Abstract
On 6 September 1999 a dozen volunteers and the MP George Galloway set off from London on a red double-decker bound for Baghdad. Galloway is senior vice-chairman of Labour's Foreign Affairs Committee and co-founder of the Emergency Committee on Iraq, which campaigns against sanctions and war on the people of Iraq. In 1998 it organised leukaemia treatment in Glasgow for the five-year-old Iraqi girl Mariam Hamza, after whom the bus trip, the Mariam Appeal, was named. The group hoped to raise awareness of the consequences of sanctions, to demonstrate to Washington and London that the Arab world opposes the policy, and to show solidarity with Iraqi people