Portland Press Herald (Maine)
August 2, 2003 Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: LOCAL & STATE; Pg. 1B
BYLINE: JOSHUA L. WEINSTEIN

To some, it may sound inconsistent - heretical, even - but Kathy Kelly, one of the nation’s foremost peace activists, likes Marines.

She was in Baghdad during the “shock and awe” military campaign, and there when Marines marched into the city. Her first thought upon seeing them: They look thirsty. So Kelly, a 50-year-old who helped found the Chicago-based Voices In The Wilderness, and another American activist, brought them bottles of water.

Kelly, who will be speaking in Maine and New Hampshire next week, said that “one of the most edifying times I’ve had in my life was talking to Marines during the occupation.”

She opposes what soldiers have to do, she said in an interview this week, but she likes them. “They are part of something that requires inherently a great deal of cooperation, a great deal of shared purpose, simple living, if you will,” she said. “There’s a lot to be learned from soldiers, and they endure a lot . . . If we could take these huge, organized and cooperative entities and enmesh all their various talents toward peacemaking, who knows what we could accomplish?”

Kelly has visited Iraq 21 times since the U.S. sanctions were put in place a decade ago. She will talk about her many experiences there during a series of appearances in Bath, Camden, Newcastle, Portland and Portsmouth, N.H. She’ll talk, too, about peace and about the need for “people within Iraq to be welcomed back into the family of nations. They’ve been beleaguered, they’ve been excluded, they’ve been failed miserably.”

One of her major appearances will be at a protest at Bath Iron Works Aug. 9. That day - the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan - officials will christen a destroyer at Bath Iron Works. Protesters, who believe BIW would be better off building hospital ships and other craft, will christen a small “peace ship.”

The Philip Berrigan is named for the late peace activist who once was imprisoned for boarding a Navy destroyer at BIW, damaging its control panels and spilling his own blood on it. The boat “is symbolic of the fact that this is what we should be exporting to Iraq - not guns, ammunition, bombs and death and destruction,” said Jack Bussell, a member of Maine Veterans for Peace.

Dud Hendrick, a member of the board of directors of Maine Veterans for Peace, said Kelly’s visit “really arose out of our intent to have a rally on August 9 at Bath. We’ve long admired her work . . . and we thought that the rally would be an appropriate place both to honor her and to give her a forum.”

Hendrick said he had been “admiring her from afar, so I was absolutely thrilled when she agreed to come.” Veterans for Peace is donating $1,000 to Voices in the Wilderness and is paying Kelly’s airfare to and from Maine. Hendrick said other peace activists immediately started contacting him, inquiring about bringing Kelly to other events.

“I’d be very surprised if there weren’t just a ton of people showing up,” he said.

Kelly, who protested the war and, before that, protested U.S. sanctions on Iraq, said she is pleased to attend the christening of the Berrigan. “I can imagine Father Phil Berrigan thinking, ‘Hang on, wait just a minute. When you christen an individual, you anoint that individual to follow a path of Jesus - love of enemies and refusal to kill.’ To be launching destroyers and say you’re going to ‘christen’ them, that ought to give us pause,” she said.

She said she wants Americans to think about what’s going on in Iraq, to think of the effects of depleted uranium, to think of day-to-day life there.

“When the U.S. decided to take over Iraq, it’s not evident that they had a plan at all to secure the most basic elements of maintaining a country,” she said. “Right now we’re hearing from people in Iraq who don’t know when they’re going to be able to go back to work . . . what entity will pay wages to them. With temperatures approaching 120 degrees and with the electricity not working, people are hot and tired and they want to go out at night and they can’t because it’s unsafe.”

And she said “I hope the people in Maine will keep in mind the value of raising questions, voicing dissent and not being afraid, not being cowered by changes that have happened in our country in terms of feelings about exercising the right to free speech.”

Staff Writer Joshua L. Weinstein can be contacted at 791-6368 or at:
jweinstein@pressherald.com