Rhoda and Mark Berenson
For more information, please visit the Committee to Free Lori Berenson website.

Dear Voices in the Wilderness:

We are writing to you with sadness and request your help. Time is of the essence.

December 2, 2004 was a tragic day for human rights in the Western Hemisphere and in the world. By a 6 1 vote, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights incomprehensibly supported the position of the Peruvian government against the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which had ruled unanimously, 7 - 0, to condemn the system under which our daughter Lori Berenson was twice tried. In so doing, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has irrationally reversed its own position for the past 12 years and demonstrated support for the judicial processes promulgated by the totalitarian regime of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and his “advisor” Vladimiro Montesinos.

By Sheila Provencher
December 18, 2004

The small office is freezing cold–no gas heater, no electricity. “Many groups offer us money to improve the place, but we refuse, because we need to be independent, you understand?” she says.

Hana is the founder of Women’s Will, an Iraqi women’s organization that works for justice and human rights. Sixty-something, gray-haired and blue-eyed (”I do not look Iraqi” she says, smiling), wearing an old blue windbreaker and dark-blue pants, she chain-smokes as she talks. She stands only about 5′3″, but her energy envelops the room full of people.

She speaks about their latest project: to unite Iraqi mothers across religious lines and to reach out to mothers in the US and around the world to work for peace. “We all suffer from the war,” she says. “Here in Iraq, when the Coalition forces detain a young man, they are imprisoning his mother too. She and the family suffer with him. When the US sends soldiers to Iraq, they are sending the soldiers’ mothers too. The families suffer.”