Kathy Kelly Speaks of War and Responsibility at LEPOCO Annual Dinner

  (below is text of speech given 3-31-2007) 

      It’s a great privilege to be here tonight, but also to have been a recipient of good will and encouragement from people in LEPOCO, so many staunch, strong peaceworkers over such a long time. It’s great to feel kindred spirits and to have that real sense that we do “catch courage” from one another. So, thank you very very much for this invitation and for the fine meal, the wonderful singing and the good companionship. I always like to begin a presentation assuring people that if anyone came from a more ordinary background than mine, it would be almost unimaginable. Maybe I could say that where I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, we certainly were not into diversity, the idea was to fit the mold, to fit in, so even though my mother had an Irish brogue and sounded different from other people, there was no emphasis in the Kelly family on being Irish, such that when my Uncle Dick came over from Ireland to visit I was very very excited to meet my mother’s brother, he walked in the door, took one look at me, singled me out and said, “You’ve got the map of Ireland written on your face.” And I thought he must have meant my acne, I had never heard such a phrase. I was upstairs crying for two hours, that he noticed my acne. So we were very good at fitting in, and trying to be diverse was not on board at that point. I would like to dwell with you a little bit longer, however, tonight, on just that, on going to Ireland.

        I had never done it, my mother was born there, and when they were visiting Ireland, I was busy, in my early thirties, going back and forth to Central America, and eventually to Iraq. As it looked as though war in Iraq was inevitable, people in Iraq saw themselves in the crosshairs of the world’s largest army, the world’s largest arsenal, and I was invited by the sisters of St. Bridget, in Kildare, Ireland, to come to their peacefest. This meant leaving Baghdad, I was in place with the Iraqi Peace Team. We didn’t know, as you didn’t I’m sure, as you were feverishly organizing people to try to stop a war before it started. We didn’t know the start date. So I thought, OK, timeout, and I went, eventually over to Dublin and then Kildare, actually, I stopped at Shannon Airport. And there I saw this very sturdy group of people who remained maintaining a peace encampment, but it was a plane spotting peace encampment and they were tracking the planes as they went overhead, US planes that were making pitstops for refueling, and carrying US soldiers and possibly US equipment to support a war. Ireland was, constitutionally, a neutral country, and this just wasn’t onboard in the eyes of many people, to be giving support to a country that might be trying to provoke a belligerent war that was based, in the eyes of many, on flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction. 

       I was eager to go and give the best talk that I possibly could in Kildare, Ireland. I talked about women I knew who had gone to the Dominican Sisters, pregnant, and said, “Please, Sister, we want a ceasarean section.” They did not want to give birth to their babies under bombardment. I talked about men who I thought had nerves of steel who burst into tears and said, “Believe me, I am so scared.” I talked about how I had been under bombardment in 1998, and one of my strongest memories was of a young woman named Entisar, she had heard an explosion, she went to see what happened, she caught shrapnel in her spleen, she was going to survive. The Doctors did the surgery that she needed, but in that hospital at that time, where Iraq had been under siege for so long, they had one colostomy bag to share between five patients, and Entisar was terrified that she would never leave the hospital. 

       Soo, did my best. And then, went back to Baghdad, and then there was still electricity, the war hadn’t started yet. I read on the internet that five of the people who had been at the talk, one of whom I knew quite well, the other four I didn’t know so well, had taken it upon themselves right after my talk to go on a brief retreat and then they went out to the Shannon Airport tarmac and did two and a half million dollars damage to a United States Navy airplane parked on the tarmac of Shannon Airport. I didn’t tell them to do it. They called themselves the Pitstop Ploughshares. 

       I think the Irish government would have cheerfully drawn and quartered them at that point, but they were brought before the court. And I was called as a defense witness, and the trial was a very elongated one. The first effort fell apart because the Judge, he realized that he had the proverbial Irish temper. You know, they wear the sheepskin wigs and the long gowns, and I thought that wig was going to go “PYOOM” right through the ceiling, he was so angry, so he had to recuse himself from thte case. Then they got together again, for a second trial, and this time the Judge and his wife had had dinner with George and Laura Bush, I think three times, so he had to take himself off the case. Just this past summer, I was called over for the third time to be a defense witness, kind of shaking in my shoes, thinking that I might be an albatross for these people, all of whom had become my good friends. And one of them, the one I knew well, was facing ten years in prison. So, it was a very very dramatic trial. 

