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Redesigning America

by Ken Krayeske
Hartford, CT

A merica needs to redesign itself into a culture of peace, says war-tax resister Kathy Kelly.

Kelly, 52, took about two dozen trips to Iraq from 1991 to 2004. On many of those junkets, she brought duffle bags full of medicine to people of Iraq, willingly violating U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq. A U.S. judge fined her $20,000 for this criminal transgression. She refuses to pay.

Kelly's book, Other Lands Have Dreams, from Baghdad to Pekin Prison, describes her experiences in Mesopotamia and America. She chronicles her protests at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, which earned her a federal prison sentence.

From her Chicago living room, she helped organize the group Voices for Creative Non-Violence, http://www.vcnv.org/. The 40-Year Plan caught up with Kelly at the Hartford Catholic Worker one night last week, where she was spending the night before addressing students at Mount Holyoke College.

What have you been doing lately?: What I have been doing of late Ken is trying to be part of education, but education about the experience of warfare against Iraq and that is an experience of warfare that goes back to 1991, when I first went over to Iraq with a group called the Gulf Peace Team. But war never ended, economic war, military bombardments, the shock and awe campaign, the sanctions and the attendant economic woes that come along with that. This is something the American people are so much involved with. I mean we pay for much of it, certainly I think we are experiencing far less security in our country because so many people are aghast at what we are doing.; So I am a full time peace activist these days. I am a former teacher. I am somebody who has been lucky to be part of some dynamic and interesting peace movement efforts, but as far as what I do, I think a lot of it has to do with education.
Please describe those education efforts.: I think that many people in the United States are still a bit confused about why the United States isn't received well in Iraq. There is a "heroes in error" narration that goes on well the United States went over to get rid of Saddam Hussein and some errors were made, but Saddam is gone, why aren't people in Iraq grateful? There is still a residual sense of the US being heroes in this whole affair and that is not something that stands up to the actual facts.; If you just look at some of the grievous errors that were made in the beginning year of the occupation, it becomes pretty clear that there was nothing heroic at all about going in there with so little planning. For instance, Iraq was suffering badly because of debilitated electrical plants. But somebody came up with a plan saying that we will fuel the electrical generating plants with natural gas.; This was a plan that was developed in the Green Zone. Well, there weren't any pipelines for that natural gas. So then instead of building the pipelines, there was a decision made that the money should go toward helping to repair the oil refineries, and the question of electricity was just sort of left dangling.; This is something that people in the Green Zone who were there on a temporary basis and who were going to go back home and enjoy constant access to electricity might not think about so much. But for people in Iraq who have to live in that country and have to raise their children still lacking electricity, still lacking potable water with 300,000 children in Iraq suffering from acute malnourishment.
Is that number of children greater than the number who were suffering from acute malnutrition during economic sanctions or has the war worsened the problem?: It is very, very difficult to get assessments that would pass muster with some of the World Health Organizations. How do you do the investigations when security is so difficult when people are afraid to have an NGO - a non-governmental organization - that includes foreigners even living in the country? This is something that is problem. But in August 1999, UNICEF, the United Nations organization, had put out a very clear estimate. They were able to document that 50,000 children under age 5 were dying every year in Iraq and that the economic sanctions directly contributed towards their deaths.; Well, that to me was child sacrifice. 500,000 children under the age five and that was tracing a trend that had happened from 1990 when the sanctions were first imposed up to 1999. But I am pretty alarmed when I again hear from the UNDP, another respectable UN organization that 300,000 children in just one year after the US occupation began were suffering from acute malnourishment. Because if 60 percent of the rural areas don't have clean water, and 20 percent of the urban areas don't have clean water, then those; 300,000 children suffering from acute malnourishment could get cholera or typhus or dysentery or diarrhea and how does a child survive that? And maybe the child dies in a mother's arms and maybe she takes the baby straight to the cemetery and she doesn't think to herself, "Oh, I wanna make sure that some non-governmental organization working in Geneva registers my child's death." And maybe she doesn't have a telephone and maybe it is too dangerous to try to take any kind of transport to find a westerner to register that statistic.; But the children are the ones who continue to pay terrible, terrible punishment and I think in the US public's eye, there is less awareness of the fact that at this moment the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the UN are all still demanding that out of Iraqi revenues from Iraqi oil production monies be paid out to pay Saddam Hussein's debts, for which surely the average people were not responsible, and to pay reparations for the 1991 war.; It would be perfectly possible for people in high places in both the UN and the State department, the IMF and the World Bank, to say "Look, those creditors who believe that money is owed to them, many of them wealthy corporations or far well wealthier countries will have to wait. Get in line to wait. The first priority is to make sure that these children who committed no crime are fed and that they get clean water and have a reasonable prospect to thrive."; But instead Iraq is going to be reeling from subsidies that are withdrawn. Pretty soon they are going to monetize the ration basket. That means they are going to tell people who get so little food already - lentils, rice, cooking oil, flour, salt, tea - that they now have to come up with the money to pay for it, while they are already trying to pay cooking fuel oil prices that are expected to go ten times higher than what they are now. There has already been a three fold jump in those prices and also the price for petrol for transportation. When the price of oil goes up, petrol and everything else goes up, too.
