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Title: Prison for a peacemaker: An interview with Kathy Kelly
Source:
http://onlinejournal.com/
URL Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1951.shtml
Published: Apr 11, 2007
Author: Jack Balkwill
Post Date: 2007-04-13 16:09:18 by robin
Keywords: None
Views: 16
Prison for a peacemaker: An interview with Kathy Kelly, part one
The war in Iraq is the longest war in US history, even longer than Vietnam when one considers the first Gulf War extending through the sanctions (with interruptions for bombing, such as Clinton’s “Desert Fox”), to the illegal 2003 invasion and current occupation. So from 1991 through 2007 we have continuous war in one form or another for 16 years. Through it all, Kathy Kelly has promoted peace for the Iraqi people and attempted to counter the brutal sanctions that, according to UN reports, Jack: When did you first go to Iraq, and what was your purpose? Kathy: In January 1991, I joined the Gulf Peace Team, an international group of peace activists encamped on the Iraq side of the Iraq-Saudi border. I landed in Baghdad on the last plane allowed into the country prior to the war. Traveling by bus to the desert camp, we passed through Kerbala in southern Iraq. Our team was mesmerized by the city’s beauty. Students, gowned and graceful, sauntered along palm-tree lined university streets. Mosques shimmered in the sunlight. All of us voiced a hope that we could one day return to Kerbala. The Gulf Peace Team camp was already humming by the time I got there. Latrines had been dug, tents were set up, food preparation and clean up tasks were assigned, and in spite of language and cultural differences people were learning about each other. During the night, on January 16, 1991, the U.S. began bombing Iraq. Seventy-two of us, from 18 different countries, crawled out of our tents and huddled together, watching planes fly overhead almost once every five minutes. As the ground war approached, there was more of a chance that we actually would be in the way of invading U.S. forces. On January 28, Iraqi authorities evacuated us to a hotel in Baghdad. In Baghdad, there was very little electricity available. However, in the women’s restroom there was a light. I went there to write and read, from time to time, and there met mothers and children. The mothers were very friendly to me, and the children, after initial shyness, were glad to play. Sometimes I’d see them again, in the hotel’s basement bomb shelter, late at night, when the bombing was more intense. Fathers held children in their arms and reassured them. But the men’s faces showed unmistakable anxiety and fear. We found an old typewriter, abandoned by journalists. It lacked a typewriter ribbon, but I had learned, in Nicaragua and in prison, that if you place a sheet of carbon paper in front of a clean sheet of paper, it will function like a typewriter ribbon. We melted a candle onto the typewriter and soon I was able to produce our team’s statement about why we were in Baghdad. An Iraqi official spotted me managing to type something and soon returned with a document he needed typed in English. We were reluctant, at first -- was it right for a team claiming neutrality to assist an Iraqi government official? We asked to read the letter. It was a letter to then Secretary General of the United Nations Javier Perez de Cuellar, asking him to seek an end to bombardment of the Iraqi highway between Baghdad and the Jordanian border. This road was the only way out for refugees and the only way in for humanitarian relief supplies. Our team had traveled on this road for some distance, en route to Baghdad, and had seen charred and smoking vehicles. Our bus drivers would swerve to miss craters in the road. It was a very dangerous route. We agreed to type the letter, knowing that according to Geneva conventions warring parties must provide a way out for refugees to exit and a way in for humanitarian relief. The official returned with crumpled stationery, signed by a cabinet level official, and carbon paper that had been used five times over. Imagine -- cabinet level correspondence being typed by an extranational from the country bombarding you, on wrinkled stationery, using an abandoned typewriter -- working by candlelight . . . this is what Iraq’s government was relying on . . . then imagine the support available to the Pentagon. . . . On January 31, in Baghdad, a bomb hit the servants’ quarters of the hotel where we were housed. Iraqi authorities again loaded us onto buses, after stamping visas into passports of 33 members who had asked to stay with families in Baghdad. They told us we would be welcome to visit Iraq some other time. We traveled by bus along a major Iraqi highway leading to the border crossing between Iraq and Jordan. Desert Storm continued. We called it Desert Slaughter. Many of the Gulf Peace Team members returned to their home countries to campaign for an end to the relentless bombing and destruction. Those of us who had visas for a return trip to Iraq organized, as best we could, medical relief convoys to bring desperately needed medicines into Iraq. We hoped that we might safeguard the road between the Jordan-Iraq border and Baghdad, thinking that if authorities from the U.S. and the UK knew that ordinary citizens from their own countries were traveling along that road, delivering medical relief, they might be less inclined to consider every moving vehicle a military target. Announcing the convoy project would give us a chance to remind the U.S. war planners about the Geneva conventions. A few of us began calling Jordanian pharmacists and charity organizations to learn more about procuring medicines for delivery to Iraq. A Jordanian businessman, Mr. Nidal Sukhtian, heard of our project and decided to donate a semi-truck full of powdered milk. He also volunteered to pay for petrol, hire a driver, and help us out with an interpreter. Suddenly our project became much more manageable. I took responsibility to contact the media. An NBC–TV correspondent decided to cover our departure. