Perspective On the further invention of
nonviolence
By TOM ROBERTS
Kathy Kelly of Chicago just returned
home from her summer trip.
It was a six-week getaway to sunny Basra in the South of Iraq.
This vacation package featured 100-plus temperatures for six
weeks, electrical outages for 14 hours a day, no air conditioning, no ceiling
fans, only occasional phone service and constant water shortages. The nearly
daily sorties by low-flying U.S. and British war planes that rattled all the
houses in the neighborhood, reminders of the bombs that dropped back in January
1999 just a few houses from where she was staying, kept boredom at bay.
Kelly arrived in mid-July with Lisa Gizzi of St. Paul, Minn.; Mark
McGuire of Winona, Minn., and Tom Jackson and Lauren Cannon, both of Dover,
N.H. A sixth member, Ken Hannaford-Ricard of Worcester, Mass., stayed for two
weeks. The group stayed in the al-Jumhouriya neighborhood, described in one
Associated Press story as a labyrinth of mostly one-story crumbling brick
houses bisected by open sewage and dotted with dumps of uncollected
garbage.
Kelly returned Sept. 6 to the United States, and her work at
Voices in the Wilderness, a group that has opposed the U.S. sanctions against
Iraq since 1995. The work has become her life (NCR May 21, 1999).
The summer trip was the latest and longest of many visits she has
made to Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, when she and others camped out on the
border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq in a wild, crazy act of nonviolence. It is
difficult to get heard over the roar of the war machine.
But ever so gradually her voice has been magnified. Almost monthly
for several years Voices has organized delegations that travel to
Iraq to see the results of the sanctions, to hear firsthand the sorrow in a
country where as many as 5,000 children a month under the age of 5 die because
of the sanctions. Hundreds of people have headed off on the unlikely journey to
this war-ravaged country. The day she got back from her latest trip she was on
the phone with a TV reporter from Brazil who was trying to hook up with a
delegation. Little by little the word goes out from the returning delegations:
The war in Iraq has not ended.
Somewhere in the early light of human existence folks began to
experiment with violence. Since then, the race has spent a staggering amount of
will and imagination, not to mention money and resources, on war making. Kelly
and others like her insist on standing in defiance of all of that history. They
experiment with the mad notion of nonviolence.
So what does a summer in one of the poorer neighborhoods in Basra
yield for the nonviolence effort?
In a phone interview Kelly kept talking about the details of daily
living. The meager rations of the U.N. food basket augmented by a few homegrown
eggplants and tomatoes. Nothing works anymore in Iraq -- not water systems or
the garbage trucks that used to make daily rounds -- because spare parts and
new machinery are forbidden under the sanctions.
But mostly it was hot. Theres just not much you can
do because youre so hot, she said. You cant pick
up a pen and paper because within minutes the paper would be soaked. You
cant phone out because the phones wont work. You cant read
late at night because there is no light. People just become weary. Very, very
weary.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the target of the sanctions, is
almost nonexistent in the daily equation. He isnt suffering. And
organizing for social change is not high on the list for people struggling to
survive.
Despite the heat and poverty, Kelly and the others managed to do a
lot. They studied Arabic with the families who hosted them. They looked into
the eyes of the women and men who survive the sanctions and heard their wonder:
Why are people in the United States angry with us. What have we
done?
They marveled at people who daily face insoluble problems and
intense needs with civility and dignity. They watched the children,
wildly happy, creative and unspoiled children. Through the
children, they began to understand how deeply the people of these poor
neighborhoods draw upon their Islamic faith and centuries of cultural customs
to work through desperate times.
And thats what the movement, the effort for nonviolence, her
lifes work at the moment, yields -- something utterly, almost
ridiculously human. No summits, no conferences, no dignitaries. Just the sweat
of a grimy street in Iraq and a look into the eyes of the enemy. It
is the antithesis of war, which rips up the daily routine and grinds life under
with the machinery of the utterly inhumane.
Kelly, 47, a former high school English teacher, says with a quiet
contentment that this is her life. Theres nothing Id rather
be doing in my work or my personal life than trying to be part of the further
invention of nonviolence. In the time when I happened to be born into this
world theres a level of violence that could annihilate the whole world. I
want to be part of the tradition that chips away at this propensity for
violence. The window for me has been what Ive learned from the people of
Iraq.
The larger call, particularly from the gospel message,
she said, is to bring about the practice of forgiveness, of loving
enemies and of a clear and determined refusal to kill.
Tom Roberts is NCR editor. His e-mail address is
troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, September 15,
2000
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