Cover story:National Catholic Reporter
Iraq Peace Team gives voice to the besieged
By CLAIRE SCHAEFFER-DUFFY
October 25, 2002
Henry Williamson, a 54-year-old para-medic from Charleston, S.C., currently
occupies room 509 of the Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad. The days and nights are
hot; the air conditioning pathetic. There are dust storms and a possible
war on the horizon. Nonetheless, Williamson, a multi-term combat medic in
Vietnam and now a member of the Iraq Peace Team, is planning to stay for
at least two months.
Over the next six weeks, the Iraq Peace Team will funnel approximately
40 American peace activists into “enemy territory” for short-term or open-ended
stays. Their mission? To show solidarity with the Iraqi people and to articulate
for the American public the perspective of the besieged.
If there is a war, the presence of Americans in Iraq will help people
in the United States understand what it’s like to suffer bombardment and
to realize the country “isn’t just a target in the crosshairs,” said Kathy
Kelly, director of Voices in the Wilderness. The Chicago-based organization,
which is working to end economic sanctions on Iraq, initiated the Iraq Peace
Team last August and sent its first group, Williamson among them, to Iraq
in late September.
“People are going in waves, in small teams of four or five,” Kelly said.
Four “waves” are scheduled for October and one of these -- a delegation of
14 -- is being organized in conjunction with Christian Peacemakers Team,
an interdenominational organization that sends peacemakers for nonviolent
intervention in conflict zones. According to Voices coordinator Danny Muller,
in late October, 100 to 150 Italians and a few other Europeans will join
the Americans in Iraq for a short-term stay.
Since 1996, Voices has organized 50 delegations to Iraq. These trips,
which include tours through hospitals, water treatment plants and schools,
have become a primary way for ordinary Americans to document the effects
of sanctions on the Iraqi people. Kelly said Iraq Peace Team participants,
will do volunteer work, assisting nongovernmental organizations, such as
UNICEF and Bridges to Baghdad, an Italian charity that set up a clinic in
the southern city of Basra to combat water-borne diseases.
Risking prison, fines
To date, she has received approximately 105 applications from people willing
to join the project. The price is $2,000, for travel and living expenses,
per participant. But there are other costs. Applicants are reminded that
travel to Iraq is a violation of federal law.
According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, those who violate economic
sanctions risk 12 years imprisonment and up to $1.25 million in fines.
Nor is a timely exit from the country guaranteed. Iraq Peace Team literature
suggests that those interested in going to Iraq plan for “an indefinite stay
as there is no guarantee that roads leading in or out of the country will
be easily navigated in the event of an assault or an invasion.”
And of course, there is the possibility of death.
Williamson says he is not afraid. “I believe in reincarnation. You must
do what is right, and the chips will fall were they will,” he said. He would
like to see his wife and grown sons again but says of the Iraqis, “These
are wonderful people to die with.” He has brought an “arsenal of nonprescription
drugs,” to Baghdad and currently spends much of his day doing medical assessments
for hotel staff and neighborhood children, dispensing medicine and purchasing
prescriptions. “I make contact with the physicians and see what they need,”
he said.
The Iraqis, he said, are less afraid of aerial bombardments than the
aftereffects of the war -- famine, a tightening of sanctions that have already
killed “thousands and thousands and thousands.”
“Getting killed by a bomb is instant, whereas sanctions give you much more time to ponder your death,” he said.
The main purpose of the Iraq Peace Team is education, according to Kelly.
Team members would ideally become ad hoc reporters, covering a story ignored
by the mainstream media. “As most media tries to convince people that only
one person -- Saddam Hussein -- lives in Iraq, [the Iraq Peace Team] will
be in a unique position to publicize the fact that Iraqi civilians are suffering
under sanctions, and the humanitarian costs will be exacerbated by another
war,” states the Iraq Peace Team Support Handbook, which is replete with
detailed instructions on how to contact local media and Congressional representatives.
Wanting to educate
Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who traveled
with the first Iraq Peace Team in late September, took the mission to educate
seriously. He admits the trip was a challenge for him, “I’m a law professor.
I’m not a traveler. I’ve never been to the Middle East at all. I’ve been
to England twice and I thought that was exotic,” he said. But Quigley maximized
publicizing his experience before, during and after the trip. He has spoken
once on a local popular radio talk show and is scheduled to speak again.
The Louisiana Weekly,
a New Orleans newspaper, has done two stories on his trip and he anticipates
a third. In late August, he announced his decision to go to Iraq at a school
convocation of 600 faculty and staff.
“The fact that I was going to Iraq made at least several hundred people look at the country differently,” he said.
While in Iraq, he sent back e-mails describing what he was seeing. His
daily reports, filed from an Internet cafe, included descriptions of burros
and “stone, square houses” in the desert, a Catholic Mass at St. Raphael’s
in Baghdad, where the Kyrie is still sung in Greek, and nighttime wedding
caravans of cars announced by trucks blasting New Orleans brass band music.
Quigley also gave statistics on the effects of sanctions. Reporting
on a visit to a public hospital in Baghdad, he wrote, “There is one nurse
for every 40 children with cancer. The doctor said that in European countries
90 percent of kids with these diseases could be cured. In Iraq it is 10 percent.”
Later in the same e-mail he added, “I am sorry to be so grim, but the reality
here is pretty incredible. I have no doubt that if any of you were here to
see what I am seeing, you would be as moved as I. These folks are people
like us.”
He disseminated his e-mails through a personal list of several thousand
people. The e-mails also appeared on peace and justice lists in Cincinnati,
and were circulated in Massachusetts and the Midwest, where his family lives.
He describes his trip with its subsequent reports as “a small stone in a
big pond that has touched a lot of people’s lives.”
Citizen-initiated contact with “the enemy” is not a new strategy for
American antiwar activism. During the war in Southeast Asia, more than 200
American peace activists traveled to Hanoi, capitol of North Vietnam. Like
the Iraq Peace Team, they usually traveled in small groups of three and four
and by 1969 were averaging one delegation a month. They, too, wished to get
information about the war for the American public and Washington officials.
Their personal contacts with the Vietnamese inspired them to organize humanitarian
aid for North Vietnam and to later become involved in facilitating mail delivery
to American prisoners of war, even arranging the early release of some.
But American activists have used the strategy of going to “enemy territo-ry”
with increasing frequency during the last three decades. Mary Hershberger,
author of Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War,
a book documenting visits of U.S. citizens to Hanoi, says this is probably
because many of the wars in which one side displayed overwhelming military
might in the past 50 years have been American wars.
“Citizens watching their country unleash massive bombing on other civilians has been mostly a U.S. phenomenon,” she said.
Hershberger pointed out that during the empires of England and France,
“there were plenty of people who went to countries that were being colonized
and were profoundly moved. It’s not uniquely American but uniquely human
to identify with people who are suffering,” she said.
Quigley believes trips with the Iraq Peace Team offer a counterpoint
to the “concentrated [U.S.] political and media bombardment” that has lead
to the “Hitlerization of Hussein and the Nazification of Iraq.” He is convinced
that if more Americans walked where he walked and saw what he saw, antiwar
opposition would grow. Although U.S. war clouds are gathering directly above
him, Williamson shares Quigley’s confidence in the compassion of his countrymen.
“We are a wonderful nation,” he said. “Americans are amazing people.
When they find the truth, look out government. I just wish the Americans
would find out.”
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a freelance writer living in Worcester, Mass.