George Galloway: I'm a victim of the war against the Iraqi people

I've never personally benefited from my work on Iraq; I have given my political life's blood to this fight

The funding of political campaigns is seldom the prettiest of sights. Ask Tony Blair, he of the "blind trusts", Ecclestone, Mittal et al, not to mention Lord Sainsbury, who is giving a new meaning to sponsoring a chair, in his case in government. And it is especially difficult when your campaign is challenging a core foreign policy of two of the world's most powerful states: Britain and the United States.

That is the challenge I faced when I embarked upon an initially lonely fight to lift the embargo on Iraq, described as "genocide" by Dennis Halliday, a United Nations official, when he resigned in protest, and as "infanticide masquerading as politics" by the American Democratic congressman David Bonior.

It was a challenge that led me into fundraising among pro-Western monarchies, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the latter despite my having been an arch critic of that country's political system and its role in the Middle East.The campaign I helped build, the Mariam Appeal, was astonishingly successful; but it only almost lifted the embargo and merely almost stopped the war.

I estimate, although the exact details will be available to the courts in the libel action I have launched against the right-wing pro-Zionist Daily Telegraph, that between 1998 and 2002 our campaign raised over £800,000, of which the great majority came from one source: the government of the United Arab Emirates.

This was such a secret it was plastered over every piece of our campaigning literature and emblazoned on the front of our famous red London bus, which we drove from Big Ben to Baghdad in 1999 – across 11 countries, three continents and 15,000 kilometres. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, moved by the plight of children with cancer in Iraq – a tenfold increase in childhood cancer is possibly linked to depleted uranium weapons – donated around £100,000.

The other significant donor has been the man much mentioned in recent press comment, the Jordanian businessman and political activist Fawaz Zureikat.

His presence at our side was scarcely undercover, either. In fact, virtually every British journalist who has travelled to Iraq over the past few years – including several from The Daily Telegraph – was introduced by us to him in his role as a financial supporter of our campaign. Many, if not all, had cause to be grateful for his help and his hospitality in facilitating their work in Iraq.

Now, if newspaper critics had focussed on the incongruity of a left-wing campaigner obtaining support for his campaigning organisations from semi-feudal monarchies and businessmen such as Mr Zureikat, who represented some of the world's biggest companies in Iraq, that would have been a legitimate line of attack – though my defence would have been that needs must. We were, after all, fighting against the policies of a much more motley crew. However, as we now know, that is not what The Daily Telegraph has said.

Emblazoned across four broadsheet pages this week is a story in which the Telegraph says unequivocally that I personally have received hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from the previous Iraqi regime as part of an oil deal. This is a lie of fantastic proportions, which is now the subject of a legal action for libel. For the record, I have never personally benefited from my work on Iraq; on the contrary, I have given my political life's blood to my fight for Iraq's people.

The only evidence supplied by the Telegraph to support this allegation is a document, signed illegibly by an unnamed "head of Iraqi intelligence", purporting to be a memo to Saddam Hussein's office asking for even more money for me personally. This document, we now know, has confused dates and is answered, apparently by Saddam's office, without reference to me, in the negative.

The Telegraph says I traded in oil and food under the oil-for-food programme. To whom did I sell this oil (which, incidentally, is done through the United Nations Sanctions Committee and subject to the most forensic scrutiny)? And what happened to the proceeds? In other words, where is the money? From whom did I buy the food that I allegedly sold to Iraq? Which food? When? Where?

I am genuinely surprised that lawyers on a major national newspaper appear not to have asked these basic questions. Does anyone seriously believe that I, one of the most observed and scrutinised political figures in Britain, could have been in receipt of such sums of money without attracting the attention of the security services?

I don't know the provenance of these documents, or how the Telegraph – which has broken three major "intelligence" stories in two weeks out of Baghdad, targeting Russia, France and now me – came to stumble, in a burning, destroyed, looted building, upon such a find. Their own reporter states it was a "mystery" how these documents alone were undamaged.

Forgery and deception have, of course, been a hallmark of the whole Iraq story, from the fake British "dossier" h to the false invoices for uranium from Niger, with which Iraq was "months" away from producing a nuclear bomb.

And from the Zinoviev letter through the smearing of Michael Foot as Soviet "Agent Boot" to the poisonous concoction of lies about Arthur Scargill, Libyan money and a non-existent mortgage, it is an old, old story to smear troublesome dissidents in this way. But whatever the nature of the documents, the information within them is simply false and will be shown to be so in the British courts.

It has all been a helpful diversion from the United States/United Kingdom invasion, destruction and occupation of Iraq – which is going so disastrously wrong, as some of us predicted that it would. And it is a useful, if reckless, joyride for journalists more keen on witchunting me than uncovering the lies, forgeries, deceptions and war crimes of two of the world's most powerful states, which are currently laying waste to one of the world's most wretched countries.

I have been through many media firestorms in my life, but the shock and awe of this one beats them all. My reputation has been carpet-bombed for weeks; first I was traduced as a traitor, then said to be in the pay of Saddam. But I stand by my views about the war and the sanctions, which slaughtered more people than all the weapons of mass destruction in history.

And I am proud of the huge international campaign that we fought, a campaign that moved so many and shook the few who took the fateful decision to go to war, to their very core.

My only regret is that, in the end, we failed to halt the slaughter – to stop the opening of the gates of hell, as the Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa memorably put it. Many interests and many lives are going to be scorched in the fire that is coming. And it is going to spread far and wide.

The above is based on an article that appears today in 'Tribune'. George Galloway is the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and writes a regular column in the Scottish 'Mail on Sunday'