Barely three hours after the first cruise missiles slammed into Baghdad, a wave of demonstrations started in Asia and Australia and rolled swiftly across Europe and the Middle East toward the United States, where anti-war activists planned hundreds of protests later on Thursday.

In the Arab world, thousands of protesters vented their fury at the start of the war to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, with demonstrators in Egypt and Syria demanding the expulsion of US ambassadors.

In Cairo, the Arab world’s biggest city, riot police used water cannon and batons against hundreds of rock-throwing protesters who tried to storm toward the US embassy.

"This war is a sin," said 43-year-old Cairo taxi driver Youssef, as religious music blared from his car radio. "It’s a sin because ordinary Iraqis will suffer. It’s not a sin because of Saddam, who was too stubborn. He’s got a head of stone."

In Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is one of Washington’s staunchest allies on Iraq, the three biggest trade unions staged a two-hour strike.

Italian cities were thrown into chaos as tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, in many cases blocking train stations and highways. The biggest demonstration was a march on the U.S. embassy in Rome.

In Germany, more than 80,000 schoolchildren, many with faces painted with "No War" or peace signs, protested in the capital Berlin and the cities of Stuttgart, Cologne, Munich and Hanover.

"Let’s bomb Texas, they’ve got oil too," read one banner.

In Berlin, people lay in pools of red paint outside the heavily guarded US embassy to symbolise civilian casualties.

Swiss police clashed with hundreds of protesters, mainly students, who marched on the US diplomatic mission in Geneva, firing tear gas into the air to disperse them.

Spanish police in riot gear fired rubber bullets at anti-war demonstrators, including well-known actors and celebrities, who gathered in central Madrid in protest at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s support for the US-led attacks on Iraq.

Earlier they beat some demonstrators with batons in an attempt to move them on.

Violence also erupted in Calcutta, eastern India, when about 1,000 protesters waving banners reading "US warmongers go to hell" tried to storm a US cultural centre. At least 12 policemen and six demonstrators were injured when cane-wielding police drove them back, a senior police official told Reuters.

Thousands of British anti-war campaigners, enraged by the involvement of British troops in a war they see as an illegitimate grab for oil by Washington, blocked roads and scuffled with police as protests spread across Britain.

At the biggest rallying point in London’s Parliament Square, police hauled away demonstrators, including many schoolchildren, who were sitting in roads and blocking access points.

"We’re here for peace," said schoolgirl Tallulah Belly, 14, at Parliament Square. "We’ve walked out of school — we are the future generation and they should be listening to us."

The only reported clash outside a British embassy was in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where around 1,000 protesters were sprayed with water from a fire truck when they crossed barriers outside the mission. Witnesses said police beat several of them.

In France, more than 10,000 people, mostly students, surged through Paris chanting anti-war slogans, reflecting their government’s rigid anti-war stance which has infuriated Washington and split the international community into two camps.

Huge protests also took place in Greece, Spain and Austria.

In the Gaza Strip, about 1,000 Palestinian women and children marched in the Rafah refugee camp, holding Iraqi flags and posters of Saddam and setting fire to Israeli and US flags. About 150 people marched in Bethlehem in the West Bank.

On the other side of the planet, protesters brought Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, to a standstill. Organisers put the crowd at 40,000, police said it numbered "tens of thousands." Australia is a staunch ally of the US and a supporter of the use of force to disarm Saddam.

Anti-US sentiment was also strong in Muslim Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan, where many saw the attack as the start of a US campaign to subjugate the Islamic world and seize oil.

In Pakistan there were scattered but peaceful rallies across the country against what some called "American terrorism," while in Indonesia some 2,000 people from a conservative Muslim party sang and chanted anti-American slogans outside the US embassy. 

(Courtesy: Reuters).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 1

The post Listen to the world appeared first on SabrangIndia.

NEW YORK CITY,
February 12: Returning from six days of making people-to-people contacts at schools, hospitals and universities in Baghdad and Basra, Iraq, family members of September 11 victims challenged world leaders to "use some imagination" to find alternatives to military action in that nation. The four-member delegation represents September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an advocacy group seeking effective, non-violent alternatives to war and terrorism.

"During our trip, I met a lot of people who want their country healthy again, and their children happy," said Kat Tinley, whose uncle, Mike Tinley, perished at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. "Like much of the world, the people of Iraq have known violence entirely too long, and they long for peace."

"We talked with the teachers of a primary school who described the hopes they have for their students," added Terry Rockefeller, who lost her sister, Laura Rockefeller, at the twin towers. "We found a striking commonality in our grief for lost loved ones and our dreams for our children."

The delegation also visited the Amariyah bomb shelter and met relatives of the hundreds of civilians who died after a US missile struck the shelter on February 14, 1991.

"The personal connections we made with the people of Iraq have been very deep and meaningful," said Kristina Olsen, whose sister, Laurie Neira, was aboard Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. "Meeting with sick children and families who have lost loved ones has underscored the importance of the human bond that we share in our mutual suffering."

Colleen Kelly, who lost her brother, Bill Kelly Jr., at the World Trade Center, added, "In Iraq, we have begun to realise our hope of connecting a human face and story to the people of Iraq. This has only deepened our resolve to petition the governments of this world to explore every viable, peaceful alternative to the crisis here, using creative and perhaps non-conventional diplomacy."

In a press conference at the UN Church Center in New York City, the delegation also recognised that January 15 was the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose 1967 declaration that "wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows" provided the inspiration for the group’s name.