When you address an audience with these statistics, how do people receive you?: Well, to be honest, I next to never address an audience with those statistics without first telling anecdotes, personal stories of personal encounters and trying to establish that I don't want to be a blame maker, a finger pointer. The issues are to complex to say "Where are the good guys? Where are the baddies?" I think that there are some stories that come from personal experience that people can identify with which can at least be put out there to help build up some empathy. And that is what I perhaps think is most important.
Can you share one of those with us, please?: On a fairly recent trip in my experience, I went down to the Cossard Prison in southern Iraq. I went there because when I arrived in Amman, Jordan, two young university students came in. I was jet lagged out of my mind and I didn't want to meet new people in Amman. They were apparently very eager to talk to me and other team members who were with me.; So I said "Well, okay." I was riveted. They were telling me of their experiences being locked up for six months in the Buqha compound in southern Iraq under United States forces. They were students. One was a medical student, the other was an engineering students. As it looked like war was approaching, their parents in Palestine were saying okay come back home now. But they didnât want to toss away all the years they had put into their studies. It is not like they could say "We will transfer our credits over to the engineering school or the medical school in the West Bank."; It doesn't exist.; They thought "Well, we will sit it out and maybe it will be a short war. The war in 1998 was only four days and maybe we will go back to school and finish our studies." It was a bad gamble. They lived in the highest building on Haifa Street. And when the U.S. Marines came, they wanted to be in the highest building on Haifa Street because it was a good lookout place.; These two young guys were immediately cuffed. They were picked up as prisoners.; They said "We are not prisoners, we are students. Why? Why? Why do you take us?"; And the Marines said "Show us your IDs."; And they had shown their IDs and they said "You are terrorists."; They said "We are students."; They said "You are Palestinians. You are terrorists."; They were called Third-Country Nationals, TCNs and taken down to this very, very desolate place in southern Iraq and locked up in the Buqha compound, a series of tents and they talked to us about their treatment. They had been forced to parade naked in front of women soldiers, very humiliating for them. They had been sleeping on the ground in cold weather with just one blanket and no blanket with which to cover themselves. They were told they had to bark for their food or say "I love George Bush."; They tried to protect a few thirteen-year-olds who were there, who were very terrified and wanted to go back to their families. They tried to organize the other prisoners. And maybe because they spoke English as well as they did, they were released. Five of their fellow students were left behind. They were begging us "Please, can you go and find out, are they there? How are they? Bring some word back for their parents who were begging us to please not abandon them.; It wasn't very easy to get into the Buqha compound. We went to our Christian Peacemaker Team friends and they said "All you can do is try. Get a driver, and here is the name of somebody who we think is sympathetic, Major Garrity."; And off we went. It was a long drive. It is a bit of a dangerous drive. When we got there, there were actually visiting days, but this wasn't one of them, and visiting hours, and even if it had been the visiting day, we were too late.; The soldiers were telling us there is really nothing we can do for you. But we used Major Garrity's name and sat on a picnic bench for hours and finally she came out. She certainly didn't have to give us the time of day, but she was very kind and very sympathetic. And she said "I know you have come a long way, and I know these young guys that you want to see."; And she let us in and she let us meet with them. And that was a very touching moment. The brother of one of the prisoners was with us as well; to see them embrace, to hear their stories, to have some information to bring back. And then, of course, when we got to Amman when tried to go to every group we could to seek their release.; But on our way out of that prison, the U.S. Major said to me, "Look" - and this was January of 2004, "Be glad that they are with us and they are not in Baghdad." I was thinking "Well, it doesn't look all that great down here, and if they were in Baghdad maybe they would have a better chance to be in touch with some kind of authorities."; I was confused, and I said "Are you sure?"; She said "I am telling you." And she gave me a very knowing look, "Be glad they are with us. We give them something to sleep on. We give them clothes. We give them food."; And again I was thinking, "I am glad you are nice to us, but it doesn't seem to me to be doing anything more than the Geneva Conventions demand that you do." It wasn't until I got back to the United States that I started to get a better insight to what she might have meant.
