When a group of people met in London recently to discuss their concern about the effects of UN sanctions on the people of Iraq, it was no coincidence that they did so in a building where, sixty60 years previously, the political activist Mohandas Gandhi had stayed. Kingsley Hall is within earshot of Bow Bells and is situated in Tower Hamlets, currently the third poorest ward in the country, where 40 per cent of the population is Bangladeshi and where you can hear 50 different languages spoken.
The hall was built by a couple of philanthropic sisters, Muriel and Doris Lester, who, as young women, abandoned their comfortable, middle-class lifestyle to set up a place where the people of Bow could come to pray, to get something to eat and receive medical care, and their children could learn to read. Bow - 15 stops eastwards on the Underground and a world away from London's West End - has a history of people such as the Lesters. George Lansbury MP, Labour Party leader in the 1930s, represented Bow for 20 years and Sylvia Pankhurst worked there also.
In 1926, Muriel Lester, in India to meet Tagore, visited Gandhi's ashram. Four years later, receiving an invitation to London to discuss Home Rule for India, Gandhi agreed to accept on condition he did not have to go to a hotel but could stay at Kingsley Hall. His room, little more than a cell, can still be seen, bare of furniture but for a bedroll on the floor.
He lived there for three months - with a goat in residence also to provide him with milk. From the window, looking southwards towards the river, the only thing different now is the silhouette of the ill-famed Millennium Dome outlined against the sky.
In the workaday meeting place downstairs - parquet floor, windows too high to see out of, a wash of yellow on the walls - the keynote speech was given by Denis Halliday, UN Humanitarian Aid Co-ordinator to Iraq until his resignation in protest at the indiscriminate nature of the sanctions. Three years on, his tone was one of righteous anger. He had just returned from another visit to Iraq, and he chose not to indulge in the euphemisms of war. "We are not simply talking about children suffering," he said. "but of children being killed." Many in the audience had visited Iraq and some had engaged in their own sanctions-busting programmes, including the Italian organisation Bridge to Baghdad which had shipped into Italy, by means as ingenious as they were illegal, a consignment of the famed Iraqi dates.
This exercise brought into focus one of the many side-effects of the sanctions, said Denis Halliday for, without an import/export trade, there is no foreign currency coming into the country and without imports, the government is deprived of an income from import duties.
Taking the stage alongside Halliday was Kathy Kelly, Chicago-based founder of Voices in the Wilderness, an organisation which campaigns to end the UN sanctions. A former high-school teacher - she had no need to use the microphone - she emulated Gandhi by dossing down on the parquet floor for the night. As someone who has spent a year in prison for her principles, she probably found it superior to a prison cell.
Strangely, the conference - dedicated to conflict resolution - provoked its very own area of conflict. When people divided into groups to discuss different aspects of concern, two men were excluded from the women's group. One of them was Halliday. It was a moment of supreme irony as the keynote speaker was told he was not welcome.
Halliday, however, is an experienced negotiator, a veteran Aldermaston marcher and a Quaker; though clearly discountenanced by the rejection, he accepted it with grace.
In the 1960s, Kingsley Hall was used by the psychiatrist R.D. Laing in his experiment in living for people suffering from schizophrenia. Laing's philosophy of total tolerance resulted in so much damage being done to the building that it was rendered almost inhabitable, something that shocked the working-class, God-fearing people of Tower Hamlets.
It wasn't until Richard Attenborough used Kingsley Hall as a set for his film Gandhi and subsequently raised the money to pay for its rebuilding that it was once again restored to its former self.
A bust of Gandhi was donated to the hall and throughout the conference it stood on the stage as a reminder of the principle that the impossible is possible, a theme used by Denis Halliday:
"We need dialogue and an end to alienation and maybe even we need to listen. We should develop a strategy of friendship towards the Arab world," he said, calling on Arab countries to use their influence and their potential for power to deal with the 11-year impasse and calling also on Iraqis themselves to initiate change. "What is needed," he said, "is the courage to take on the impossible."
At the end of the conference, Kathy Kelly sang a song for the children of Iraq and someone read a poem declaring that "compassion is a spiritual tool". It was a thought that could have come from Gandhi himself.