(www.peacefultomorrows.org/)

A Grieving Father’s Hope for Peace

JOHN TITUS

I write this letter with sadness in my heart and with a hope that we the people of the United States of America can overcome our differences, put aside our political biases, and open our hearts and minds to greater understanding and compassion. We are standing at the precipice of a war that looms like a dark shadow in the distance and my soul cries out.

Much controversy has resulted as our nation’s leaders move forward with preparation for war. Families, friends, the citizens of our country and the world are divided on the rightness or wrongness of such action. Each of us must search our hearts and souls and come to our own conclusions. I pray for enlightenment for each of us and especially for the leaders of the world as we move forward.

My message is borne of grief but with a clarity that comes from deep soul searching and meditation. When death strikes the heart our view of the world changes profoundly. Clarity finds its way to those who seek truth and understanding born from love.

My daughter, Alicia Titus was murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2001. She was a wizened young woman who lived life with grace, beauty, and compassion. Her whole life was dedicated to loving others, embracing differences, seeking truth and doing acts of goodness. Her joy was a gift she gave freely to all. She was able to see through the outer façade that so many of us maintain to protect our gentle souls. And she communicated at a deep level, beyond the trivial, beyond the mundane, to a level of love and understanding.

She travelled the world with the goal of experiencing all that life had to offer and to meet people from all walks of life. She embraced the sanctity of life. The people of the world were her family. It is a sad irony that she would die so violently at the hands of hate-filled zealots, diametrically opposed to all she stood for and believed in.

My message comes from deep within my soul, a place that feels the connection with all of life, that place where the Divine resides in each of us. The dark forces that took Alicia’s life self-righteously believed that they were fighting evil, ridding the world of the infidels who opposed their core beliefs. They struck at the heart and soul of America and over 3,000 innocent people died. Now we stand ready to use our advanced technology and risk our sons and daughters to fight those whom we believe to be infidels, those who oppose our ideologies and beliefs.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a corrupt, self- centred, egotistic and "evil" person. But, can we justify in our hearts and souls, the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people to try and get one man? And, like Osama bin Laden, he may elude our efforts and taunt us as the innocent dead lie in the Iraqi streets. Estimates range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 people who will directly or indirectly die as a result of our bombing. Sixty per cent of these are children under the age of 15 whose greatest sin is being born. Please, do not write these human lives off as "collateral damage". This is very dehumanising, extremely callous and it goes against all that is right and good.

We have a choice whether or not to move forward with this war. Unlike the message you have been repeatedly given, this is a war on the Iraqi people, not a war on terrorism. If we systematically kill the citizens of Iraq out of our own sense of self-righteousness and fear, we reduce ourselves to the level of those that we deem as terrorists. Look deep within your soul and seek the truth that longs for expression. There has to be a better way of resolving this conflict other than committing more senseless killing. It is my hope that we can learn from the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, without perpetuating a world in which violence and unjust killing are accepted as a solution to conflict. This is how our primitive ancestors resolved differences.

Surely, we have grown in love and understanding beyond that. My prayer is that God will be with our world leaders, our troops who would sacrifice their lives for us and to the children of Iraq whose cries will ring out in agony and resound in the soul of America.

(March 2003).
(http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/voices/jt_030903.html)

___________

‘I’m not going to respond to terrorism by becoming a terrorist’

If you had lost a loved one, would you want revenge? As the world edges closer to war, RACHEL SHABI talks to relatives who believe retaliation is wrong.

RITA LASAR, 71

New York, USA

My brother Abe (Zelmanowitz, 55) worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center, on the 27th floor. He could have got out, but his colleague, Ed, a quadriplegic, was trapped with him. My other brother and sister-in-law called him, begging him to leave, but he said he would wait for help to get Ed out. But help came too late.

Then Bush made his speech at the National Cathedral (September 14, 2001). He mentioned my brother’s heroic act, and it became immediately apparent to me that my country was going to use my brother’s death to justify attacks in Afghanistan. That was as horrendous a blow to me as the actual attacks on September 11. I hoped and prayed that this country would not unleash forces in my brother’s name. When it (the bombing of Afghanistan) happened, I was horrified and devastated. I felt so impotent.

Then I got a call from Global Exchange (a human rights organisation), asking me if I’d like to go to Afghanistan. What I saw there changed my life forever. I had been a very privileged, blessed American who had only ever seen war on TV. And then I went to Afghanistan and saw the devastation and horror of what happens to innocent people when bombs fall — anyone’s bombs, anywhere in the world. That my brother’s name had been used to justify attacks on the people I met, became family with, cried and grieved with, brought it to a point where it was emotional and real. I found nothing but understanding, warmth, hugs — they knew all about 9/11 and they grieved for us and apologised to us. Every American should go there — because, if they did, they would stop the plans for war on Iraq immediately.

I did not pay any attention to who was to blame for 9/11 — there was no place left in my mind and heart other than the grief about my brother and the people who were going to be killed in his name. I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t want any other sister or mother to feel this way. It was only later that I began to think about how to bring the perpetrators to justice. I knew that bombing was not the answer. We are no safer now than when we started bombing. We are going to war with a country that had no connection to 9/11, our privacy and our freedom in this country are being slowly whittled away, and Muslims are afraid to go out in the street — in a city that used to welcome everybody.

Revenge for 9/11 is the excuse they are using to bomb Iraq. There are people in Iraq who are alive today and who will be dead next month if we have a war — and my country will say that they have done that to avenge my brother’s death. I will not let my brother, my dear brother’s death, be hypocritically used in this war — the fact that his death is being used cynically hurts me so much, I can’t tell you. Imagine someone who you loved, who died violently, being used insincerely and untruthfully in a political campaign. It is an exploitation.

