British government attacks war graves workers

This 30 July 2015 video says about itself:

A Benghazi official on Thursday condemned the recent desecration of British and Commonwealth war graves at a military cemetery in the eastern Libyan city.

British media reports said the attacks on the graves took place a couple of weeks ago.

A video was posted online which appeared to show a group of men kicking down the grave stones.

“They did this in revenge on those who burned the Holy Quran in Afghanistan at the American base,” said sheikh Moftah Al-Ferjani, a Benghazi official at the Ministry of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs.

“This is an act which is unacceptable in Islam,” he said.

He said however, that the graves shouldn’t have been desecrated because: “these are the graves of people who have died in Libya and are buried in Libya.”

“They are very old, ancient and they are revered and still revered among us,” he added.

The graves are for British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in North Africa during the Second World War, according to British media reports.

Al-Ferjani also called upon Libyan authorities to take responsibility for the graves to prevent similar events taking place in the future.

More than one-thousand Commonwealth and British soldiers are buried at the site in Benghazi.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

‘Obscene’ pension cuts for war graves workers slammed

Saturday 7th November 2015

WORKERS who maintain British war graves face losing £6,000 a year from their pensions.

The government-controlled Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) looks after cemeteries and memorials in 154 countries. It employs 1,250 staff round the globe, including 850 gardeners, who tend the graves of 1.7 million dead from World Wars I and II.

The commission plans to end the staff’s pension scheme, which bases pensions on their salaries at the time of retirement, from March.

Civil Service union PCS described the plan as “obscene.” PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: “The work commission staff do to maintain war graves and memorials is hugely important and highly prized by families, and it is obscene for the commission to be slashing their pensions.

“We have said all along that we are prepared to negotiate changes but we will not accept imposed cuts that will leave low-paid staff thousands of pounds worse off.”

When I was in Benghazi in Libya in 2005, I was at the local Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. I saw the many graves there of British, South African, West African, Indian, Palestinian, etc. soldiers who had died there during the second world war. The well-kept cemetery which I saw then is ruined by now, already before these new British governmental ‘austerity’ measures. Because of the incessant bloody war in Benghazi ever since British Prime Minister David Cameron’s military escalation in Libya in 2011.