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.

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.