So I have no intention of touching the subject of revenge. If people ask me why I don’t want retribution, I say that it is the natural human reaction to not seek retribution — or it should be. It cannot accomplish anything. My brother is dead. I privately mourn for him every moment. But I am not looking to atone for his death. I’m looking to prevent the death of others. I don’t want to see other people die to amend a ghastly, unbelievable death. The world is larger than just me. Things don’t have to be done to make up for things that have happened to me. Things have to be done to make things better in the world. I draw from my love of human beings that everyone is the same as I am. That it is possible — not in a dream, but some day — for this to be a peaceful planet. I’ll fight to the day I die against this war on terror. I don’t want my granddaughter to be sitting here at my age, facing the same world that I’m facing now: a world of starvation, war and inequity. Surely we can do better than this.

DAVID POTORTI, 46

North Carolina, USA

His name was Jim Potorti – he was my eldest brother,53. Jim worked on the 95th floor of the north tower, almost directly where the plane hit.

I was surprised at my reaction at the time, which was that I didn’t have a lot of anger in the way that others did. I felt sadness more than anger, because I recognised that these terrible acts were desperate acts reflecting a desperate feeling.

All the radio and TV stations were saying we should kill the people responsible for 9/11, just go and bomb people — and it made me sick in the heart to hear that. I had just lost someone and they were saying we should do the same to others. I never remember being angry at the people who did it, because it was such a political act. It wasn’t like a drunk driver hitting my brother, where I would have been really angry.

I remember being angry that the bombing of Afghanistan was being carried out in my name. Yes, anger is the only word, because I think of what a nice person my brother was, how much he loved his family. I felt we were really dishonouring his memory by throwing our constitution out of the window, that if we really wanted to honour him we should hold on to our principles instead of throwing them all away. I don’t think my brother died for my country, but I hope that my country doesn’t die for him, by rejecting its values and principles.

The goal is always justice, but how you achieve justice is the question. We have all wanted to bring the people responsible for 9/11 to justice. And so another source of anger is that we are not doing that, we are not locating Osama bin Laden or the Al Quaeda network — in fact, we are making it harder to find them. It’s the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Justice for me would be a more equitable world, where people did not live in such misery that they had to hate each other. A world in which the US contributes to a sense of equality, rather than making it worse.

So the rage I felt after 9/11 was rage at the whole system, that people could be so desperate that they would do something like this. The people who flew the planes into the building are dead: what more can you do to them? But this kind of terrorism is like a cancer. The only way you stop it is to stop the cycle, by saying, "I’m not going to respond to terrorism by becoming a terrorist." If you do respond with violence, you are just promoting more and more terrorism.

I don’t make any connection between Iraq and 9/11, because I’ve never seen any. I would only justify an attack on Iraq if the Iraqi army attacked the continental US. Not a terrorist attack, but the official Iraqi army. I got a vicious e-mail today in which someone claimed that Saddam killed my brother. How do you respond to someone who’s so out of touch with reality? My brother’s death was a nightmare, and I feel like it just gets worse every time it’s used to justify more terror and more pain. I just want this to be over. I just want people to stop being so angry. I want people to stop dying.

No one has ever asked me how I feel about anything. That’s where the feeling of violation comes in — speaking for me, instead of asking me how I feel. We had a baby about a month ago, and I’m realising that she will never know my brother. How could I possibly wish that kind of loss on anyone else’s brother, or daughter, or parents?

The thing to atone my brother’s death would be for there to be more honesty in the world, for America to start being more honest about the repercussions of its world policy. Over the past year, I have really educated myself about foreign policy – I wanted to know why this happened. What I wish now is that people in the US would do the same. I want people to just shut their mouths and read – stop talking until they know something. We all have to do that, including me. 

(Excerpted from a report in The Guardian, UK, Saturday February 22, 2003).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 2

The post ‘Win without war’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

BAGHDAD, March 12: If the invasion that the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Shock and Awe" commences, Charlie Liteky is unlikely to feel either.He expects the United States to bomb Iraq. He expects noise and destruction more powerful and frightening than he has ever known. He expects the earth to shake and houses to go dark and children to scream themselves hoarse.

But Liteky sounds more determined than frightened.

Like 20 other members of the Chicago-based Iraq Peace Team who remain in Baghdad even as hostilities appear certain, Liteky abhors cluster bombs, cruise missiles and the civil unrest that combat causes. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, he knows firsthand the chaos and carnage of war.

That’s precisely why he sounded elated Tuesday morning when he told his wife that the Iraqi government had extended his tourist visa 10 days and is likely to extend it again, long enough for him to help Iraqi children through the difficult time.

Most of the peace activists who descended by the hundreds on Baghdad this fall and winter have fled. Those who remain have no intentions of leaving. They are anchored to the bull’s-eye despite the fact – or maybe because of it – that the World Health Organization predicts 1,00,000 Iraqis could die.

"I’m here because I hear the children cry," Liteky said. "In my mind … I imagine the bombing and the noise and the windows shattering and something coming down from the ceiling and children looking up and parents grabbing them and fear being transferred from parents to children."

Save yourselves

Washington has warned the activists to clear out. The Pentagon has said its assault will leave no place in Baghdad to hide. So the rundown hotels that enjoyed full houses as recently as February are shuttering their windows.

At the Hotel Al-Fanar on the Tigris river, the Iraq Peace Team is moving to the lower floors because the eight-storey building is old and seems unsteady. Its bomb shelter is a musty basement that stores the hotel’s chemical cleaning supplies.

