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December
31, 2001
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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December
31, 2001
The Most Precious Gift
By Kathy Kelly
It is ironic that my most treasured Christmas
moments have come in a largely Muslim country.
It is December 1998 and after an intense
and illegal bombing campaign at the very beginning of Ramadan,
we have spent a week with children in Baghdad learning to sing
"We Shall Overcome" in Arabic. The sweet voices of
those children sustain me to this day.
It is December 1999, and in a particularly
run-down area of Basra, a little boy pulls a milk crate by a
frayed rope. Inside the crate, bundled in a muddied, ragged blanket,
an obviously malnourished baby gazes calmly at me, undisturbed
by the flies that surround him. This is a nativity under siege.
That child's innocent, suffering gaze, drives me to this day.
Each Sunday in the Christian season of
Advent, church goers anticipate arrival of the innocent one,
born into impossible poverty, who will bring forth justice for
the poor, liberty for captives, sight for the blind. "O
come, O come, Emmanuel" is sung in churches worldwide. I
hear the tune now and feel haunted.
A modern-day Herod, deadly, vengeful
and reckless, pursues the children of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands
of innocent people have already been slaughtered in 11 long years
of the most devastating siege in modern history. Instead of confronting
the failures of this policy, the US seems to be gearing up to
compound them with the greatest failure of all: war.
In hospitals, schools, mosques, churches
and homes, people here ask us why the American people want to
punish them even more. For 11 years they've been told that sanctions
were a more "peaceful" alternative to open warfare.
Now they're being told that war is the solution to the suffering
caused by sanctions. It would seem that the message from the
US to the Iraqi people is in a twisted way at least consistent;
and that is to please remember that they're being killed with
the very best of intentions.
But the truth is that war is not peace.
We must not allow ourselves to be governed by a cruel and merciless
world order that relies on siege and warfare to accomplish goals
that violate human rights and international law. Around the world,
people of conscience must begin to non-violently resist and challenge
the movement towards intensified warfare with actions commensurate
to the crimes being committed and threatened.
The barriers to peace may seem overwhelming,
yet hope springs forth from the most surprising of places. Hope
lives in the forgiveness shown by Umm Hassan, a young Iraqi mother
I met last year. Moments after her child died for lack of an
antibiotic, she murmured: "I pray this will never happen
to a mother in your country." Hope lives in Amber Amudson,
a young American mother whose husband, Craig, was killed in the
attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Amber helped lead a walk
for peace from Washington DC to New York City earlier this month,
and she wrote to President Bush: "If you choose to respond
to this incomprehensible brutality by perpetuating violence against
other innocent human beings, you may not do so in the name of
justice for my husband.... find the courage to respond to this
incomprehensible tragedy by breaking the cycle of violence."
It is Christmas 2001, and we are in Basra
again, visiting the families we came to love when we lived with
them two summers ago. Then, we tried to understand the effect
of sanctions by learning what it was like to live without electricity
for 14 hours per day in 49-degree heat, to share meals made from
meagre rations, and to be cut off from communication with the
rest of the world. Today, we're cherishing the hope of peace
and pledging to defy the call to war.
Four days ago, we visited Mar Yusuf Church
in Mosul, which was hit by a US bomb in 1991, killing four guests
at the church and severely burning one of the priests. The damage
has long since been repaired, and inside stands the most beautiful
of Christmas trees.
Riad Hamza dresses up as Father Christmas
every year to pass presents out to the children. He made the
tree for them as well - fashioning the ornaments from cigarette
and matchboxes wrapped in brightly coloured paper and ribbons.
He made the tree branches from shredded rice bags dyed a deep
green. "Here in Iraq," Riad told me, "we make
something from nothing - especially the peace." And isn't
that the most precious gift of all?
Kathy Kelly
is director of Voices in the Wilderness,
the first US grassroots organisation to bring activists into
Iraq to witness the effect of sanctions, to violate the sanctions
by bringing medicine and toys into Iraq, and to educate the US
public upon their return.
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