About Abu Ghraib?: And Baghdad. And also to read the Human Rights Watch reports that tell about abuses that have not necessarily been ended and that when you realize that the Iraqi commandoes that are now sometimes replacing U.S. troops are doing to their prisoners, these types of reports are commonplace all around the Arab and the Muslim world. There are many, many people whom I believe are thinking that it is very dangerous to leave yourselves vulnerable to the United States. We went to war against Iraq because we could, because they didn't have any weapons to fight against us. Look what has happened to their population, to their younger generation, the kind of suffering that they are enduring.; Is it making us safer? And also, if the point of all this is to project immense military might and US power so that other people will turn their resources over to us at cut rate prices, why aren't we seeing more social progress in this country.
I don't know. You ask me questions I wish I could answer, what do you tell people who say, "I am only one person. What can I do?": I think that we are saddled in this country by a media-saturated image of star power, that there is only a certain circle of people who matter, who count. You see this in the entertainment industry. You get it through the news media and sometimes even in terms of our education, kids get the impression that there are just a small number of people who really matter and the rest of us are disempowered and don't count and that we are fringe circles.; I don't buy that, I don't think it is true. I think that the fathers had it right in a set of earlier decades when they said the only stars are in the firmament. What is very, very unlikely is that you would ever get a critical mass of the entire U.S. population to work toward social change. What I think is needed is a critical mass of socially engaged, committed activists who will work towards social change.; In terms of big, huge demonstrations, I think that the peace movement came closer than it ever has before to stopping a war before it started. That was with the massive demonstrations worldwide on February 15, 2003.; One of the best ways to stop a next war is to keep telling the truth about this current war. Sometimes I think in the fog of war you ask "How can you tell what is really true?" But there are some things you can nail down, and those things ought to be articulated to elected representatives.; As long as an increasing number of people are entering into that circle who will go and make contact with the elected representatives, write the letters to the editor, help organize the massive demos, help continue the education efforts, then I think we do stand a better chance of being able to take this concentrated power out of the hands of the ruling elites and perhaps pull our society back from being a colonial empire, an imperialist empire, which horribly endangers security for next successive generations.
