1968 and camping chickens by David Wilson

‘Boredom is counterrevolutionary’

‘Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves’

Forty years later these two Paris grafitti from ’68 seem appropriate. We
weren’t going to let ‘68 be boring, but there were going to be many graves

On the edge of Colchester and set windily above the muddy river Colne the
half-built University of Essex campus already seemed to be half-forgotten.

We would change that.

May came early for us. On 17 March 1968 an estimated 40,000 people
gathered in Grosvenor Square to rally against American action in Vietnam
and British support for the US. My job was to help make and then
‘distribute’ paint bombs which were sealed inside the pint-size plastic
containers which in those days had been used for milk.

The anger over the US war in Vietnam and the British government support
for that war was physically tangible. We made it through the police horse
lines to the US embassy. (The only other demonstration I have been on
displaying such militancy was on 2 February 1972, the day of the funerals
of the victims of Bloody Sunday in Derry and the day the British Embassy
in Dublin was burnt to the ground. Some 15,000 of us marched from
Cricklewood to Whitehall. The following day quite a few banks and offices
in the West End offered a lot of work to glaziers.)

In May scientists from Porton Down were invited to address the Chemistry
Society. Thirty or so students led by David Triesman (now Lord Triesman,
yes how can it happen?) occupied the lecture hall. The police were called
and running chases took place across the campus. The meeting was
cancelled.

We were off. The Sorbonne was occupied and we were not going to let
Colchester be far behind. The suspension of Triesman and, I think Mike
Gonzalez, led to calls for an occupation of the university. A General
Meeting was organised and, not expecting to win the vote, some of us left
the meeting to help set up barricades outside the Vice Chancellor’s
office. These had to be removed almost as quickly as they had been erected
when we were told the meeting had declared itself the “Free University of
Essex”

No need to barricade liberated territory comrades!

Students and staff met to re-set syllabus and in the Sociology Department
Emile Durkheim was quickly and unceremoniously replaced by Karl Marx.
Professors asked their students if they (the professors) were doing OK.

I was sent off as part of a delegation to get support from other
universities for a demonstration we planned for London against Porton Down
and chemical and biological war research. I also had the task of alerting
the media to our actions and they were an open door. They considered Essex
a May ‘flashpoint’ and asked me if we expected tens of thousands of
students to take to the streets. On the rainy day of the demo the spray-on
paint on our home-made posters dripped onto the sodden streets leaving us
to shout our slogans to an emptying Oxford Street. Half-way to our
destination, the MoD in Whitehall, ten French ‘students’ attached
themselves to the front of the demo – why weren’t they in Paris? – and
shouted ‘A bas de Gaulle’. In some confusion and in small numbers we
arrived in Whitehall. There was a brief sit-down and the Household Cavalry
were, we later learned, persuaded by the Sun’s photographer to dismount
and draw their swords. In the absence of a student riot in the centre of
London the Sun had its picture!

That was May. Three months later I was on my way to Zagreb to get married
and on 19 August Renata and I joined a long line of to-be-weds queuing for
their civil ceremony in front of an enormous bust of Tito. We spent the
first night of our marriage in my in-laws’ bedroom on the outskirts of the
city, meters away from the motorway north.

It was the day before the Warsaw Pact occupied the centre of Prague and we
were kept awake listening to the Jugoslav People’s Army (JNA) heading for
their northern frontier with Hungary. Did all this impinge on the future
of the marriage. Yes it did!

We headed south for our honeymoon with mini-van and tent. After a few days
traveling down the Adriatic coast we headed inland to Bosnia Hercegovina.
We were making for the auto-camp at Mostar, but West of Caplijna and with
the dark closing in we decided to camp beside the river Neretva. We turned
off the road and headed down to the river where we found a family already
camping there. Beside their tent was a chicken coop with 6 chickens. We
asked them how long they had been there and the father replied “we came
with 10 chickens and eat one a day.” We made a quick count; they had been
there four days. I then asked if there were any wild animals in the area
and his wife replied, “It’s not the animals you need to worry about. It’s
the people.”

In August 1993, exactly 25 years later, I was trying to get into besieged
Mostar as an aid-worker and found myself on the same road West of
Caplijna. Almost at the exact point where my wife and I had turned off
the road I found myself joining a long line of ‘Muslim’ Bosnians
(Bosniaks) who had been driven out of their homes (which were on fire each
side of the road), the bedraggled line guarded by aggressive and drunken
Croatian militia.

The many graves in the Balkans now stretch to Mesopotamia and beyond to
the South and to the Hindu Kush and beyond to the East.

The Paris Graffitti got it right. Half-way means graves.

An afterword:

This may seem a cynical take on 1968, but as Gramsci said ‘pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will’. The forty years since 1968 have been
years of bloody imperialism and massive defeats for the ‘Left’. And yet
because of 1968 many of us who were politically active then remain active
today – we are optimists of the will. We haven’t given an inch and what’s
the alternative? Over to you Lord Triesman.