October 26, 2005
by Kathy Kelly

Today, in cities and towns throughout the U.S. and beyond, activists will gather to grieve and protest the carnage wrought by the unlawful and immoral war in Iraq. Thousands will gather to commemorate the 2,000 lives of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and call upon U.S. people to stop funding the war. Others will focus chiefly upon the well over 100,000 Iraqi lives lost, and, in a campaign launched some months ago, will ring bells 100,000 times –1,000 chimes each in 100 different locations - as names of Iraqi civilians killed since the start of Shock and Awe are read aloud.

October 25th marked the 2,000th American service-member death in the Iraq war: October 29th will mark one year since The British Lancet, perhaps the world’s foremost medical journal, estimated from careful research that tens of thousands of Iraqi people had died due to this same horrific war. The demonstrations will overlap, but for once we can claim that separate demonstrations, held, simultaneously, can actually raise awareness and hopefully affect change. These protests are after all the same: One life, two thousand lives, one hundred thousand lives, or many, many more - are all too much to pay for the imperial ambitions of the few.

(photo: CPT)

Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Justice Not Vengeance call for bell ringing ceremonies to grieve and protest the deaths of Iraqis in the US/UK war and occupation.

October 24th – 28th

As people opposed to the US/UK war and occupation of Iraq, we act to end the silence about the suffering and death in Iraq and to publicly unlock the grief that it has caused in our communities. On October 24th – 28th, to mark the anniversary of the release of the Lancet Study on 29 October 2004, each sponsoring group will act out our grief by gathering in a public place for a simple and solemn “Bell Ringing” ceremony. We will ring a bell–one ring per minute–1,000 times, each ring symbolizing the death of an Iraqi person as a result of the war and occupation.

We call upon other communities to organize similar bell ringing ceremonies on these days. One hundred communities ringing a bell 1,000 times would equal 100,000 rings, the estimate of the Lancet study.

For complete information about this project visit IraqMortality.org

• IRAQ MORTALITY WEBSITE
• CALL FROM VOICES FOR CREATIVE NONVIOLENCE AND JUSTICE NOT VENGEANCE
• PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR THE 100,000 RINGS PROJECT
• SIGN UP FORM
• POSTCARD
• Also on the wesite, ARTICLES AND ANALYSIS pertaining to the Iraq mortality studies that have been published.

100,000 RINGS: In Remembrance of the Iraqi Dead

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 26, 2005

Contacts: Kathy Kelly or Joel Gulledge
773-878-3815 or 773-619-2418 (cell)

CHICAGO - On Thursday and Friday, October 27 and 28, 2005, at Dearborn and Adams, from 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., Chicago activists will join with groups across the U.S. and the UK to toll bells in remembrance of the more than 100,000 Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the U.S. led invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 100 locations listed at www.iraqmortality.org, participants in the “100,000 Rings” campaign will ring a bell once a minute, for 1,000 minutes, to express grief and condolence for every life lost as a result of the U.S. bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq.

By Lucia Dailey

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” —Hannah Arendt

Deliberate destruction of Iraqi civilian infrastructure by US bombing in the First Gulf War, along with US-backed economic sanctions, caused hundreds of thousands to die from treatable diseases and malnutrition. Most vulnerable as always were children, women, and the old. A report in March 1991 by UN Under Secretary-General Martii Ahtisaari registered the desolation: “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure…. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age.”

Middle class life collapsed, few goods were available in stores, and epidemics of polio and other infectious diseases erupted due to lack of medicine and chlorine for treating water. Before one bomb fell in 2003 a million Iraqis were already dead from the First Gulf War and the sanctions. UN estimates are one half million of the dead were children under the age of five. Iraq had not risen from its knees when the second Bush Administration unleashed the might of the US arsenal in a campaign most obscenely named “Shock and Awe,” in a war based entirely on lies.