Members of the peace team have signed an ominous-sounding contract: "In the event of your death, you agree to your body not being returned to your own country but being disposed of in the most convenient way."

They have had awkward discussions about what to do with the corpses that might collect around them. Wrap the dead in hotel drapes, they decided. Pray for help.

Iraq Peace Team founder Kathy Kelly had a photo enlarged that shows her with some of her dearest friends — the family of an Iraqi widow and her nine children. The photo is being mailed to Kelly’s mother in Chicago.

"She can see by that photo that I am very, very happy," Kelly said, sounding serenely calm despite the gathering storm.

On Monday, Kelly helped an Iraqi friend pack to leave. Teacher and artist Amal Alwan rushed her three young children into a taxi and paid $300 for the 10-hour drive from Baghdad to Damascus, Syria. Alwan doesn’t have relatives in Syria and couldn’t tell the cabbie exactly where to go.

"She doesn’t have a clue where she will stay, but she can’t possibly stay in Baghdad, not with children," Kelly said. "Her house is next to a communications centre."

As Kelly spoke it was almost 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday in Baghdad and she was awake reading "A Fine Balance," a novel about civil war in India. She planned to rise six hours later for a daily prayer meeting, then go with the peace team to the United Nations offices in Baghdad. They would hold aloft several enlarged photos of Iraqi families.

Each photo would carry a single question: "Doomed?"

"I don’t have the slightest sense of not belonging exactly where I am right now," said Kelly, 50, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. "The thought of leaving has not even crossed my mind."

The Pentagon says the presence of US pacifists will not deter the course of war. Although there are no plans to arrest them for violating sanctions on Iraq by travelling to Baghdad, officials throughout the US government, from the White House to the State Department to the Pentagon, sound confused about how to best to deal with them.

"There’s not a whole lot of precedence," said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Dan Hetlage. "It’s not like you had human shields protecting the Taliban."

Armed for war

Members of the Iraq Peace Team say they are as prepared for war as they will ever be. They have "crash kits" packed neatly and set by their hotel doors. Liteky’s is the size of carry-on luggage. It bulges with bandages, antibiotics, water-purification tablets, three litres of water, dried fruit, canned tuna, biscuits, power bars and a short-wave radio.

He hopes to ride out Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad’s Orphanage of the Sisters of Mother Teresa. Or at least to rush there as soon as the bombing subsides. He’s compelled to at least try to quell the inevitable trembling of the children.

"I’d rather die doing something," he told his wife, Judy, "then die … in some old folks home."

Liteky, 72, is a former Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war hero awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for crawling under volleys of gunfire in 1967 to rescue 23 injured US soldiers.

According to army reports, during the firefight near Phuoc-Lac the wounded became too heavy to carry so Liteky turned onto his back in the mud, pulled the men on top of him and crawled backward under gunfire, using only his heels and elbows.

He’s plenty scared of war, he said, but his fear is for the children.

When the attack comes, he said, "the most beautiful thing that can happen for me is if I am permitted to be at the orphanage. At least I could pick the children up, hold them, and try to let my calm and love transfer to them."

Liteky speaks every morning to his wife, 11 time zones away, in San Francisco. Since arriving in Baghdad three weeks ago, it has become increasingly difficult to hang up the phone. On Tuesday they spoke for 40 minutes, said goodbye twice, and kept talking.

"I don’t have a death wish," he said in an interview Monday. "I have everything to live for. I have a wonderful wife and a wonderful life back home."

Liteky and his wife have thought for a week that the invasion of Iraq would begin sometime between March 10 and 17. So when Judy Liteky, a math teacher at a community college, left for work on Monday, she put a bumper sticker on her car.

"Attack Iraq? No!," it read.

"The bumper sticker made me feel just a little bit better," she said

Kelly heard late Monday that the United Nations would evacuate most of its remaining office staff on Tuesday. Still, she sounded steadfast in her decision to stay in Baghdad, even if it meant dying.

"A lot of people are concerned for the foreigners who remain here; you wonder if anyone is concerned for these very ordinary Iraqi people who are going to die here," she said.

When photographer Thorne Anderson chose to travel to Baghdad with Kelly in January to document the people and the war, he informed his family of the trip in an e-mail.

Anderson, who has freelanced for Gannett News Service, Newsweek, The New York Times and other publications, said he expected a little preaching, lots of concern, and some pleas to reconsider.

Instead, his father, the Rev. Eade Anderson of Montreat, N.C., was succinct in his reply.

"I’ve always said life shouldn’t be wasted on the small things," he wrote in an e-mail. "Love, Dad."

( March 12, 2003, Gannett News Service, http://www.commondreams.org/

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 3

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"The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments." – Thich Nhat Hanh

I am in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team, and we
will stay here throughout any war. We will share the risks of the millions who live here, and do our best to be a voice for them to the world. Our risks are uncertain. Thousands here will surely die. But most Iraqis will survive, and so too, I hope, will I.

A banner the government put up a few blocks from where we stay reads simply, "Baghdad: Where the World Comes for Peace."

It’s meant as propaganda, I’m sure, flattering Saddam Hussein. But without knowing it, it states a simple truth: that the world must be present for peace. We must be present in Baghdad as in America – in Kashmir or Chechnya, the Great Lakes, Palestine and Colombia – where there is war, and rumours of war, we must be present to build peace.

We are present. My country may arrest me as a traitor, or kill me during saturation bombing, or shoot me during an invasion. The Iraqis may arrest me as a spy, or cause or use my death for propaganda. Civil unrest and mob violence may claim me. I may be maimed. I may be killed.