You were in Baghdad in March of 2003, the day the Marines marched into Baghdad. Could you tell us what happened the day you saw imperialism face to face?: I guess I'd like to be honest with you; it was a very conflicted day for me. We had lived in a five-story hotel, one that we had been in for years as visitors to Iraq trying to break the economic sanctions. We stayed there because we felt that it would be terrible to say to people who had given us hospitality in the past, whose children we knew and played with, with whom we had built relationships to say "Hey, it is getting a little dangerous. We are out of here, good luck." So we stayed.; We thought maybe we could be of some consolation and maybe we could help secure wherever it was we were staying. The day I am thinking of, looters were systematically going through buildings in downtown Baghdad and they were 10 minutes away from where we stayed, and there was a big huge risk that we were in fact jeopardizing the people with whom we were staying; grandparents and parents and children and a newborn infant.; If the looters came in and broke windows and burst in and had weapons and took hostages, we were very uncertain what might happen. We were hiding our passports, hiding money, telling the people at the front desk "Don't pull out guns to defend us, whatever you do."; All of a sudden a little eight-year-old came speeding down a corridor screaming the Arabic word for "Soldiers. Soldiers." We ran up to a second floor balcony and looked out and as far as the eye could see there were Hummers and APCs and tanks and Jeeps. The Marines got there before the looters. I was one relieved pacifist.; I think the Marines might have wondered, looking up at us, "Where is their spaceship? Who are these people?" And we were pretty curious about them. Questions were shouted back and forth. I noticed one guy climb out of his hatch, and cross his legs and pull out an Army issue novel and start to read.; I do remember I was holding one end of a banner that said "Courage for Peace, not for War." I looked at my friend Cynthia and I said to her, "They look pretty thirsty, don't they." And I as I recall it, Cynthia dropped her end of the banner as she was telling me, "Of course that is the right thing to do. I am so glad you said that."; She picked up two big six-packs of bottled water and went marching down in her Code Pink hat to go meet the newly arriving Marines. And I was a bit taken aback, but then I thought, "Oh, wow, that is what every Iraqi family did every time we entered any household. No matter how poor, people would want to sit us down, serve us tea, and send the youngest kid out to get a Pepsi and you would be the big American with a bottle of Pepsi if we tried to share it with the other kids, 'La. [no]'"; I remembered I had a box of dates and I went down with a box of dates. And I am pretty nosey, so I went up to the kid with the book and I asked him, "What are you reading?" And he said, "Heart of Darkness, ma'am. It is my 13th time reading it."
That is an Army issue novel?: Those kinds of encounters, I remember for 10 days, I'm going to say we picnicked. We would sit on a tarp. We didn't have much to share with them, really experiences, and that is what they had to share with us mainly. And if one of those Marines wanted to move one of their big vehicles, they would literally first check with us, "Can we move your tarp a little bit because we don't want to dog ear the edges?"; Repeatedly, they would come up to us and say, "Could you tell us your side of the story? Or "What was happening between Iran and Iraq back in the 80s?" They were interested and they repeatedly said they wanted to be part of rebuilding and wanted to be part of reconstruction.; Quite a few expressed real deep remorse for what had happened. Their commander was the first to come and talk to us. He said, "Look, don't blame these young guys for what happened. In the heat of battle, I made some hasty decisions and it is I who will have sleepless nights." And that wasn't true.; A lot of them would come at one o'clock in the morning and tell us about the battles that they had been part of and tell particularly graphic memories. And I remember one guy saying "I hope it never registers here, ma'am, you know what I mean, I hope it never registers here [pointing to his forehead]."; If you read Evan Wright, an embedded reporter's accounts of having come in to Baghdad with that same group from the border between Kuwait and Baghdad, it is a very hair raising narrative with a lot of brutality, a lot of killing, a lot of cheering when brutality and killing were happening, and people giving accounts of how they felt when they were sniping and people talking about busting their cherry and getting their first kill. I think he told the truth. And I know I just told you the truth.; If we were to put U.S. wealth and productivity into training young people in the United States to be very well equipped as people who could purify other people's water systems, as people who could build electrical plants, as people who could help teach and offer health care delivery, we would be loved all around the world.; Cubans do it, why can't that be what the United States would be doing in another country, instead of taking young people who even after all these battles say "Gee, I wish I could help reconstruct" and turning them into automatons under battle who are taught to say the word "kill" 3,000 times a day. It is not fair to entitle them as "Generation Kill."; They are 18-year-olds. They never had any chance to experience themselves as parents or as invested workers in a meaningful project. A lot of them couldn't find other alternatives means for education and work in our country. Why are we sowing our wealth and prosperity into making the United States despised and hated because of the military grip that we have imposed on other people?
