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October 2002 A Hunger For Peace The Satya Interview with Kathy Kelly

 

Kathy Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices in the Wilderness (VITW), a campaign to end the UN sanctions against Iraq. VITW publicly demands that the UN Security Council and the U.S. government end economic sanctions that collectively punish the 25 million people of Iraq. In direct violation of the U.S. embargo, VITW regularly sends delegations of Americans to Iraq, who show their support of the citizens and return to the U.S. to put a human face on a country that has been reduced to one man in the minds of most Americans.

Kathy Kelly is a long-time advocate for nonviolence and civil disobedience, and has been nominated for a joint Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee. On August 6th—exactly 12 years since the sanctions were imposed—VITW began its fourth annual 40-day fast outside of the UN in New York to educate the public about the devastating effects the sanctions have had on the Iraqi people, and to protest the potential use of violence against Iraq. Rachel Cernansky caught up with her to talk about VITW, the fast and what people can do.

What is Voices in the Wilderness?
VITW is a campaign to end the economic sanctions against Iraq. We began in 1996 after statistics started to emerge that made it clear that hundreds of thousands of children under age five had died as a direct result of the economic sanctions. We felt that we ought to try to break the sanctions, and we did that using public violation of the U.S. embargo against Iraq.

Why a hunger fast rather than a strike or a protest?
It’s partly a belief that every now and then we need ourselves to break from our usual patterns of consumption, and for the small community who undertakes it, I think the fasting strengthens our own resolve and perspective. It’s a way to speak to all sides of the issue. We believe in nonviolent methods and in trying to take actions that, if they’re going to inflict any hardship on anyone, it would be on ourselves. It also stands in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights movement here in the U.S. It’s a 40-day fast; we’re going to break it together with a symbolic break of the embargo as well, by passing out Iraqi dates to anybody who wants to share them with us.

Who do you try to reach and how effective has it been?
You really can’t calculate who you’ve reached and what changes were accomplished. We didn’t predicate this action on effectiveness so much as on asserting our belief in the possibility of using nonviolent means to communicate to people. When you think about people who have suffered terrific losses in Iraq, you wish you could do something much more effective. I can imagine people in Iraq thinking, what difference does this make?, but I think we just have to keep on trying as best we can with the methods and the means that we believe in.

Has Mohandas Gandhi been an influence for you personally?
For me very much so. I don’t think I could begin to say that I would reach the spiritual discipline and the purity that he attained, so it’s always something to strive for, but there’s always so much to learn from him and from his writings. It’s interesting to me that he continued to reinvent his experiment with nonviolence, judging what works and what doesn’t.

I think he died before he was able to finish his work toward amending the violence—especially between Muslims and Hindus—and it saddens me when people use that to critique and then be dismissive of Gandhi and nonviolence. It’s similar to Jesus and Christianity. It was up to the followers to try to implement and adapt the teachings to be as universal and widespread as possible in terms of loving your enemies and neighbors.

You’ve been a presence at the UN for four years now. Have you gotten any responses?
We’ve been here for so long that I think people see us almost as a fixture. There’s a sense of compatibility; a lot of people at the UN agree with us, they just don’t see any potential for it to make a difference. But I think there is that potential. For instance, we’ve been told by Hans van Sponeck that when he was in Baghdad as the UN humanitarian coordinator, he was very aware when we were fasting outside of his offices; he said he was impressed by us and would tell his colleagues he wished he could be down there with us. And once upon a time, it seemed we had little to no significant contact with both Dennis Halliday, when he had that job, and Hans van Sponeck; but these are two people who now go out of their way to connect with us—Dennis Halliday comes over to the fast site [at the UN] quite often and Hans stayed with us in Chicago when he last visited the U.S. So I think there is reason to believe that likeminded people will find one another and connect.

What effects do you think VITW has had on the American people?
We have accomplished something in terms of contributing to the education of people here. I think that even State Department leaders are ready to concede that many people are now aware that economic sanctions have had a punitive and lethal effect on children. They’ve said they’re trying to pass a “smart sanctions” bill, which would quiet public concerns; but it doesn’t mean the children won’t continue to die. The U.S. can appear to have taken a measure to ease civilian suffering; in fact we don’t think that that will work out.

In the meantime, we have no energy policy in the U.S. to speak of, so I think the U.S. wants to preserve what many consider to be our right, to take as much oil as we want and recycle as much money as we can back into our own economy.

Do those affected by the sanctions feel bitterness towards the U.S. and its people?
In my experience, Iraqis don’t express anything like bitterness toward the Americans they meet. They’ll say things like, “We know that you are not your government and your people would never do this to us;” or that they pray that this will never happen to a mother or child in the U.S. But in terms of analyzing what’s happened to them and why, most people aren’t going to talk about that very much because people can get in lots of trouble if they are found to be talking negatively about their government. So I think they just avoid talking politics with [activists] like me. People in Iraq are, however, very astute about politics and economics and are perhaps more knowledgeable of the world economy and political analysis than people here because they have to be; because their survival is so dependent on trying to understand what’s going on around them.

I do believe that most Iraqi people are aware that the U.S. government hasn’t had their best interests at heart because, whatever they think of their own government, they’ve seen bombings and war planes flying over their land so regularly—the northern and southern no-fly zones in particular—and they know that the U.S. has insisted that the economic sanctions have to stay in place.

