• Justin Alexander
• Cynthia Banas
• Leisa Faulkner
• Rita Jankowska-Bradley
• Kathy Kelly
• Jeff Leys
• Cathy Breen
• Farah Mokhtarei
• Caoimhe Butterly

Justin Alexander

Justin Alexander, from the UK, is currently living in Baghdad and working with the The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). He has also lived in Baghdad with the Christian Peacemaker Teams which works in solidarity with Iraqis, addressing some of the abuses of the occupation and helping Iraqi organisations develop non-violence. He first came to Iraq in 2001, while campaiging against the economic sanctions, and again in 2003 and 2004 working on Jubilee Iraq, a campaign to get Iraq’s odious foreign debts and war reparations written off.

He studied Physics & Philosophy at Balliol College Oxford and then worked for a while in finance for Schroders Investment Management in London. More recently he has done research on organisations tackling HIV/AIDS in Africa and on other subjects for New Philanthropy Capital.

Cynthia Banas

Cynthia, retired librarian from Vernon, NY, is a long-time worker for peace and an experienced UNICEF volunteer. It was through her work with UNICEF that Cynthia became aware of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi infants who died as a direct result of the harsh sanctions imposed upon Iraq by the UN and the USA in 1991.

Cynthia joined Voices in the Wilderness, a group located in Chicago, which had worked for lifting the sanctions since 1996. Cynthia traveled to Iraq several times with Voices in connection with this work. She was also a member of the Iraq Peace Team sponsored by Voices. From October, 2002 through April, 2003, Cynthia lived in Baghdad as a Team member and witnessed the international call for peace and negotiations and inspections rather than violence. She continued to live there during the buildup to the attack, through the shock and awe bombing, the invasion, the looting, and a cruel occupation now given the name of freedom.

Cynthia will join with others in the Geneva Fast to call attention to the cruel reparations that have been imposed upon Iraq.

Leisa Faulkner

A Sacramento, California mother of five, Leisa Faulkner of Progressive Democrats of America, joins Voices in the Wilderness in Geneva. Working to reduce US military involvement internationally, she is known for her humanitarian work in Haiti, as well as for her work to close the School of the Americas. Last year she spent three months in Federal Prison for a nonviolent line crossing at the School of the Americas. In 2004 she was awarded the Dolores Huerta Award for humanitarian service.

Rita Jankowska-Bradley

As a member of Jubilee USA Network, Rita participates in the Geneva Fast for Economic Justice in Iraq specifically to support its demands that Iraq’s odious debt be cancelled and that IMF shock treatment conditions not be imposed. Rita is a founding member and coordinator of Jubilee Montana Network and serves on the coordinating committee (board) of Jubilee USA Network (JUN), working to cancel the external debt of impoverished countries. She is a member of the policy and grassroots working groups and represents the Montana group on JUN’s Network Council, consisting of 70 organizations across the country. Rita is the inspiration for and the project director of JUN’s Break the Chains! Power of Music Campaign. This campaign uses music and the arts in movement-building and mobilization of the broader global justice and social justice-based faith networks and civil society at large, around unconditional debt cancellation. She has traveled to Nicaragua and Guatemala on delegations focusing on debt, trade and aid.

Rita has combined over 30 years of peace and justice work, community organizing and networking with a professional career in dietetics/public health. She was a lead organizer for the Missoula-based Global Justice Action Summit, an alternative to the G8 meeting in Calgary in 2002. She is an active member of Community Action for Justice in the Americas, Missoula Maryknoll Affiliates, and Missoula Women for Peace (a chapter of Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom). She is a member of the Montana Peace Seekers Network. She also co-chairs the Montana Workers Rights Board—a moral voice for workers. Rita was selected as the Peacemaker of the Year for 2003 by the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center and by the Missoula Peace Quilters. She was a founding member of the Butte, Montana group Taking Action for Peaceful Solutions (TAPS) during the first Gulf War. She knows first-hand about militarization and globalization by attending the FTAA protests in Miami. She has protested at nuclear missile silos and outside military bases in Montana and at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Rita writes and reads poetry as a way to expose injustice and to challenge people to think, understand and act for peace through justice.

Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly, of Chicago, IL, helped initiate Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the UN/US sanctions against Iraq. For bringing “medicine and toys” to Iraq in open violation of the UN/US sanctions, she and other campaign members face a $20,000 fine which they refuse to pay.

Beginning in 1996, Voices in the Wilderness organized 70 delegations to visit Iraq. Kelly has been to Iraq twenty-two times. She and members of the Iraq Peace Team remained in Iraq throughout the “Operation Shock and Awe” bombing, the invasion and the initial days of Occupation. Her most recent trip to Iraq was in January 2004.