I am nervous. I am scared. I am hopeful. I am joyous, and I joyously delight in the wonder that is my life. I love being alive. I love the splendor of our world, the beauty of our bodies, and the miracle of our minds. I bless the world for making me, and I bless the world for taking me. I feed myself on the fellowship we inspirit, in standing one with another in this, this present moment, each moment unfolding to its own best time.

Different things move different members of our team, but all of us are here out of deep concern for the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Iraq. Twenty years of almost constant war, and 12 years of brutal sanctions, have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq. We are here, today, because most of the world refused to be present, then. What more right do I as an American have to leave than all the people I’ve come to love in Iraq? An accident of birth that gives me a free pass throughout the world?

All of us are here out of a deep commitment to nonviolence. Peace is not an abstract value that we should just quietly express a hope for. It takes work. It takes courage. It takes joy.

Peace takes risks.

War is catastrophe. It is terrorism on a truly, massive scale. It is the physical, political and spiritual devastation of entire peoples. War is the imposition of such massive, deadly violence so as to force the political solutions of one nation upon another. War is the antithesis of democracy and freedom. War is the most bloody, undemocratic, and violently repressive of all human institutions.

War is catastrophe. Why choose catastrophe?

Even the threat of war is devastating. On March 11, when we visited a maternity hospital run by the Dominican sisters here in Baghdad, we found that eight new mothers that day had demanded to have their babies by Caesarian section — they didn’t want to give birth during the war. Six others spontaneously aborted the same day. Is this spirit of liberation?

Don’t ask me where I find the courage to be present in Iraq on the eve of war. Five million people call Baghdad home. Twenty-four million human beings live in Iraq. Instead, ask the politicians — on every side — where they find the nerve to put so many human beings at such terrible risk.

We’re here for these people, as we’re here for the American people. The violence George Bush starts in Iraq will not stop in Iraq. The senseless brutality of this war signals future crimes of still greater inhumanity. If we risk nothing to prevent this, it will happen. If we would have peace, we must work as hard, and risk as much, as the warmakers do for destruction.

Pacifism isn’t passive. It’s a radical challenge to all aspects of worldly power. Non-violence can prevent catastrophe. Nonviolence multiplies opportunities a thousand-fold, until seemingly insignificant events converge to tumble the tyranny of fears that violence plants within our hearts. Where violence denies freedom, destroys community, restricts choices — we must be present: cultivating our love, our active love, for our entire family of humanity.

We are daily visiting with families here in Iraq. We are daily visiting hospitals here in Iraq, and doing arts and crafts with the children. We are visiting elementary schools and high schools. We are fostering community. We are furthering connections. We are creating space for peace.

We are not "human shields." We are not here simply in opposition to war. We are a dynamic, living presence — our own small affirmation of the joy of being alive. Slowly stumbling, joyous and triumphant, full of all the doubts and failings all people hold in common – our presence here is a thundering, gentle call, to Americans as to Iraqis, of the affirmation of life.

We must not concede war to the killers. War is not liberation. It is not peace. War is devastation and death.

Thuraya, a brilliant, young girl whom I’ve come to love, recently wrote in her diary:

"We don’t know what is going to happen. We might die, and maybe we are living our last days in life. I hope that everyone who reads my diary remembers me and knows that there was an Iraqi girl who had many dreams in her life…"

Dream with us of a world where we do not let violence rule our lives. Work with us for a world where violence does not rule our lives. Peace is not an abstract concept. We are a concrete, tangible reality. We the peoples of our common world, through the relationships we build with each other, and the risks we take for one another — we are peace.

Our team here doesn’t know what is going to happen any more than does Thuraya. We too may die. But in her name, in this moment, at the intersection of all our lives, we send you this simple message: We are peace, and we are present. n

(Ramzi Kysia is an Arab American peace activist and writer. He is currently in Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team (www.iraqpeaceteam.org), a project to keep international peaceworkers to Iraq prior to, during, and after any future US attack, in order to be a voice for the Iraqi people. The Iraq Peace Team can be reached through info@vitw.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 4

The post This present moment appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Why I had to leave the cabinet

ROBIN COOK

March 19, 2003

I have resigned from the cabinet because I believe that a fundamental principle of Labour’s foreign policy has been violated. If we believe in an international community based on binding rules and institutions, we cannot simply set them aside when they produce results that are inconvenient to us.

I cannot defend a war with neither international agreement nor domestic support. I applaud the determined efforts of the prime minister and foreign secretary to secure a second resolution. Now that those attempts have ended in failure, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

In recent days, France has been at the receiving end of the most vitriolic criticism. However, it is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany is opposed to us. Russia is opposed to us. Indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum majority to carry a second resolution. We delude ourselves about the degree of international hostility to military action if we imagine that it is all the fault of President Chirac.

The harsh reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading member. Not NATO. Not the EU. And now not the Security Council.

To end up in such diplomatic isolation is a serious reverse. Only a year ago we and the US were part of a coalition against terrorism which was wider and more diverse than I would previously have thought possible. History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

Britain is not a superpower. Our interests are best protected, not by unilateral action, but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules. Yet, tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened. The European Union is divided. The Security Council is in stalemate. Those are heavy casualties of war without a single shot yet being fired.

The threshold for war should always be high. None of us can predict the death toll of civilians in the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq. But the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at the very least in the thousands. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate invasion. And some claim his forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the basis that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a serious threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of that term — namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against strategic city targets. It probably does still have biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions. But it has had them since the Eighties when the US sold Saddam the anthrax agents and the then British government built his chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years and which we helped to create? And why is it necessary to resort to war this week while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is frustrated by the presence of UN inspectors?

