Voices in the Wilderness and Justice Not Vengeance are initiating the “Counter Terror: Build Justice” campaign to challenge nonviolently the ongoing occupation of Iraq and the so-called “war on terror”. We invite you to join us in this campaign by 1) endorsing the following statement; and 2) organizing an action during the Month of Action, March 19 to April 19, 2005. To endorse the action or for more information, send an email to the campaign at luo at vitw.org

• View endorsements from US organizations.
• View endorsements from UK organizations.
• View Individual Endorsements.
• Read the campaign’s Background Paper

‘Counter Terror: Build Justice’

In the face of global terrorism, we believe that our community, our nation, and our world, must choose the path of peace, human rights, and justice. We believe that what is presented to us as ‘the war on terrorism’ is a campaign of violence and repression that actually generates more anti-Western terrorism.

We believe that the world needs a different agenda in order to end the terrorism of the weak and halt the terrorism of the powerful. We reject the logic of war and invasion, the erosion of basic rights, and the demonisation of Muslims and Arab communities.

August 2004. Over a decade of economic and military warfare against the people of Iraq. Over a year of occupation of Iraq. The Apartheid Wall being built in Palestine. People cut off from their lands, livelihoods and each other. Economic devastation in Iraq and Palestine. Health care and education destroyed in each land. Resource wars over oil, water and land.

The times cry for change. The times cry for peacemakers and justice-seekers. The times cry for action. It is high time that we respond to the call to act. The times cry for us to act as if the lives of the peoples of Iraq and Palestine truly matter.

It is time to challenge our comfortable lives in the United States. To challenge our country’s acts of war and oppression. To resist the machinery of war enveloping our country. To choose the path of nonviolence over continual destruction.

We therefore initiate this campaign of Solidarity, Resistance and Liberation as we demand that our country end its actions of economic and military warfare that result, for so many, in Life Under Occupation.

Our demands include:

• Respect for all worker rights and human rights in Iraq and Palestine.
• An end to the occupations in Iraq and Palestine.
• Self-determination for the peoples of Iraq and Palestine, not a puppet “sovereignty.”
• A dismantling of all walls that separate and tear lives asunder.
• Reconstruction of Iraq and Palestine that benefits and is directed by the people of Iraq and Palestine rather than by the dictates of corporations or foreign countries.
• Reparations to families of Iraqis killed as a result of the US-driven economic and military warfare since 1990.
• Clean up of all cluster-bombs, landmines, depleted uranium and other unexploded weapons, as well as a prohibition on any future use of such weapons.
• Redirect our country’s resources away from war and to uses which affirm life, including universal health care, education, economic development and a justly reformed criminal injustice system.

by Robert Fisk

Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, “there will be more than one lost generation” in Iraq?

Is there no end to the kidnappers’ targets? Margaret Hassan was abducted at 7.30 yesterday morning on her way to work running Care International’s Iraq operation. Soon afterwards, Arabic al-Jazeera television showed her sitting in a room looking calm, if concerned. It also showed close-ups of her identification papers and said an unnamed Iraqi group claimed it had kidnapped her.

Margaret was the enemy of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. She is the symbol of all those who believe that Iraq - a real, free, unoccupied Iraq - has a future; and all we can be told is that she, too, has joined the legion of the unpersons, the “disappeared”, the list of those who, because of their language or the colour of their eyes or their nationality, have slipped into Iraq’s dark hole.

By Jo Wilding

The US has asked the British government to send you north to free up forces for another offensive against Falluja. I’m writing to ask you to refuse any orders to deploy to Baghdad or other areas currently under US control.

I was an ambulance volunteer in Falluja during the April siege. I went because my friend Salam, a doctor, said US troops were stopping medical supplies getting in, cut off water, food, electricity and had closed down the main hospital and controlled the road to the smaller one with snipers.

Salam was evacuated with bullet wounds; a missile from a US plane destroyed the ambulance in front of his. He and his crew were under fire, pinned inside the vehicle while their colleagues burned in the other one. He thought the marines wouldn’t shoot us because we’d look like their brothers and sisters. He was right: in daylight we moved medical supplies, evacuated people from the second hospital and homes in the firing line, picked up sick and injured people.

We went to bring two sick women from a house in US territory. Outside a man of about 60 was lying face down in the road, shot through the back. You don’t need me to tell you what it looks or smells like when a man’s chest isn’t inside his body any more.

Kathy Kelly’s Anti-war Crusade Has Taken Her To Hot Spots Around The World-from Midwest Missile Silos To Baghdad Bomb Shelters.

By Don Terry
Published October 17, 2004
Chicago Tribune Magazine

If jailbirds were listed in an avian guide, Kathy Kelly would rate a special entry for “Dove.” She has been arrested more than 60 times at home and abroad in her remarkable journey from St. Daniel the Prophet parish on the Southwest Side to the forefront of the American peace movement.

Though nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, she is not well known beyond the world of anti-war activists and jailers. Writer Studs Terkel, the chronicler of quiet heroes, calls her “The Pilgrim.”

“She has visited more countries, cities and small towns not listed in Baedeker’s guide than anyone I have ever known,” Terkel writes in his latest book of oral history, “Hope Dies Last.” “Her hosts have been the men, women and children whose homes have been under constant fire. Her pilgrimages have one purpose: to reveal the lives of war’s innocent victims.”

Her sometimes lonely path was set a long time ago at St. Paul-Kennedy High School, though she didn’t realize it at the time. She sat in the dark with tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched a film about the Holocaust called “Night and Fog,” Afterward, she felt the stirrings of resolve, as she would tell Terkel many years later. “I never, ever,” she said, “want to be sitting on the sidelines or sitting on my hands in the bleachers and just watch some unspeakable evil happen.”