By Kathy Kelly
March 26, 2004

This weekend, I’m preparing for an April 6, 2004 entry into the Pekin FCI (Federal Correctional Institute) in Peoria. I’m one of several dozen people who, on November 22, 2003, crossed the line at the US Army’s military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. With caring friends, I’ve shared gentle and sometimes nervous laughter as we try to make the best of a difficult reality. “Will you write a book?” asks a sweet sister-in-law. My brother can’t resist chortling, “Yeah! A pop-up book!” and then we’re off on a string of imagined pop-ups over which to giggle. Yesterday, a friend joked about a cartoon he’d seen that showed “the boss” in jail and the unnerved assistants asking, “How long can we say, ‘Sorry, he’s away from his desk.’”

I could be harmed in prison, but that certainly could have happened to me while in Baghdad or several other places I’ve traveled to by choice. I don’t feel anxiety beyond normal fear of the unknown.

The cruelty of prison rests in locking up people who are often already feeling remorse and low self-esteem because of past actions and then heaping upon them more reasons to feel badly about themselves and allowing almost no means to improve their situation. Parents separated from their children, feeling that they’ve screwed up their lives, are often snarled at by counselors and guards who say they should have thought about their loved ones before they started causing trouble. People who’ve committed crimes, often nonviolent crimes which they honestly regret, (mainly related to drug use and drug trade), shouldn’t be free to continue harming themselves or others through drug traffic. But why take away every other freedom, and why employ other human beings to act as “human zookeepers?”

I’ve felt somewhat insulated from attacks on self-esteem while in prison. I’m proud of line-crossings that protest pouring money into the Project ELF nuclear weapon facility in northern Wisconsin that fast tracks Tomahawk Cruise missiles to maim and kill people in Iraq. Likewise, it’s good to be part of the growing group who’ve crossed the line at a military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. Graduates of the school have been responsible for massacres, assassinations and tortures. People should be crossing these lines every day of the week. No shame, no stigma here.

by Jo Wilding

“This was a Baath party building. The girls have never been in this hall before,” Maha said by way of explanation for the ones who burst into tears and went and hid. “Only three girls come to the youth centre and they only come for sewing lessons.” For the last couple of weeks she’s been visiting the girls’ schools and talking to their parents, negotiating and reassuring for them to be able to come to see the show. Still she was surprised at how many were allowed to come.

“Some of these girls, I have not seen them smile since the war and today they were laughing. It makes me think there is still hope.” Maha is the computer teacher for the centre, which has two computers. She’s well respected in the community for her honesty which is why she was able to persuade the parents to let their daughters come to the show and also why she’s able to convince the manager to let the girls use the centre. Less popular with the staff and community, he’s known as “Little Saddam”.

The girls, like they always are, were excited to see a woman in the show, like the women who work there, mostly as cleaners and cooks, clustered at the back of the room. Maha is hoping today will be a precursor to more of the girls coming regularly. There’s nothing else for them apart from school. There’s some kind of plague that claims them around 11 or 12 years old. They disappear.

by Jo Wilding

A sign on the wall opposite says “Idle Association Thi Qar”. Thi Qar is the southern governorate which includes the city of Nasariya and the road in front of the Idle Association is closed off every morning by a couple of vehicles of Italian troops, dark blue carabinieri in tight trousers and sunglasses, smoking cigarettes out of the roof hatches, a few more on foot and some Iraqi police, while hundreds of men gather outside looking for work.

Next door on the other side of the hotel is the police station. Within a minute of the front door we were accosted by an Iraqi police officer and told to come and speak to his superior who told us we couldn’t walk down that road. Why not? Because it’s dangerous. OK, no problem, we’ll go the other way. No, the officer said. Go back to your hotel and stay there. Don’t walk anywhere.

Less than an hour in Nasariya and I was already being sent to my room. Disobediently we carried on past the hotel door and into town. The hotel manager said it was safe to walk anywhere in Nasariya. As ever, people were curious, friendly, protective, asking were we Italian, what were we doing here and did we want chai. In the streets of Baghdad you don’t see a lot of foreigners but here we’re properly rare.

Another time police came over to the bench we were sitting on outside a tea shop and asked what we were doing. I held up my glass of tea and stated the obvious. They demanded our passports. “It’s in the hotel,” I lied, because otherwise they’d wander off with it, pass it around, find things to ask pointless questions about. “Is there a problem?” No, the first one conceded, eventually, there was no problem, except that by now his colleague was eyeballing the men on the bench and had to be coaxed away.

by Ceylon Mooney

I just returned from a brief stay on the Wheels of Justice Bus Tour in Dallas, Lafayette and Memphis. In those 5 days we spoke with hundreds of people in these states and drive our billboard (see pictures) past hundreds of thousands. Normally, my duties as co-coordinator are limited to scheduling and programming; my job is much like a booking agent for bands or touring performers. As you may have read below, the bus breathed its last gasp somehwere 60 miles west of Fort Stockton, TX.

We quickly shifted to our backup transportation, the Wheels of Justice van, which got a quick face-lift: “no war against iraq” on one side, and “end israeli occupation justice and human rights for everyone” on the other. I drove from Memphis to Dallas to meet the crew on March 17th.

In Dallas we did a few programs and met with some unbelievably organized and committed folks from all walks of life working for justice and peace in the middle east and in their own communities, from the Dallas Peace Center to the Crawford Peace House, just 8 miles away from the OTHER house in Crawford you might have heard of (hint hint hint…think of something FAR removed from “peace”). We relied on the love and hospitality of hosts, of friends old and new, in Austin, Crawford and Dallas to scoot our speakers and manager around the state for a few days while they waited for the WoJ van to meet them at a coffeeshop in Dallas.

If you ever wanted to see a SOLID analysis of media bias and Palestine/Israel coverage, visit www.ifamericansknew.org. So many of our presentations are to people VERY unfamiliar with Iraq or Palestine that we often have to really put our best foot foreward in addressing a sympathetic or well-informed audience. Well, media is something that not enough activists know how to navigate or how to work, and Alison Weir’s presentation lays it all out for you, the well-informed or the newcomer. Not only must we confront the media; we have to become the media.

by Celia Duff, deputy regional director of public health
BMJ The general medical journal website

This time the gerbera daisies will evoke memories for me. Last time it was poppies—deep blood red poppies. Back then, in May 1999, the poppies lit the Macedonian fields outside the refugee camps—camps full of Kosovar Albanians fleeing ethnic cleansing. A splash of colour, incongruous amidst the misery of people who had lost everything. The daisies—pastel shades, covered in dust, struggling to survive without water—symbolise for me that there is hope amidst neglect.

I found them in a corner of the palace garden. The palace is magnificent: huge, high ceilinged rooms, miles of corridor, marble floors, and surrounded by a high wall and protected by acres of landscape that deny the outside. Opulence and gross extravagance on a scale you could not imagine, reflecting great wealth and self importance. Strange that the man for whom the palace was built liked the same flowers as I do.

I am in Iraq, seconded to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Three of us from the Department of Health are here in Basra. We work in the southern office of the Coalition Protection Authority, which covers an area the size of Scotland. We are the regional government working within a multinational effort alongside Iraqi technocrats to regenerate a country. The politics of the conflict are not my concern. I see only a country systematically starved of resources, whose people were punished through purposeful withdrawal of the basic necessities for life, a people subjugated by fear and corruption. This is how they were repressed.