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to disarm, and our patience is exhausted. Yet, it is over 30 years since Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply. What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops to action in Iraq.

I believe the prevailing mood of the British public is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator. But they are not persuaded he is a clear and present danger to Britain. They want the inspections to be given a chance. And they are suspicious that they are being pushed hurriedly into conflict by a US administration with an agenda of its own. Above all, they are uneasy at Britain taking part in a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies. It has been a favourite theme of commentators that the House of Commons has lost its central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for Parliament to stop the commitment of British troops to a war that has neither international authority nor domestic support.

(The Guardian, UK)
(The writer is a former British foreign secretary and till March 17 was the leader 
of the House of Commons)

Anti-war official rocks Australian govt.

BOB BURTON

March 12, 2003

CANBERRA:The Australian government has been stunned by the resignation of one of its senior intelligence analysts who argues that, based on US and other intelligence information he has seen, there is currently no justification for a war on Iraq.

"I’m convinced a war against Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to the US, or to the UK or Australia, or to any other country, at this point in time," former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie said, announcing his resignation late on Wednesday evening.

"I just don’t believe that a war at this time would be worth the risk,’’ he said.

A critical factor behind Wilkie’s resignation was claims made by US secretary of state Colin Powell to the UN Security Council purporting that a link exists between Al Qaeda and Iraq. "As far as I’m aware there was no hard evidence and there is still no hard evidence that there is any active co-operation between Iraq and Al Qaeda,’’ Wilkie told Australia Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) television.

Three years ago, Wilkie, a 41-year-old career military officer, was seconded to the Office of National Assessments, which prepares briefings for the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from a wide range of intelligence sources.

Wilkie has worked on global terrorism and transnational issues including Afghanistan and the likely humanitarian consequences of a war on Iraq.

Wilkie describes his resignation as the "biggest decision I think I’ve ever made in my life’’ but felt compelled to act by what he thought is the prospect of a high risk of humanitarian crisis from any US-led attack on Iraq.

"I don’t believe I could stand by any longer and take no action as this coalition marches to war. I think the interests of the thousands of people, perhaps tens or even more, tens of thousands of people or even more who could be injured, displaced or killed in a war, I think their interests are more important,’’ he said.

The director general of the Office of National Assessments, Kim Jones, sought to downplay the significance of Wilkie’s resignation. "The officer concerned was a member of our transnational issues branch. He normally worked on illegal immigration issues. The transnational issues branch does not deal with issues related to Iraq,’’ Jones said, reading from a statement.

Speaking to journalists in Jakarta late Wednesday evening, minister of foreign affairs Alexander Downer, also sought to dismiss Wilkie’s resignation. "Mr Wilkie has come to the view that he doesn’t support the Australian government’s policy, and I think in those circumstances he’s done the honourable thing and resigned.’’

As one of the few ex-military officers that work at the Office of National Assessments, Wilkie was identified as one of the people who would work in the national intelligence watch office if a war in Iraq eventuated. In preparation for that role he had access to all intelligence information flowing into the agency on the topic.

Only hours before Wilkie’s resignation, Prime Minister John Howard sought to justify Australia’s support for the US war on Iraq on the basis of countering groups like Al Qaeda.

"To me, the ultimate nightmare of the modern world is that chemical and biological weapons will get into the hands of terrorists, and believe me, they will use them. They will not care about the cost (of what) they do to the countries against, or the peoples against which they are used,’’ Howard said in Sydney.

Wilkie believes that a war on Iraq may well turn out to be counter-productive. "In fact, a war is the exact course of action most likely to cause Saddam to do exactly what we’re trying to prevent. I believe it’s the course of action that is most likely to cause him to lash out recklessly, to use weapons of mass destruction and to possibly play a terrorism card,’’ he said.

Wilkie hopes that his actions will force Howard to rethink its unquestioning support for a unilateral strike against Iraq. "If my action today and over the next couple of days, can make the Australian government rethink its position, and maybe take a more sensible approach to developing its policy on Iraq, I think it’s been worthwhile,’’ he said.

In the wake of mass rallies in mid-February in which well over half a million citizens publicly demonstrated against the war, Wilkie’s resignation has demonstrated the depth of concern amongst the normally conservative ranks of the intelligence and foreign affairs establishment.

Former Office of National Assessments analyst and now the head of the Global Terrorism Center at Monash University, David Wright Neville, believes there is great concern about Howard’s policy in intelligence and military circles.

’’Speaking to former colleagues, former contacts both in the Office of National Assessments and other elements of the intelligence community, (there) are widespread concerns that are similar to Andrew’s about the direction in which the government is taking us,’’ he said.

With opposition to Australia’s deployment of 2,000 personnel to the Middle East growing, opposition political parties and the peace movement sense that Howard is now becoming electorally very vulnerable.

An opinion poll commissioned by the public relations company that works for the Labour Party and released on Wednesday revealed that 59 per cent of Australians oppose a unilateral attack on Iraq. However, a UN-endorsed attack was supported by 64 per cent of the 1,000 people surveyed.

According to opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, Wilkie’s resignation ‘’torpedoes the credibility’’ of Howard. (Courtesy: IPS)

Second US diplomat resigns

March 10, 2003

A veteran US diplomat resigned today in protest over US policy toward Iraq, becoming the second career foreign service officer to do so in the past month.

John Brown, who joined the State Department in 1981, said he resigned because he could not support Washington’s Iraq policy, which he said was fomenting a massive rise in anti-US sentiment around the world.

