THE IRAQ PEACE TEAM
by Ramzi
Kysia
You get what you pay for in life.
What are you willing to pay for peace?
With George Bush as president, it doesn't
seem to be a problem any of us will ever have to face again, but you can't be a
pacifist only in peacetime. You can't be a pacifist by yelling at your tv set,
or forwarding a million emails to everyone you know. Pacifism isn't that
passive, it isn't that easy. It is, and always has been, by definition, a
radical challenge to every element of worldly power and
violence.
I'm in Iraq with a handful of
other Americans: Eric Edgin, an Indiana college student; Nathan Mauger, a
journalism graduate from Washington State; Farah Mokhtareizadeh, a Pennsylvania
college student; Jon Rice, a history teacher from Chicago; Henry Williamson, a
paramedic from South Carolina; and Joe Quandt, a writer from New York. More are
joining us. By the end of October, we'll have over 30 people on our team. By
December, our numbers will be over 100. We're here to tell the stories of the
Iraqi people; to put our lives on the line to stop this
war.
Living in Baghdad, you wouldn't
know there was a war. The streets bustle with people on their way to work or
school. In the evenings the parks are full of kids playing soccer, people
visiting with family and friends. There are no tanks in the streets, no soldiers
marching, no civil defense drills, and--other than foreigners like us--no one
here seems to be stocking up on food or water. Is it denial? Disbelief? Some
inner despair? I honestly don't
know.
It's painful that Baghdad is so
beautiful. There's a unique and striking blend of traditional and modern
architecture. I love the city's parks, it's wide, tree-lined boulevards--each
avenue sprouting date palms and poplars. This is truly a green city. I told a
cab driver that Baghdad was a beautiful city. He just looked hard at me. "No,"
he said, "Baghdad is not beautiful. Baghdad is
tired."
We hear it over and over
again--just below the surface--a melody of melancholy, resignation, and fear.
People quietly complain, "What more can America do to us?" We visit a high
school, and the kids want to make absolutely sure we really understand that
they're not natural-born killers or terrorists. A teacher lets us know that his
8-year-old asks him every day if today's the day he's going to
die.
Ask an Iraqi about "liberation,"
and they'll laugh at you. It's bitter mirth. If the U.S. doesn't bomb the
civilian infrastructure again, and if the government falls fast, and if the army
doesn't break-up along ethnic and religious lines--then only a few thousand
innocent people will be killed when George Bush starts his war. But if Bush
bombs the water and power systems like his dad did in '91--tens of thousands
will die from the resulting epidemics. If the army falls apart, there could be a
civil war that makes past conflicts in Lebanon or Bosnia look like schoolyard
brawls. And if food aid distributed by the Iraqi government under the
Oil-for-Food program is disrupted for more than a few weeks, UNICEF is warning
there will be country-wide famine.
When
will Americans wake up to the fact that we are not the only real people on this
planet; that our security cannot depend on the insecurity of everyone
else?
George Bush seems to be living
out some comic book fantasy, never sure of whether he's really the President, or
just Alfred E. Neumann doing a poor impersonation. Donald Rumsfeld angrily
denounces Iraq for having an "insatiable appetite" for weapons. This from a man
whose budget for war is over 50 times the size of Iraq's entire economy. And
Colin Powell criticizes the UN for forging an agreement to return weapons
inspectors--4 days after Bush demanded that the UN do it or become
"irrelevant."
Have we failed to notice
that the inmates are now running the
asylum?
Some accuse us of being "fools"
or "apologists" for the Iraqi government. We don't often have the opportunity to
speak with officials here, but when we do we always raise concerns about
prisons, extrajudicial killings, and state-directed
violence.
That isn't to toot our own
horn. Our status as Americans gives us this luxury, in a way that Iraqis do not
have for themselves. That's uncomfortable and troubling, and if it strikes some
as hypocritical for us to be here as pacifists, I can understand that. But it
strikes me as much more hypocritical to speak out against a foreign government
for killing innocents--while facilitating the killing of countless more by our
own government through our silence and our tax dollars. We apologize for no one
but ourselves.
According to Human
Rights Watch, Iraq has roughly 3,000 extrajudicial killings a year. According to
UNICEF, U.S. policy kills over 50,000 Iraqi children every year. Both are
terrible. They aren't equivalent.
My
government may not care, they may be intent on war no matter what--but I refuse
to be "irrelevant." I'm here. I choose to believe that if Americans knew what
was being done in our names, we wouldn't allow it. The alternative is
madness.
It's disgusting that millions
of people being threatened with massive destruction isn't "news," and Americans
joining them is. But if the only way to get anyone to pay attention is to be in
Baghdad when the bombs fall, so be it. We're
here.
Our hotel isn't fancy, but at
least it isn't close to anything "strategic." Our risks are the same as the
other 5 million people in Baghdad, the other 24 million people in Iraq. As our
team's numbers grow, we'll turn the hotel into our own hostel--living 5 or 6 to
a room.
We're volunteering with NGOs
already working in Iraq, and we're doing regular writing and journaling. Some of
that writing will be carried in alternate media and small-town papers, and, even
after the U.S. destroys the electricity and phone lines, we'll get reports out
through the local press center on a satellite phone. We won't let folks back
home forget the human consequences of what they do here. Milan Kundera once
wrote, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting." We're here to be part of that
struggle.
Mohammed Ghani Hekmat is
perhaps the most prominent artist in Iraq, and one of the kindest men I've ever
met. His sculptures decorate the country. He's proud to be the first Muslim
artist ever commissioned by the Vatican. In 1991, he was working on a series of
life-size reliefs of the Stations of the Cross, when the Gulf War happened. The
windows in his studio were blown out by the explosions. We asked him what he
thought of the American people, and his voice filled with anger: "They're
innocent," he accused, "Innocent! Like
children."
We're here because we know
we're not innocent. Being here is our part in the war against terrorism:
humanizing Iraqis in the eyes of Americans, humanizing Americans in the eyes of
Iraqis--taking direct responsibility for what's done in our
names.
Our government, our country--our
people--have killed hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq since 1990.
We're about to compound that atrocity with another war that, if it goes badly,
will likely kill hundreds of thousands
more.
In 1945, when the Allies
liberated the death camps, the entire Western world was absolutely shocked. We
asked, "how could this have happened? How could the German people have allowed
this? Where were the 'good'
Germans?"
Today, I know where the good
Americans are: they're in Iraq, and they're organizing in the streets of
America--laying their entire lives on the line to prevent the mass destruction
of human life.
We get what we pay for
in this life. I don't want to die. I am scared for my life. But this storm is
fast upon on us. This is the moment when we all must ask--what are we willing to
risk for peace?
Ramzi Kysia is a
Muslim-American peace activist, working with the Education for Peace in Iraq
Center <http://www.epic-usa.org/> . He is co-coordinator of the Voices in
the Wilderness <http://www.vitw.org/> ' Iraq Peace Team
(www.iraqpeaceteam.org <http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org/> ), a group of
American peaceworkers pledged to stay in Iraq before, during, and after any
future U.S. attack. The Iraq Peace Team can be reached at
ivoices@uruklink.net
Posted: Fri - November 1, 2002 at 06:54 PM