       The Judge this time was a woman, and she would have none of the Pitstop Ploughshares activist contention that they had acted based on their faith beliefs. You know, from the Book of Isaiah, “Once shall come the day, O Lord, when they will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift a sword against nation, and neither shall they continue to learn the ways of war any longer.” That’s how they wanted to pitch their action, and the Judge just said forget it, so there went a whole bunch of their defense, it would seem. 

       They had, fortunately, three of the most talented lawyers, they call them barristers over there, in all of Ireland. And one of them, Mr. Nix, was even regarded by the Prosecutor as the last of the great Irish orators. So Mr. Nix, in his summation for the case, when he could say anything he wanted, a looking like he was right out of central casting. He had the Daddy Walrus moustache, a long beard, he was kind of portly, balding gray hair…anyway, Mr. Nix went right up in front of the jury and started his summation by reading to them The Sermon on the Mount, which was a bit of a direct challenge to the Judge. Those of taking notes, out jaws dropped, our pens stopped in mid-air. And then, he moved from that by saying that the problem with these five defendants was that they believed their faith, they don’t practice their faith a la carte, I’ll take a little of this and a little of that, but put a hold on that. And then he went on, to change tone, and he described a beautiful day in a Dublin park. He’d been sitting on a bench watching children chase the ducks up the hill and the ducks chased the children down the hill and the children were squealing. And he assured all of us that the most beautiful sound, the universal sound of joy in any language must be the sound of children at play. And then, his face darkened, his voice thickened, Mr. Nix was booming out at us, “THEY’RE BOMBING CHILDREN. IN A SWIMMING HOLE IN LONDON, CHILDREN ARE SWIMMING IN A POOL OF THEIR OWN BLOOD.” 

        Well, I’d been myself so fixated on this trial, that I had barely read to the end of any news accounts about the Israel-Lebanon War that was raging those same days of the trial. Well you bet I beat a track over to pick up an issue of the Guardian, and then I read an account about a man in Kusia, who is sitting on the edge of the crater that Mr. Nix referred to and there were plastic sandals caked with blood and mud distributed around the edge of the crater. And this man, his name was Aboud Ismail, he had his head in his hands, he was roaring with grief, and he shouted out, looking at the crater, “HIZBOLLAH, HERE? ONLY CHILDREN HERE, MY SON HERE.” And his son was one of the three killed, seven seriously injured, eleven children had been at play. Mr. Nix had all of us on trial, really. “The problem is not the question of whether these five had a lawful excuse to do what they did, the question is, what is your excuse for not to do more. Would you not try, if you could, to stop a Hizbollah missile from slamming into northern Israel? Would you not try, if you could, to stop an Israeli missile from slamming into a canal in Southern Lebanon? WHAT WILL RISE YOU?” That question, “what will rise you?” I know he wanted to indelibly mark on all of us, as though we were the ones on trial. 

       Now, such an amazement, the Dublin working class jury acquitted the Pitstop Ploughshares defendants on all five counts. And there was a sense of relief, but also, the United States was trying at that time to deliver 600 pound bunker busters to go over to Israel to use against Lebanon in what can only be described as a disproportionate capacity to kill. And those US planes couldn’t land. Not on the Shannon tarmac. When they tried to land in Scotland, the Scots were out in force saying, “Nay, nay”. They finally had to land, briefly, in Suffolk, in an old field for sheepherding, in the UK. And I made my way over to Lebanon, what else could I do? What else could you do following a trial like that. The war was still raging, their were young, Lebanese professionals, beautiful young people, translators, and English teachers and landscape artists and engineers and doctors and social workers, and they had collected themselves together and as much medical relief, supplies and food as they could bundle up and their determination was to go south of the Latani River where the Israeli Defense Forces had assured any moving vehicle or person was a military target. And they said, “We are going to be on the move. We can’t just let people, just because they are Hizbollah, or because they are women and children of a different background than ours, maybe they are more poor than we are, just become stranded.” Many couldn’t get out from where they were. And so the idea was to go down, and be with them, and bring relief, as much as possible, and could internationals who find themselves able to join please hurry up and get on over there. 