In a resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Brown said he agreed with J Brady Kiesling, a diplomat at the US embassy in Athens who quit in February over President George W Bush’s apparent intent on fighting Iraq.

"I am joining my colleague John Brady Kiesling in submitting my resignation from the Foreign Service — effective immediately — because I cannot in good conscience support President Bush’s war plans against Iraq," he said.

"Throughout the globe the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force," Brown said in the letter, a copy of which he sent to AFP.

"The president’s disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century," he said.

"I joined the Foreign Service because I love our country," Brown said. "Respectfully, Mr Secretary, I am now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the same reason that I embraced it."

Two senior State Department officials confirmed that Powell had received the letter from Brown, who had served at the US embassies in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow before being assigned to be a diplomat-in-residence at Georgetown University in Washington. n

(Wire Services) (http://www.unitedforpeace.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 11

The post Cracks within appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The consequences could be catastrophic in Iraq and around the world. The United States may reap a whirlwind of terrorist retaliation – and step up the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and company are committed to an "imperial ambition," as G. John Ikenberry wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs – "a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor" and in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer."

That ambition surely includes much expanded control over Persian Gulf resources and military bases to impose a preferred form of order in the region.

Even before the administration began beating the war drums against Iraq, there were plenty of warnings that US adventurism would lead to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as terror, for deterrence or revenge.

Right now, Washington is teaching the world a dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.

There is good reason to believe that the war with Iraq is intended, in part, to demonstrate what lies ahead when the empire decides to strike a blow — though "war" is hardly the proper term, given the gross mismatch of forces.

A flood of propaganda warns that if we do not stop Saddam Hussein today he will destroy us tomorrow.

Last October, when Congress granted the president the authority to go to war, it was "to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

But no country in Iraq’s neighbourhood seems overly concerned about Saddam, much as they may hate the murderous tyrant.

Perhaps that is because the neighbours know that Iraq’s people are at the edge of survival. Iraq has become one of the weakest states in the region. As a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences points out, Iraq’s economy and military expenditures are ‘a fraction of some of its neighbours’.

Indeed, in recent years, countries nearby have sought to reintegrate Iraq into the region, including Iran and Kuwait, both invaded by Iraq.

Saddam benefited from US support through the war with Iran and beyond, up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait. Those responsible are largely back at the helm in Washington today.

President Ronald Reagan and the previous Bush administration provided aid to Saddam, along with the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, back when he was far more dangerous than he is now, and had already committed his worst crimes, like murdering thousands of Kurds with poison gas.

An end to Saddam’s rule would lift a horrible burden from the people of Iraq. There is good reason to believe that he would suffer the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu and other vicious tyrants if Iraqi society were not devastated by harsh sanctions that force the population to rely on Saddam for survival while strengthening him and his clique.

Saddam remains a terrible threat to those within his reach. Today, his reach does not extend beyond his own domains, though it is likely that US aggression could inspire a new generation of terrorists bent on revenge, and might induce Iraq to carry out terrorist actions suspected to be already in place.

Right now Saddam has every reason to keep under tight control any chemical and biological weapons that Iraq may have. He wouldn’t provide such weapons to the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who represent a terrible threat to Saddam himself.

And administration hawks understand that, except as a last resort if attacked, Iraq is highly unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction that it has — and risk instant incineration.

Under attack, however, Iraqi society would collapse, including the controls over the weapons of mass destruction. These could be "privatised," as international security specialist Daniel Benjamin warns, and offered to the huge "market for unconventional weapons, where they will have no trouble finding buyers." That really is "a nightmare scenario," he says.

As for the fate of the people of Iraq in war, no one can predict with any confidence: not the CIA, not Rumsfeld, not those who claim to be experts on Iraq, no one.

But international relief agencies are preparing for the worst.

Studies by respected medical organisations estimate that the death toll could rise to the hundreds of thousands. Confidential UN documents warn that a war could trigger a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale" — including the possibility that 30 per cent of Iraqi children could die from malnutrition.

Today the administration doesn’t seem to be heeding the international relief agency warnings about an attack’s horrendous aftermath.

The potential disasters are among the many reasons why decent human beings do not contemplate the threat or use of violence, whether in personal life or international affairs, unless reasons have been offered that have overwhelming force. And surely nothing remotely like that justification has come forward.

(Courtesy International Tribune; March 17, 2003)(Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the bestseller "9-11." He wrote this article for the New York Times Syndicate).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 13

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For much of the world, it was the indescribable savagery of seeing jet-loads of innocent human beings piloted into buildings filled with other innocent human beings. It was the sheer horror of watching people jump from the 80th floor of the collapsing World Trade Centre rather than be consumed by the inferno inside. Yes, it is true that many Muslims also saw it exactly this way, and felt the searing agony no less sharply. The heads of state of Muslim countries, Saddam Hussein excepted, condemned the attacks. Leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, Britain, Europe, and Australia have made impassioned denunciations and pleaded for the need to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and extremists.
 

But the pretence that reality goes no further must be abandoned because this merely obfuscates facts and slows down the search for solutions. One would like to dismiss televised images showing Palestinian expressions of joy as unrepresentative, reflective only of the crass political immaturity of a handful. But this may be wishful thinking.
 

Similarly, Pakistan Television, operating under strict control of the government, is attempting to portray a nation united in condemnation of the attack. Here too, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learn from students at my university here in Islamabad, from conversations with people in the streets, and from the Urdu press. A friend tells me that crowds gathered around public TV sets at Islamabad airport had cheered as the WTC came crashing down. It makes one feel sick from inside.
 