During the first two weeks of the Gulf War she was part of a peace encampment on the Iraq-Saudi border called the Gulf Peace Team. Following evacuation to Amman, Jordan, (February 4, 1991), team members stayed in the region for six months to help coordinate medical relief convoys and study teams.

Kelly has also been active with peace teams efforts in Nicaragua, the West Bank, Bosnia, and Haiti.

In 1988 she was sentenced to one year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites. Kelly served nine months of the sentence in Lexington KY maximum-security prison. She returned to prison in the spring of 2004 for a three-month sentence imposed because she crossed the line at a military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA.

She is active with the Catholic Worker movement and, as a pacifist and war tax refuser, has refused payment of all Federal income tax for 20 years.

Jeff Leys

Jeff Leys is an organizer with Voices in the Wilderness. He traveled to Iraq in February 2003 with the Voices in the Wilderness’ Iraq Peace Team project. In November 2003, he returned to Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams (a project of the historic peace churches—the Mennonite, Brethren and Religious Society of Friends). Leys joined the Voices office in Chicago in May of 2004.

Prior to joining the Voices office, Leys worked as a labor union representative and organizer. His primary assignment was working with health care workers in Wisconsin.

Leys became active in social justice work in 1980. Over the years he has been engaged in work concerning nuclear weapons, US military intervention in Central America, and homelessness. In 1985 Leys participated in a Plowshares-Disarmament action, damaging Project ELF (a Navy transmitter system in Wisconsin and Michigan, closed in 2004) in opposition to the nuclear first strike policy of the US. He served two years in Wisconsin’s prison system for this act of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Leys earned a BA in history (emphasizing labor history in his studies) from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1991.

Cathy Breen

Health and human rights worker Cathy has lived in many places, including Panama, Puerto Rico, and Germany. She studied Geriatric nursing and worked as a nurse in Hamburg, Germany, as well as obtaining an R.N. degree in the United States. She spent 10 years in Bolivia, working in the area of health and human rights. She was a founding member of Andean Information Network, a grassroots non-governmental organization, where her work focused largely on documenting and publicizing the negative effects of the U.S.”War on Drugs” in Bolivia and the human rights abuses (arbitrary detentions, injuries, deaths) that were/are a direct effect of those policies. This work took her to Washington, DC, to the U.S. State Department and Senators’ offices.

With the Iraq Peace Team, Cathy remained in Iraq throughout the most recent invasion and during the first ten days of US Coalition Force occupation. While in Iraq, she remained in correspondence with a wide network of people through the assistance of companions with whom she lives and works at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker community in New York City.

Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh

Farah, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is a community activist and member of the Camden House, an intentional community working for the economic and ecological human rights for the people of the Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden, N.J. U.S.A. Farah has just completed one semester teaching second grade at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Camden. She is currently a member of the national Board of Directors for Word and World, an ecumenical seminary dedicated to nurturing faith-based activists in their work for social transformation. Farah has worked with Voices in the Wilderness since 2001, and made two trips to Iraq in 2002; one with the Iraq Peace Team shortly before the second gulf war. She is the 2003 recipient of the Veterans for Peace Gene Boomfield award for Peace and Justice. Having worked closely with organizations dedicated to restorative justice, nonviolence and reconciliation in Israel, Palestine, Ireland, Iraq and the U.S., Farah is grateful to join Voices in the Wilderness in Geneva for a fast in honor of the economic human rights for the people of Iraq.

Caoimhe Butterly

Caoimhe was born in 1978 in Dublin. She spent most of her childhood in Canada and Southern Africa (Mauritius and Zimbabwe). She left Zimbabwe in 1997 and moved to New York, where she spent a year working with The Catholic Worker and other groups. In 1998 she spent a year working in Guatemala with returned refugees, and then spent two years in Chiapas accompanying a community of resistance. The Chiapans’ struggle, and the collective and inclusive nature of it both inspired and educated her as to the power of non-violent resistance. Caoimhe then returned to Ireland for 6 months before joining a Voices delegation to Iraq January 2002. She then traveled to occupied Palestine where she spent a year, almost exclusively in Balata and Jenin Refugee Camps. Having lost a number of close friends in the Jenin massacre, Caoimhe lived on in the camp until she was shot and shortly after deported by the Israeli army late last year. She spent the four months after her deportation giving over 80 talks, public meetings, and interviews across Ireland, London, and Wales. Caoimhe traveled to Iraq in mid-April 2002 to join Voices in the Wilderness in Baghdad. She has spent the past five months meeting and working with Iraqi grassroots groups and individuals who are attempting to mobilise Iraqi civil society in exploring non-violent means of resistance. She is also working to help initiate a campaign seeking justice for the relatives of Iraqis killed by Occupation forces.