       So, there I was. I want to say that we were very much indebted to Professor Norman Finkelstein. In a grim sense, he had created a list of thirteen sites, where he considered to be where massacres had taken place. Taking that list, we went to Kusmia, and saw the swimming canal, and then we went to a place called Kanah, and there, we’d heard that there was a place where children were sleeping together in a building, and they had been attacked, and as we asked around for directions of the youngsters that were nearby, these young teenage guys looked at us with an ironic sense, when we asked the very awkward question, “Can you tell us where was the massacre?” Which one? Because there had been a previous time when people had gathered for shelter, in a United Nations refugee camp, and they had been attacked, so we paid respects to a place that commemorated those people. And then, we were just trying to feel our way with directions and we walked right into the two family household front yard commemorations of loved ones who had just died, children. And very quietly, my friends and I sat on a cement ledge with the women of the household. And we were in silence for about 35 minutes. 

      And there was one woman, very stately and dignified, she had a neck brace, because she had been injured in the same bombing that had killed her daughter. And so she started to talk and a torrent of words poured out. Even though it was wincingly difficult for her, she pointed above, and the drone airplanes, the surveillance planes were still crisscrossing the skies, and she posed to us the question, “Didn’t they see, didn’t they know, this my daughter she six years old, she play, she run from here to there, always she come to me.” Because the children were just sleeping over night in the sturdy shelter, the parents put them there, thinking that they would be more safe. And then, she sent her son to get a stack of newspapers, and this little girl had become, like the iconic picture. And I had even seen her picture taped onto the doors of some of the taxi cab drivers, a picture of a helmeted relief worker holding up the lifeless body of Hirza Zahara, and the relief worker roaring in grief. And then, she showed us a picture of her little daughter Zahara, cuddled in the arms of another six year old Zenef, and their bodies beautiful but lifeless, what killed these little girls was the force of the explosion that caused their internal organs to be destroyed. And then she sent for still one more picture, and this was a framed picture of a little, curly-haired six year old with big saucer eyes, a serious look on her face you could only imagine the smile. And she dropped the plastice over the child’s picture, and she asked us the question, “Is she the terrorist?” What brought that young mother into paroxysms of sobbing was her desire to say to us, “She loved to study her English. She loved to practice her English words. And then she sobbed and she sobbed. 

       I and so many others who return from Iraq could never have stood in front of you from 1996 to 2003 and told you, “Oh yes, now we can give you an answer to the question ‘why do they hate us so much?’” We came back wondering, bewildered maybe, maybe gratified, with the question, “why do they love us so much?” The capacity, the potential for friendship ran deep and it ran true and it still could. But not as long as our capacity for manufacturing, and selling, and storing and using and encouraging others to use – weapons and more weapons. It doesn’t make for friendship, and Mr. Nix’s words come back to me continually, “What will rise you?” 

      When we were in Lebanon, I had the great idea to be staying in a house that had so much broken glass, every light fixture, every thing broken, so I say, “OK, we can sweep it up, put it in a container, and then dump it in the garden.” Well, all right I’m a city girl, thank goodness young Mohamed said, “please my mother she love gardens” so we didn’t dump the broken glass in the garden, we kept piling it up in the kitchen, “I don’t think she’s going to like that either, but OK”. Well, it’s a good thing nobody listened to me, the next morning there was a knock on the door, I think maybe it was somebody from Hizbollah, I’m so glad he bothered to inform us that inside the garden were two unexploded cluster bombs. Had I been dumping the broken glass on top of the two cluster bombs who knows what might have happened? We were driving along a road, and suddenly Ramzi Kaifi says, “Stop Stop” - one unexploded cluster bomb on the road. There were 1.2 million cluster bombs dropped in the last four days of that war, when everybody knew that as soon as Condeleeza Rice said, “OK now you can sign a cease fire. She had instructed them to hold off on signing a cease fire. But in just those four days, in olive groves, in play lots, along roadsides, in gardens, 1.2 million cluster bombs. 