Your banner said "Courage for peace, not for war." How do you find the courage to stand in Baghdad the day the world's largest military power ever assembled is raining down hellfire and brimstone on the population? How do you find the courage to stand in the face of death?: That's interesting. A lot of people would see me and the other members of my team as a bit exceptional. But meanwhile, we have 16,000 United States young people returning maimed, wounded, really disarmed, and many more will be coming back with post traumatic stress. We are still pouring people over, so why ever in the world would it be considered unusual for someone who has actually been with Iraqis, in my case I think some 23 times.; I really have a reason to care deeply about relations that I have over there, to care deeply after seeing the effects of economic sanctions, after being children that were grotesquely tortured because they couldn't get simple medicines, anesthetics, antibiotics. Of course, it makes sense for me to stay with that situation.; What doesn't make very much sense is to take people who perhaps have no contact with the culture, with the recent history, with the prospects for the future for Iraq and send them into the middle of this chaos, into the middle of this ghastly mess. That is what makes no sense.; To me, it made a lot of sense to stay with children and families that we know. Courage is the ability to control your fear. Everybody feels fear when you hear these earsplitting blasts and sickening thuds and deafening explosions, of course you tense up and you flinch. But I think that it is possible to control fears, and often if there are children present, that boosts the ability to put on a poker face fast because you don't want to scare the children.; I also believe that I have had at this point, 52 very good years, and I don't think I was put on this earth to live forever. If there is some action that can be taken that might help to build the possibility of peace teams rather than further building the reality of war making, then I know which side I want to be on.
Tomorrow, you are going to go to Mount Holyoke, you are going to talk to a bunch of young people, how are going to motivate them?: When I think about young people in college situations, I feel sad if they are going to end up as indentured servants when they graduate because they've got so many loans that they have to pay back. Maybe their idealism is a bit compromised because they can't go into what they want to do, that might have more heart or more compassion because they feel like quick they have to earn some money and pay back these loans.; I also think it is not fair in our society that we don't look for ways to pay young people to learn languages like Arabic or Chinese, pay young people to learn skills that are needed by countries that are afflicted by some of the ailments that have caused by unfair distribution of resources, quite honestly by the United States hogging a lot of people's precious resources.; It would seem for me to make so much sense to do what the Cubans do. They send their young people all over the world, including places that are blighted by warfare. They have skills to offer and they do it well. I think there is a big problem in Cuba in terms of human rights and respect for the human rights of their people. We should take a cue, learn from what it is that makes other countries beloved and appreciated in other parts of the world.; Our young people could be real ambassadors of peace making. When you think of the billions and billions of dollars that we pour into our universities, making sure that the research departments can help build more weapons systems, making sure that there are Reserve Officers Training Corps on campuses all across the United States, making sure that people are feeling they as though they have no other choice but to get into this military industrial congressional media complex; it doesn't have to be that way.; I would like young people, if they come to a presentation I give, to walk out wondering is there an alternative, is there another way? Are we being treated fairly as the best resource this country has, our young people?
How do you try to give hope to a young person who says we have a complicit congress, a bought and paid for judiciary that will give the president unchecked powers, how do you say to this young person, there is hope, a light at the end of the tunnel, that this is not a thousand-year reich?: Right now, you and I are sitting in the living room of a family that has been, since I have known them back in 1993, using their home as a place to offer hospitality and to help neighbors. They are all about being part of service, sharing resources, sharing incomes and living very simply and raising happy, lovely kids in the process and living in a community.; I think point young people to those kinds of communities. They are everywhere, but sometimes you have to go to a neighborhood where the housing is dilapidated, the streets are a bit seedy looking, neighborhoods that maybe a lot of people feel like "Whoa, I couldn't go there." Go there and you will often find some of the people with hearts are open to the world: the soup kitchens, the shelters, the alternative schools, the houses of hospitality, the drop-in centers where people who are lonely or homesless can find warmth and perhaps a good meal.; This is the way to find hope in our world, look for the people who have followed their hearts and their idealism. They are everywhere. I think if we let ourselves get fooled into thinking that culture of selfishness and greed is the only street you can travel along in the United States, people will end up feeling a bit cynical and comprised in their ideals.