A bizarre new world awaits us, where old rules of social and political behaviour have broken down and new ones are yet to be defined. Catapulted into a situation of darkness and horror by the extraordinary force of events, as rational human beings we must urgently formulate a response that is moral, and not based upon considerations of power and practicality. This requires beginning with a clearly defined moral supposition — the fundamental equality of all human beings. It also requires that we must proceed according to a definite sequence of steps, the order of which is not interchangeable.
 

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it, and without regard for the national identity of the victims or the perpetrators. The demented, suicidal, fury of the attackers led to heinous acts of indiscriminate and wholesale murder that have changed the world for the worse. A moral position must begin with unequivocal condemnation, the absence of which could eliminate even the language by which people can communicate.
 

Analysis comes second, but it is just as essential. No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found. Therefore, surely the attackers, and their supporters, who were all presumably born normal, were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that?

Before all else, Black Tuesday’s mass murder must be condemned in the harshest possible terms without qualification or condition, without seeking causes or reasons that may even remotely be used to justify it.

Tragically, CNN and the US media have so far made little attempt to understand this affliction. The cost for this omission, if it is to stay this way, cannot be anything but terrible. What we have seen is probably the first of similar tragedies that may come to define the 21st century as the century of terror. There is much claptrap about "fighting terrorism" and billions are likely to be poured into surveillance, fortifications, and emergency plans, not to mention the ridiculous idea of missile defence systems.
 

But, as a handful of suicide bombers armed with no more than knives and box–cutters have shown with such devastating effectiveness, all this means precisely nothing. Modern nations are far too vulnerable to be protected — a suitcase nuclear device could flatten not just a building or two, but all of Manhattan. Therefore, the simple logic of survival says that the chances of survival are best if one goes to the roots of terror.
 

Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere. Instead, their breeding grounds are in refugee camps and in other rubbish dumps of humanity, abandoned by civilization and left to rot. A global superpower, indifferent to their plight, and manifestly on the side of their tormentors, has bred boundless hatred for its policies. In supreme arrogance, indifferent to world opinion, the US openly sanctions daily dispossession and torture of the Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces. The deafening silence over the massacres in Qana, Sabra, and Shatila refugee camps, and the video-gamed slaughter by the Pentagon of 70,000 people in Iraq, has brought out the worst that humans are capable of. In the words of Robert Fisk, "those who claim to represent a crushed, humiliated population struck back with the wickedness and awesome cruelty of a doomed people".
 

It is stupid and cruel to derive satisfaction from such revenge, or from the indisputable fact that Osama and his kind are the blowback of the CIA’s misadventures in Afghanistan. Instead, the real question is: where do we, the inhabitants of this planet, go from here? What is the lesson to be learnt from the still smouldering ruins of the World Trade Centre?
 

If the lesson is that America needs to assert its military might, then the future will be as grim as can be. Indeed, secretary Colin Powell has promised "more than a single reprisal raid". But against whom? And to what end? No one doubts that it is ridiculously easy for the US to unleash carnage. But the bodies of a few thousand dead Afghans will not bring peace, or reduce by one bit the chances of a still worse terrorist attack.
 

This is not an argument for inaction: Osama and his gang, as well as other such gangs, if they can be found, must be brought to justice. But indiscriminate slaughter can do nothing except add fuel to existing hatreds. Today, the US is the victim but the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan will cause it to squander the huge swell of sympathy in its favour the world over. Instead, it will create nothing but revulsion and promote never–ending tit–for–tat killings.
 

Ultimately, the security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those that it has grievously harmed. As a great country, possessing an admirable constitution that protects the life and liberty of its citizens, it must extend its definition of humanity to cover all peoples of the world. It must respect international treaties such as those on greenhouse gases and biological weapons, stop trying to force a new Cold War by pushing through NMD, pay its UN dues, and cease the aggrandizement of wealth in the name of globalisation.
 

But it is not only the US that needs to learn new modes of behaviour. There are important lessons for Muslims too, particularly those living in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last year I heard the arch–conservative head of Pakistan’s Jamaat–i–Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, begin his lecture before an American audience in Washington with high praise for a "pluralist society where I can wear the clothes I like, pray at a mosque, and preach my religion". Certainly, such freedoms do not exist for religious minorities in Pakistan, or in most Muslim countries.
 

One hopes that the misplaced anger against innocent Muslims dissipates soon and such freedoms are not curtailed significantly. Nevertheless, there is a serious question as to whether this pluralism can persist forever, and if it does not, whose responsibility it will be. The problem is that immigrant Muslim communities have, by and large, chosen isolation over integration. In the long run this is a fundamentally unhealthy situation because it creates suspicion and friction, and makes living together ever so much harder. It also raises serious ethical questions about drawing upon the resources of what is perceived to be another society, for which one has hostile feelings.
 

This is not an argument for doing away with one’s Muslim identity. But, without closer interaction with the mainstream, pluralism will be threatened. Above all, survival of the community depends upon strongly emphasizing the difference between extremists and ordinary Muslims, and on purging from within jihadist elements committed to violence. Any member of the Muslim community who thinks that ordinary people in the US are fair game because of bad US government policies has no business being there.
 

To echo George W. Bush, "let there be no mistake". But here the mistake will be to let the heart rule the head in the aftermath of utter horror, to bomb a helpless Afghan people into an even earlier period of the Stone Age, or to take similar actions that originate from the spine. Instead, in deference to a billion years of patient evolution, we need to hand over charge to the cerebellum. Else, survival of this particular species is far from guaranteed.

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 1

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