Is there any kind of resistance movement in Iraq that VITW works with?
We don’t try to work with groups over there because most of them are aligned with a particular political party, including Iraqi NGOs. We want to remain independent, and that’s understood on both sides—it wouldn’t help the cause of lifting the sanctions for Iraq’s people or for education in the U.S. if it looked like we were aligned with a particular party. We’re a campaign to end the economic sanctions using nonviolence and civil disobedience in our own country, and we try to stay with that.

What results do you hope for?
Even if the sanctions are lifted completely, our next effort would have to address the debt. There should be a moratorium, then maybe an impartial panel could examine which debts should actually be maintained against Iraq. I think there’s a long, long struggle ahead for Iraq’s people, but what I mainly hope for is that people in the U.S. begin to understand that this is a nation of 23 million people, not just one person, and when we impose harsh economic sanctions against a civilian population, that’s who suffers—the civilians.

Do you foresee any progress over the next few months?
Well, it’s very unpredictable right now because internationally the U.S. is very isolated. I do believe that the international community might be able to convince the U.S. to do a U-turn, but even if we manage to pull the U.S. back from a massive attack, if our elected leaders for instance say that they are satisfied with the results of containment and let’s just stay with that, I don’t want to support that because it’s basically saying let’s keep the sanctions. We think containment is a code word for sanctions, and we don’t want that. So my expectations are that it’s not going to be easy, now or in the future, to place first and foremost the cares and concerns of Iraqi people, and to develop real reliance on the political machinery in the UN for resolving international dispute.

Have September 11 and its aftereffects thwarted any progress that had been made previously?
I think that 9/11 did set back much of the work that people were trying to accomplish because the response was one of great fear and anxiety. This is a disappointment to me because when you think about it, some of the people who can best understand the fear and the grief that people felt in New York are people in Iraq because they’ve lost so many of their loved ones.

Do you think that international disapproval of the war in Iraq will have any effect on U.S. actions?
I think the U.S. is going to try very hard to find some shred of evidence that Iraq is linked to either Al-Qaeda or to the anthrax scare or some credible turbid threat to the U.S. Without these links I don’t think they’ll get international support. The U.S. is in a position now where it could just go ahead; that’s why people sometimes refer to us as the “rogue superpower.” I hope it won’t, but it could; our defense establishment is so overwhelmingly powerful. In the first three days of the Gulf War, the U.S. had successfully hit almost all of its targets because we were using [precision] weapons that are monitored from and guided through outer space. When you have that kind of control, you don’t really have to worry about what kind of basing rights you have in somebody else’s country.

Do you think weapons inspections will yield anything?
The U.S. was the monthly president of the UN Security Council in August, when Iraq submitted 19 questions before it would agree to allow weapons inspectors into the country. With the exception of two partial answers, the Council didn’t respond. The questions aren’t ridiculous, they’re the kinds of things any country would want to know before making an agreement. The Iraqis have been looking to get the sanctions lifted, and they want to know what the [subsequent] steps would be if the weapons inspections are passed, that it wouldn’t just be a kind of unfettered blanket to do whatever we want.

But it seems that unfettered access is what the U.S. wants. There’s also the chance that weapons inspections would simply be a pretext for another bombing—that the inspectors will say, “here’s where the Iraqis didn’t comply,” or “the Iraqis lied to us.” And certainly the history of the last round of inspections was, according to officials [like former UN weapons inspector] Scott Ritter, that the inspections were compromised by infiltrators and demands were made that were very unlikely to be agreed to by any Iraqi.

What can people do?
The Campaign of Conscience’s Pledge of Resistance, or Peace Pledge, (www.peacepledge.org) is a very good means of voicing opposition to war on Iraq, and is a good place to find out what you can do, such as start local affinity groups and call local elected officials; do outreach to community religious leaders; and letter-writing, along with calls, to the media to say we want more education, more awareness. It’s an appropriate time to be hosting teach-ins, and there are many resource people all across the country to participate in those. As the school year is starting up, it’s good to get campuses activated. And it’s good to monitor local media; for people to challenge when they see inaccurate or inadequate coverage—to educate themselves and then let their education be known.

The VITW Iraq Peace Team is now being formed [see www. Iraqpeaceteam.org, which is updated regularly and has a good “What you can do” section]. Its main goal is to put a human face on the nearly 25 million Iraqi citizens who are usually referred to collectively as Saddam Hussein, both by the U.S. government and the media. We’re very keen on organizing 100 people who would be ready to take up residence in Iraq before and during an attack, but we’re also sending waves of people now who are going to start long-term volunteer work with non-Iraqi NGOs.

The Mirror of Truth Tour is travelling to spots all along the East Coast where U.S. weapons (many of them weapons of mass destruction), are developed and sold and stored, and in November will wind up at the School of the Americas [in Georgia]. We want people to look in the mirror and see the truth about ourselves, that we’re the country that has developed and sold and used more weapons of mass destruction than any other country on earth.

To learn more about Voices In the Wilderness or the Mirror of Truth Tour, visit www.vitw.org, call (773) 784-8065 or e-mail: info@vitw.org. To sign a statement of conscience against war on Iraq and learn about anti-war events in your area, see Not in Our Name at www.nion.us. New Yorkers can call (212) 969-8058.