Voices in the Wilderness Ordered to Pay $20K for Bringing Aid to Iraq

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A federal judge has ordered the human rights group Voices in the Wilderness to pay $20,000 for violating the sanctions against Iraq. A decade ago, Voices in the Wilderness began openly violating the sanctions, bringing in symbolic amounts of medical, educational and humanitarian aid to Iraq on a regular basis. We speak with the group’s founder, Kathy Kelly. [includes rush transcript]

Download the court ORDER - Civil Action No. 03-1356

Download the court MEMORANDUM OPINION - Civil Action No. 03-1356

“Voices in the Wilderness Will Refuse to Comply with Order”

For Further Information: Jeff Leys or Kathy Kelly at 773-784-8065

Chicago-On August 12, 2005 U.S. Federal District Judge John Bates ordered payment of a $20,000 fine imposed against Voices in the Wilderness. Voices was fined for bringing medicine to Iraq in a classic campaign of open nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the U.N. against Iraq. The U.S. Treasury Department initially imposed the fine in 2002, days after Voices participated in international actions to oppose the U.S. buildup for war against Iraq.

Voices in the Wilderness issued the following statement:

“Today, the judiciary branch of the U.S. government completed a perfect trifecta of inhumanity in upholding a $20,000 fine against Voices in the Wilderness for bringing medicine to Iraqi citizens. Judge Bates agrees that it was lawful and proper for the U.S. government to deny needed drugs and medical supplies to Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, despite the evidence that several hundred thousand innocent children were dying because of brutal economic sanctions.

“Voices will not pay a penny of this fine. The economic sanctions regime imposed brutal and lethal punishment on Iraqi people. The U.S. government would not allow Iraq to rebuild its water treatment system after the U.S. military deliberately destroyed it in 1991. The U.S. government denied Iraq the ability to purchase blood bags, medical needles and medicine in adequate supplies-destroying Iraq’s health care system.

“We chose to travel to Iraq in order to openly challenge our country’s war against the Iraqi people. We fully understood that our acts could result in criminal or civil charges. We acted because when our country’s government is committing a grievous, criminal act, it is incumbent upon each of us to challenge in every nonviolent manner possible the acts of the government.

“We continue to oppose the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which continues the devastation of the Iraqi people. Over the past two years of occupation, the health care and water systems in Iraq have not improved. Nearly 300,000 children under the age of 5 now suffer from acute child malnutrition. It’s likely that over 100,000 Iraqis have died because of the occupation-either killed outright by military action or died because of the lack of safe drinking water, adequate health care, lack of food. What has our country wrought in Iraq?

“We choose to continue our non-cooperation with the government’s war on the Iraqi people through the simple act of refusing to pay this fine. To pay the fine would be to collaborate with the U.S. government’s ongoing war against Iraq. We will not collaborate.

“We fully understand that the U.S. government may take other action against Voices in the Wilderness, or possibly us as individuals, for our continued refusal to collaborate with the government’s policies. But we invite representatives from the government to enter into dialogue with us about how best to correct the misguided, ill-conceived and criminal acts of our country towards the Iraqi people. We invite all U.S. citizens to pause and consider how we might bring about an end to the blood shed and the violence in Iraq-an end to the occupation and payment of reparations to Iraq for the devastation our country has wrought upon the Iraqi people these past 15 years.

“We pause to ponder the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who asked of himself and his co-conspirators in resistance to Hitler, whether they were yet of any use. We too live in times of unspeakable peril and violence. We too live in times when questioning and resisting our government is the one path remaining to act for justice. We too have struggled and seen untold numbers of innocent people die at our government’s hand. We too answer as Bonhoeffer did, that yes, indeed, our acts and fidelity to our brothers and sisters throughout the world are not only of use, but of absolute necessity. We invite all to join us in a conspiracy of life to end our country’s war against the Iraqi people.”

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The Independent
by Robert Fisk

There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans - if you are lucky.

Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and - this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year - they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead - or what the Americans told him afterwards.

“It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: “There is a boy under this vehicle.”

The Independent
by Robert Fisk

It was the same lunatic corkscrew landing in the same little Lebanese plane, barrelling down into the sandstorm of Baghdad airport. Piloting his 20-passenger twin-prop aircraft - from Flying Carpet Airlines, no less - Captain Hussam has three things on his mind: American helicopters, pilotless reconnaissance drones and incoming missiles. So we all scan the dun-coloured runway and terminals and the grotty slums beside the airport road for the tell-tale pink flame surviving pilots have sometimes caught sight of.

But we landed safely and a scruffy bus took us to the terminal where I bid the customs officer Salaam Aleikum and he cheerfully asked me if I was a Muslim. “English,” I replied, which seemed to be good enough to him. He couldn’t break the airline security string on my bag so he waved me through. Then there came The Airport Road. We all need to put this in capitals these days. As my Iraqi fixer put it very well: “It’s really just a matter of luck.” Sometimes you glide safely across to the city, sometimes you get caught up in a firefight, sometimes - like poor Marla Ruzicka, the American girl who tried to count casualties - you are too close to a suicide attack. “I’m alive,” she cried just before she died.

Cindy Sheehan (photo: Sharon)

I’m holding a newspaper clipping from 1996. The creases are torn, the page yellowed. The headline reads “Mother bear charges trains.” Trains had killed her two sons, and so this mother grizzly charged train after train after train.

At first I carried this clipping in my wallet, and then I taped it over my desk. It helps me remember what it means to be courageous, what it means to be alive. -Derrick Jensen

Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in the Iraq war, is definately charging the train head on, courageously.

Since Saturday, August 6th, Cindy Sheehan has held a vigil outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas demanding an audience with the president to ask why her son died in Iraq. Sheehan has no plans to end her vigil until Bush meets with her to discuss the war, he returns to the White House, or she is arrested.

The following is a compilation of information and articles concerning Cindy Sheehan’s action in Crawford, Texas.