Cynthia Banas, Kathy Kelly, Leisa Faulkner, Rita Jankowsa-Bradley, Jeff Leys

by Kathy Kelly

“Where you stand determines what you see, and how you live.”

That’s how Voices in the Wilderness members began our statement explaining why we’d decided to stay in Baghdad during the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq. During the long war of the economic sanctions, we had stood at the bedsides of numerous mothers who held dying infants and looked at us with imploring eyes, asking “Why?” We saw too much of the catastrophic military and economic violence inflicted on ordinary Iraqis to ever consider giving up on efforts to end UN/US economic sanctions. We had returned to our homes haunted by the gasps of children in hospital wards that served as little more than “death rows” for infants, and we had tried to alert people in the U.S. and the U.K., people with some level of control over their governments, about how those governments brutally and lethally punished Iraqi children for political actions they could not control.

Where you stand determines what you see. For the latter half of June, eight of us will do plenty of standing, again in opposition to economic punishment of ordinary Iraqis, with children bearing the hardest punishment. We’re fasting for fifteen days leading up to the June 28-30 UNCC deliberations over whether to saddle the poorest Iraqis with billions of dollars of Saddam Hussein’s debt.

A Fast for Economic Justice in Iraq

Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh

By Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh

GENEVA–As I made my journey from Camden, New Jersey to Geneva I became overwhelmed with curiosity imagining what a country that stayed ambitiously neutral during World War II, and had produced such recognized documents as the Geneva Conventions would be like. Would Geneva be a haven of progressive politics and social radicalism? Or would the shroud of Calvinism and the “protestant work ethic” thwart my romantic sway? Upon arriving I found Geneva to be a beautiful city, confident, elegant and spotless! However, the immense “success” of the banking industry fills the poetic potency of the city with the sterile air of classicism. The revolutionary social writings of one of Switzerland’s most well known philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, appear to have been written upon the banks of the Lake Geneva, and washed away by the ever strengthening tides of globalization. His legacy preoccupies my mind as I amble through avenues full of familiar names: McDonalds, Starbucks, H&M …