While Hearts Still Ache
by Kathy Kelly
9/26/01
For forty days, August 6 – September 14, 2001, twelve members of Voices in the Wilderness fasted and vigiled across from the UN in New York City ]as part of a campaign we called “Breaking Ranks: A Fast to End the Siege of Iraq.”
Each week, we carried a simple meal of uncooked lentils and rice, along with a jug of untreated water, to the steps of the US Mission to the UN and invited any staff member there to share the meal with us. (We didn’t offer the untreated water. We included it only to show that Iraqi people don’t want contaminated water any more than we do.) Each week, we asked that someone from the US Mission discuss with us our concern for the many thousands of nameless, faceless Iraqis who have suffered and died because of the UN/US economic sanctions. Each week, our invitation was declined. Instead, each week, we were arrested and charged with criminal trespass and obstruction.
During the final week, we aimed to connect with hundreds of people arriving at the UN for a conference culminating a decade of UN efforts to guarantee children’s rights. We wanted participants to recognize that Iraqi children have rights too, and that a decade of UN imposed sanctions have killed over one half million Iraqi children – according to UNICEF’s own figures.
But the final week of our fast coincided with the terrible suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With heavy hearts, we quietly finished the fast, groping for words to express our sorrow, but thinking it best not to resume our public vigil.
It’s still hard to speak while hearts ache for loved ones killed on September 11, 2001. But how can we stay silent when we hear screams for revenge? No, it’s time to again ‘break ranks’ – be voices for peace amidst the cries of hatred and war.
It’s sadly ironic that the ‘attack on America’ has caused a bereavement which is mirrored in cities, towns, and villages across Iraq, where targeted civilians have endured 11 years of cruel attack and devastating siege. Nothing, nothing justifies the September 11 attacks. Nothing, nothing we’ve ever seen in Iraq could excuse it But the security people crave, here, requires deeper understanding of what ordinary people have endured in countries where US policies have claimed thousands of victims.
What I’m suggesting is that in the weeks to come we could gently ask our friends, co-workers, neighbors and family members to consider what we now have in common with ordinary Iraqi families and children who have, for eleven years, helplessly suffered repeated bombardment while watching an economic siege destroy their culture and kill their most vulnerable people. Recalling our feelings when we watched buildings collapse, saw bodies dragged from the ruins, learned that thousands of
innocents were instantly incinerated, can we possibly think that Iraqi people have felt differently when they’ve been attacked?
On September 12 2001, my friend Ali Abunimah wrote a haunting letter about how he awoke wanting to believe that the previous day had been only a bad nightmare. No, it really happened. But immediately a worldwide outpouring of sympathy and condolence flowed to the US. Nearly every country in the world expressed sorrow over the hideous catastrophe. How horrified and offended we would be if another country, much less all the assembled nations of the UN, were to tell residents in
New York or in Washington DC that they will simply not be allowed to rebuild, that they cannot communicate or trade with the wider world, that they can never again adequately care for their children? Isn’t it unimaginable that instead of aggrieved international support, we would awaken to ostracism, shunning, and a long, slow assurance of ongoing deterioration.
Unthinkable, yes. But isn’t this what happened to Iraqi people in the cruel aftermath of the Gulf War? Listen to the anguished isolation of teenage girls from the Dijla school in Baghdad: “You come and you say you will do, you will do,” said a young woman whom I met in May 1999. “But nothing changes. Me, I am sixteen. Can you tell me what is the difference between me and someone who is sixteen in your country? I’ll tell you. Our emotions are frozen. We cannot feel.” And then her friend rose from her seat and asked, “What is the fault? What have we done? And what would happen to us if we were to do to any other country on earth what is being done to us now?”
Hear a young lad’s bitter resolve in Fallujah, just outside of Baghdad: He stared pensively at me while our team met with a small crowd that had gathered near the market place. “Ahmed,” I asked our translator, “please, could you ask that boy what he is thinking?” Ahmed posed the question and the boy squared his shoulders, and said, “I am a scholar of the faith.” “Yes,” I persisted, “but please, ask him what he is thinking.” The boy never took his eyes away from mine. “Tell her,” he said, “that I am thinking of how when I grow up I will become a fighter pilot and bomb the United States.”
It’s hard to hear these voices. Their cries have been muted by our might. But now we too have been wounded, scarred. Perhaps now we can hear the echo in our own hearts, of the far-away voices of people previously forgotten and invisible, people who can help us see that our security won’t lie in being able to frighten, threaten, coerce and kill other people. Those nearly-silenced voices there -- and in our own hearts – tell us that a safe and livable future will lie in our ability to forge bonds of understanding and compassion with other people. This will indeed require sacrifice. We’ll need to learn about living more
simply, to teach our children to love service and abhor exploitation, to prize just and fair exchanges with other people, and to practice forgiveness akin to that of the young Iraqi mother I met in July 2000.
Moments after her six month old son, Hassan, died for lack of an antibiotic, she murmured, “I pray this will never happen to a mother in your country.”
Voices in the Wilderness
1-773-784-8065
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw
1460 West Carmen Ave
Chicago IL 60640