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CounterPunch
October
16, 2002
THE IRAQ PEACE
TEAM
Good Americans
in Baghdad
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 recent
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
comicbook 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 . He is co-coordinator of the
Voices in the Wilderness'
Iraq Peace Team (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
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