Describe Voices for Creative Non-Violence.: I had been volunteering with Voices in the Wilderness since 1996, when a number of us thought we just couldn't any longer hear the accounts of particularly two elderly Roman Catholic sisters who had come back from Iraq and said "It is really bad over there." Those of us who had gotten this campaign started, we had been in Iraq in 1991 either before, during, or immediately after that bombing. We felt that simply we had to pay attention to what was happening.; We just decided that well we cannot be a credible NGO that would do humanitarian relief, that's not possible. But what we could do was challenge the economic sanctions that were causing so much suffering. We decided to break those economic sanctions and we did it as often as we could for the next 13 years. We traveled with duffle bags packed with medicines, vitamins, sometimes antibiotics for children.; The government decided ultimately that we were criminal, that we had violated laws and that we should be punished by paying a $20,000 fine as a civil penalty. We won't pay that fine. The judge who wrote the opinion in a case that was finally decided in August 2005, wrote that those who break an unjust law should do so openly, lovingly and with a willingness to pay the penalty. So we have said to him: "If you put us in prison, we will go willingly and lovingly," as most of us have done that before. But we won't turn over one dime to the war criminals that are continuing this warfare against Iraq.; Voices for the Wilderness has ended. It was a fine campaign, it was a very sturdy campaign, and I hope that that kind of campaign will happen at any place, at any time, when economic sanctions are afflicting and murdering innocent people. But the war against Iraq goes on and the global war on terror goes on. A number of us believe that that should be opposed vigorously.; Voices for Creative Non-Violence is the group that now works out of my home, not unlike the home we are in now. It is a second floor apartment in Chicago. People who work with the group are volunteers. We try as best we can to continue this effort at education.; The young people in Chicago that I know are going to do a 33-day electricity fast and fast from electricity as best as they can as a way to show identification with Iraqis. Sometimes in Baghdad we hear that they are averaging four hours a day of electricity.
Which is worse than it was before the war.: Yes. When you don't have electricity there are so many other complicating factors. It is hard to run a country under those circumstances. In Washington, D.C. concurrent with that another group of our folks will be doing what we are calling "the Winter of our Discontent" and fasting and vigiling in front of the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA for a 30-day stretch and doing as much lobbying as they can, saying not only bring the troops home, but also pay reparations for the suffering caused in Iraq.
How long do you figure it will be before we will see the Bush administration charged with war crimes?: I don't think about that too much. I don't want to take a route that says the responsibility should be pinned on this bad guy or this bad girl. I think we need all of us to look in the mirror. There is shared, joint responsibility for the cruelty and suffering that's imposed on other people because of collaboration by the population of the United States.; They don't go out and hold bake sales to raise the money for their weapons systems. The one thing they want from us is the one thing we can control, and that is money. So we have that on our hands. How many of us turn over our income, our wealth, and our productivity to people whom we know are using it to commit criminal acts, atrocious acts against other people?; I also think we live well, we live really well, many of us, because we have been able to take other people's resources at cut-rate prices. How much are we communicating to elected representatives about how we want to change those lifestyles that we don't want to be hogging the available fossil fuel energy? In a sense, if there is just a finite set of fossil fuels remaining, if they are not going to discover new reservoirs of oil, for instance, then we are taking what is available to the children and their children. We are hogging what is left and they will be left with a crash landing. That is wrongful. It is not right to say that it is all the fault of these Republicans or those complicit Democrats. This overconsumptive and wasteful lifestyle is something on all of us.
Clearly. But at the same time, how do you not have a life that depends upon the automobile in Connecticut? Anywhere outside of major metropolitan areas, you pretty much need a car.: Well, we pretty much are going to have to change that. I don't think we can keep going merrily we roll along with our SUVs and our levels of consumption and think that this is an indefinite pattern that we can sustain. The planet is groaning. Every man, woman and child in the US is responsible for 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide going out in the atmosphere. It is nine metric tons for every European.; How much more can the planet take? The greatest terror that we face is not what a random group of attackers might do in the near future, the distant future, but the greatest terror is global warming, what we are doing to our ground, our water, our air.; I think the positive thing is that it could be a very, very challenging and interesting set of problems for our young people at Mount Holyoke or any other college you or I might visit. To say to their professors, "We want coursework that is going to help us cope with the very real problems we are going to face."; We are going to have to redesign our societies. We are going to have to redesign mass transit. We are going to have to redesign how we consume our food because we will not be able to afford to bring that food from California to the East Coast. It could be a time of enormous revitalizing growth and energetic, thoughtful study.; I want to also add that I look to the faith-based institutions and I hope they would be the ones that say "Let's make the poor our priority" because if they don't say it, I don't know who will. My fear is that as resources are not as easily available, what happened with Hurricane Katrina could characterize how poor people will be treated across the country and across other parts of the world as well.

2/14/06

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