      My friends in Medinah, Minnesota, In Minneapolis, in Saint Paul, gather every Friday morning, and they go the Alliant Tech factory there which manufactures cluster bombs. And they vigil, and they often engage in civil disobedience, and the Alliant Tech plant flies the flag of the country with which it has most recently done business. Last Spring, the Alliant Tech factory flew the flag of Israel. And of course it’s good for business, for the workers on the floor of the Alliant Tech factory in Medinah, Minnesota. If 1.2 million cluster bombs are used up that means you might need 1.2 million more. Is this how we would export friendship? In Iraq, one out of three children suffer from malnutririon, 66% of the rural areas don’t have potable water, 22% of the urban areas without potable water, electricity once every 12 hours, 38% of the people dependent on the ration basket but in many areas they cannot even get the meager rations that are available in that basket. 60 to 80% unemployment, and an average of 1000 people killed a week. This is the situation in Iraq that has become nightmarish almost beyond bearability, one out of every ten are expected to try to flee in this year. And yet, there are 750,000 to a million refugees in Amman, Jordan, 850,000 to a million refugees in Syria, 1.9 million people displaced within Iraq and may I read to you the words of our President in January of 2007, “Well, I didn’t think that we didn’t do a better job (I’m quoting directly..sings”an English teacher is really someone…’) I think I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the US people a huge debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America, they wonder if there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.” 

      They wonder if there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq. 

      They wonder if there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq. 

      We’re told of success stories, we’re asked to appreciate the success stories and support the troops involved in the success stories. And for many who did not want to see the last round of 125 billion dollars of supplemental emergency funding passed in the House of Representatives. For many who opposed that, among them only eight Democrats with enough spine to oppose it – people were told, you don’t support the troops. Now we can anticipate that President Bush will put forth a request for 142 billion dollars more in supplemental spending money in the summer of this year. Well, if we could just think for a moment about supporting the troops, about success. 

      General David Petraes is now in charge of United States troops in Iraq. When he was in Iraq, in Mosul, in 2003 and 2004, during his tenure against the advice of many of the locals, he appointed a particular man to be in charge of the police and they engaged in the training of new police officers. Then General Petraeus left, and after he left his appointee defected and joined the Sunni Arab insurgency. All of the newly trained police officers, en masse, turned all of their new equipment and firearms to the Sunni Arab insurgents. I’m not trying to say pick one side or another in the terrible sectarian conflict that’s going on right now, but I don’t see that any military grouping or government would call that a success. Generals Abizaid and Casey both oppose the 15% surge in troops, they were recalled to the United States. General Petraeus who said, “o yeah, that surge is a good idea!” This is what the Bush administration wanted to hear and they put him in charge of the surge. 

      A 15% increase in troops, yet these troops are embedded in none different sectors of Baghdad and also in the very very dangerous Anbar Province. Now, they don’t speak the language. They don’t necessarily much of the history of the conflict going on, nor do they know the geography. Now, you’re told you don’t support the troops if you don’t support this surge. But in fact, with the surge, they may end up taking on twice the number of opponents because they would not only be fighting the Sunni Arab insurgency but also the 60,000 armed Mehdi troops from the Shi’a side of this conflict and they’re training many Peshmurga Kurdish troops from the north who also don’t speak Arabic. This could open up a new front to the war, the civil war that I believe is already going on.

      I come from Chicago, I used to teach Harrison Jensen, the Latin Kings, two major gangs in Chicago. If the good people of Chicago had ever been told by Mayor Daly that he was going to solve gang rivalry by bringing in troops, say, from Romania who spoke no English and he was going to embed them in nine different neighborhoods of Chicago, equip them with firepower and equip the gangs with firepower so they could undergo training and monitoring, I think the good people of Chicago, I think would say NO, and we would not have been called unpatriotic for saying so. 

      But I think this is a suspension of any kind of rational thought that has been part of the war of choice that the United States has waged so cruelly against people who bear the consequences in horrific ways. And we ought not to think that if we leave, we will be leaving Iraqis to rising levels of chaos, spiralling chaos and violence. We ought to at least register the polls that have shown 78-80% of the Iraqis say YES we want the US troops to go, thank you. We must register what the consequences of the oil laws being passed would be, and why it is Iraqis would not want to say, “sure, that’s a very good idea”. Perhaps register what the BBC mideast news reported since the sad and tragic fourth year anniversary of the shock and awe bombardment. 

       They reported on a 16 year old boy named Ali Abbas, and I had met him in Baghdad, in early April of 2003. Ali was eating a linch with his family outside of their simple home and all of a sudden a missile hit. And he was in the Al Kindi Hospital and his arms had been turned into like two pieces of driftwood. And the Doctors who were severing his arms from his torso while I happened to be sitting in a side room and it turned out his Aunt was sitting next to me. I tried to comfort her as she wept and she spoke some English and she asked me two questions, “How I tell him? What I say?” How could she tell him, when he woke up, that he had not only lost his arms, but that she was now his only surviving relative. When little Ali woke up, he looked at the Doctors and they told him what had happened, and he asked them, “but, will I always be this way?” 