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember a steady exchange of phone calls setting up the time and date for the convoy to film us loading up trucks with food and medicine and then driving back into the war zone. The day before our planned departure, someone from the United Nations finally managed to get through to us that our convoy wasn’t going to enter Iraq unless we were prepared to ram our way through a UN checkpoint. Sanctions prohibited delivery of almost all goods to Iraq, save for a short list of medical supplies and medicines. Realizing that our powdered milk shipment could never pass the checkpoint, we divvied up a long list of tasks: offload the semi-truck and return it to the owner, find two small trucks to carry whatever we could find that was on the list, call pharmacies, find a new source for fuel, new drivers, change the press release, change the departure time, . . . in the frenzy of activity, I completely forgot to call the NBC correspondent. She was out in the field waiting to film us, with a full camera crew, and it was raining. I saw her that night, at the Red Crescent office, where we both had turned up to get documents that would allow us to enter Iraq. She was livid. “I will assure that you and your team never again get coverage from NBC,” she said. I murmured how sorry I was. She turned, walked away, and then paused, looking over her shoulder, to add, “I shouldn’t even tell you this, but offloading the truck WAS the story.” My heart sank. Had NBC covered the Scottish doctor on our team, tearful as she hauled cartons of powdered milk off of the semi-truck, had this image been beamed into living rooms across the United States, it might have “jump-started” awareness about the most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed in modern history. I still feel ashamed, even now, recalling that story. I feel shame and sorrow because throughout all the years of the long war against Iraq, offloading the truck never stopped being the story. Just days ago, a UN report stated that one out of three children in Iraq suffers from malnutrition. A combination of sanctions, war and occupation has brought to Iraq the world’s worst deterioration in child mortality rate. According to a report ‘The State of the World’s Children’ released by UNICEF in 2007, Iraq’s mortality rate for children under five was 50 per 1,000 live births in 1990, and 125 in 2005, an annual average deterioration of 6.1 percent. When the U.S.-led invasion was launched in 2003, the Bush administration pledged to cut Iraq’s child mortality rate in half by 2005. Instead, the rate has worsened, now to 130 in 2006, according to Iraqi Health Ministry figures. In February 2007, Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources stated that only 32 percent of the Iraqi population had access to clean drinking water, and only 19 percent had access to a good sewage system. Massive convoys should be going into Iraq, bearing all manner of humanitarian relief. They should be, but they’re not, and, in December 2006, donor nations cut in half the money they would commit to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. But let me return to 1991, because eventually in late March of that year, our team did return to Kerbala, the city that had so impressed us when we first traveled into Iraq. We stared in awe as we drove along streets devoid of palm trees, lined by wreckage and smoking ruins. We entered the main hospital and our feet stuck to the floor because the blood was so thick. Beds were smashed; equipment was torn out of the walls. We saw clusters of badly frightened doctors. Henry Selz, who had lived in Lebanon during the civil war there, spotted bullet holes near the rooftops of buildings as we walked along a side street. One elderly woman pulled us aside and began whispering about mass graves. What had happened? I learned in fits and starts, fitting together pieces of the horror story that still isn’t completed. Margaret Thatcher remarked once on television that after the ceasefire had been declared, Saddam Hussein’s generals asked if they could keep their helicopters and the U.S. generals said, “Yes,” -- then they asked if they could keep their attack helicopters -- again the answer was, “Yes.” Those attack helicopters swiftly took off in pursuit of insurgents who were rebelling in cities all through southern Iraq: Amarah, Qut, Najaf, Nassiriyeh, Basra, Kerbala. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, U.S. allies in the 1991 war against Iraq who were helping fund the war, had told President George Bush Sr. to keep Saddam Hussein in power because otherwise uprisings of Shi’ite people in the south could give rise to a dominant Shi’a governance in Iraq that would be sympathetic to coreligionists “next door” in Iran. Hence the long regime of economic sanctions which kept Saddam crippled externally but strengthened internally -- punitive sanctions which were always evaluated only on the basis of whether or not they prevented Saddam from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and never with regard to how the sanctions affected innocent and vulnerable Iraqis, particularly children. [Part 2], [Part 3, conclusion]
By Jack Balkwill
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Apr 11, 2007, 02:22
directly contributed to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, and spent time in prison for her actions. In this interview she tells the story of her struggle for peace, human rights, and social justice together with resulting experiences in jails and prisons in the Land of the Free.
Kathy Kelly joined Peace Team efforts to stand alongside ordinary Iraqis in the First Gulf War and the Second Gulf War, and was in Iraq between these wars during the sanctions period, including the bombing by President Clinton called Desert Fox. This photo is taken as she visits children during a lull in that bombing. The UN reported that during this period, economic sanctions directly contributed to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children under age five.
Jack Balkwill, a Vietnam veteran, does the web site Liberty Underground of Virginia (LUV) and has written for publications as varied as the little-read English Honor Society’s Rectangle to the millions of readers USA Today. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com.
Poster Comment:
Links to part 2 and part three at end of article.
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