77 firebomb does not have the same composition as napalm, although it has similar destructive characteristics. The Pentagon has also told us that owing to the limited accuracy of the MK 77, it is not generally used in urban terrain or in areas where civilians are congregated".

Mahon acted as a defence witness in the trial of Slobodan Milošević in 2006.

Following the testimony of Slobodan Jarcevic, who was foreign minister of the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina, RSK, in modern-day Croatia, from October 1992, until becoming foreign policy advisor to the RSK president Milan Martic in April 1994, Milosevic called Mahon, who was a member of the British parliament throughout the 1990s and also sat on the NATO parliamentary committee from 1992 onwards.

Mahon told the court that she considered the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 to have been illegal and “purely political”. She suggested that the bombing was the main reason that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled their homes in 1999, rather than persecution by the state security services. She also said that Albanians that she spoke with afterwards informed her that they had been told to leave by the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA.

Mahon even went so far as to say that she believed the air strikes had deliberately been aimed at civilian targets. “I feel passionately that NATO should be in the dock in this place as well,” she told the court.

The witness also called into question the prosecution’s account of an attack by government forces on the village of Racak in January 1999, said to have left some 45 Albanians dead.

She said that her experience of William Walker, the head of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission who was amongst the first to travel to Racak and speak out about the alleged massacre, was “appalling”. Mahon said that Walker had been involved with the Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua in the 1980s and recalled that conversations with soldiers, charity workers and Kosovo residents had led her to believe that the OSCE was under the influence of the American CIA.

“I certainly don’t think we should have destroyed a country based on what Mr William Walker said,” she told the court, adding, “I think there was something highly suspicious about what happened at Racak.”

↑ [The Hidden Massacre]
↑ [MOD letter]. The RAI documentary claimed that incendiary weapons such as MK 77 had been used in Baghdad in 2003 in civilians-populated areas, which is forbidden by the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

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