       I remember not being able to come out of the room that I was staying at in the hotel, three days pounding a pillow, asking myself, “will we always be this way?” But Ali Abbas is a child of great courage. The BBC reported that now, at age 16, living in London, he has learned how to feed himself with his feet and he’s become an accomplished artist, painting with his toes. When the interviewer asked Ali what would you like to do when you become older, he replied, “I don’t know” speaking in perfect English, and he continued, “maybe do something for peace”. Such opportunities we have to let Ali Abas and his desire to do something for peace lead us in these days and weeks and months to come. 

       I so strongly urge you, with the community and it is a community that’s been formed in the vigils. You’re practically raising each other’s kids and taking care of each other’s loved ones, grandparents. You meet and you know one another in those vigils. Take that vigil, take your educational events, inside the offices of the elected representatives and educate them, cultivate the contacts, be polite, perhaps remain in the offices as many of us have. Say that you won’t be able to leave until they sign a pledge that they will not support any longer the funding for ongoing war in Iraq, in Afghanistan or the ongoing global war on terror. Maybe, engage in remembrance. Read, or sing the names…sings, Aqmed Moustaffa, three years o-old, we remember you, Sergeant First Class Ryan Plancy, 25 years o-old, we remember you…Bring those names into these offices, and tell these elected representatives that we no longer want to be the imperial menace feared around the world, nor do we want to be goaded by fears into acting in ways that are contrary to the futures, to the potential of our own children, for the ones we love. 

      I want to close with something that brings me back to Baghdad at a time before war, this mosst recent war, but during an economic war. This was a time after September 11, I had been in New York on September 11 and shortly after that gone over to Iraq and I went to a school where I was admiring the artwork and the dance and the music and then came upon a child’s display that showed a jumbo passenger jet plowing into the left hand tower of the world trade center. It kind of stopped me in my tracks, and I said, “do you think I could talk to the person who drew this picture?” The kids were like their own little Muhabharat, and the next thing I knew there he was, 11 year old Ali Hussein standing in front of me, so I asked him, “Could you tell me what you were thinking when you drew this picture?” He folded his hands in front of himself, very confident, so pleased that the foreigner was interested in his picture, and he said, “Allah wanted this to happen to people in America, so people in America would understand what happens to other people when America hit them.” Then he saw the teacher coming toward us and he said, “And we love the people in America and we want to be their friend.” 

       Well, goodbye heart, so I told him and his friends about being in New York City on September 11, they were all ears. I told him there were a group of people who had walked from the Pentagon all the way to the World Trade Center, because they wanted to carry a banner saying OUR GRIEF IS NOT A CRY FOR WAR and many of them had lost loved ones themselves. The kids were getting that, and then I said, there was even a song that was song in 150 of the memorial services and it was a song intended to celebrate what people have in common. Well, this is a music school, right, and they said, “madam, why don’t you teach us this song?” Then madam was in trouble, my Arabic was terrible, my voice not much better, so I was trying to backpedal, and the Director of the school also directed the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra. He didn’t understand the concept “I can’t do this.” He was plinking out the tune to Sibelius’ song that you sang earlier, and transliterating the words.  

       Within two days, with violin and flute accompaniment, the children were singing that song to me. Shortly after the bombing of Baghdad, the Shock and Awe bombing, after the looters had fanned out and they had systematically gone through from place to place, Hesham, the director of the school, who had tried his best to protect the school, but the looters had splintered every instrument, shattered every window, burnt the sheet music. Hesham came to me and said, “Kathy, believe me, this all I find.” And in his hand, the tape of the children singing that song. He asked me to listen to it, and they were practicing for their Spring concert, and I said to Hesham, “Do you think you will teach that song to children again?” At that time, he said, “It is too much that you ask this now, you take it back to your country.” So I will ask you to indulge me. Sings in arabic. So sang Iraqi eleven year olds; they’re sixteen, seventeen now. I believe they are like Ali Abbas. They would like to do something for peace, so also our young ones. Let us do everything that we possibly can to create that environment where the accepted idea is “courage for peace not for war”. Thank you very much. 

(LEPOCO is a 40 year old Peace and Justice Group with an office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)