BY AARTI MONTEIRO AND NATALIE ROMAN

Kathy Kelly is a voice in the wilderness. At age 52, she devotes her life to fighting injustice. She, along with the other co-founders of the organization Voices in the Wilderness, has made it her mission to peacefully protest the economic warfare being waged in Iraq by the United States government and to raise public awareness about the issue. She and Voices in the Wilderness have done this through a variety of ways, such as holding fasts, demonstrations, educational speaking tours, and participating in peace teams that travel to Iraq. Kathy Kelly has an amazing passion for the work she's doing. She has been to Iraq about twenty times, has been arrested over forty times in the U.S. alone, and has served two prison sentences. It seems as though nothing can stop Kathy Kelly. We talked to Ms. Kelly about her work with Voices in the Wilderness and being an activist.

GS: What is Voices in the Wilderness? What is your role in the organization?
KK: Voices began in 1996 by a group of people, [including myself], who had been in Iraq before the first Gulf War or shortly after. We were starting to realize that it had turned into an economic warfare. A British medical journal, which had a very good reputation, estimated that the 587,000 innocent children in Iraq under age five who had already died between 1990 and 1995, might have survived had it not been for the conditions created by the economic sanctions. You couldn’t really make a case that it was just directly punishing Saddam Hussein. He wasn’t suffering hunger or disease or even loss of… control. In fact, it was already being argued that maybe these economic sanctions were strengthening his control over the country. Even if there were only 20,000 or 10,000 or 5, you don’t punish one child because of what a government has done. We were people who cared enough to prevent that war by taking time out of busy schedules to travel. If we weren’t going to take some action, who else in the world would we think would?
We mailed a letter to the then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, and we said that we would go to Iraq as often as we could, carrying medicines and other needed supplies for children and families. We understood that this was against the economic sanctions and that we were calling on the government to recognize the injustice of the war. Seven days later, we got a response saying that if we persisted with this, we would risk twelve years in prison, a one million dollar fine, and a $25,000 administrative penalty. We drafted another letter, had eighty signatures, saying to Janet Reno, “Thank you for the clarity of the warning. We understood the penalties when we started this campaign. We won’t pay any penalties. We don’t believe what we’re doing is criminal. We plan to organize these delegations as much as we can, and we invite you to join us.”
March of that year, our first delegation went to Iraq. We were looked upon as very odd and most government officials in Iraq didn’t want anything to do with us. Somehow we did manage to get permission to visit a hospital and bring a bit of medicine. That was one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen in my life, this hospital where the doctor said, “You want to see our pharmacy?” and he pulled out a drawer. Where parents were grieving at bedside after bedside over children; it was impossible to imagine any survival. This was just in Baghdad, just in one neighborhood.
We’re still working very hard, trying to end the occupation. We want to see economic justice for Iraq.

GS: How do you react to criticisms that the United States is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq?
KK: I think the means you use determine the ends you get. We slapped those people with fifteen years of the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history. We pushed people to point of desperation. We turned the thumbscrews just tighter and tighter on a population that had no control over their dictator. Other people in other parts of the world were watching aghast and the people here didn't understand. The means that the United States used were repeatedly violent and cruel means, which hurt and harmed innocent people. In the first Gulf War, 80% of the so-called smart bombs missed their targets they were supposed to hit, a bridge and it falls on a house. There were people who knew that when you wipe out a country's electrical facilities, they can't purify their water and they can't refrigerate food and they can't import food because they can't buy anything. Who is going to get hurt? The children that are malnourished and then get a water-born disease.
The United States wanted to keep Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, crippled externally, strengthened internally because the U.S. Allies, George Bush Sr. [said] "We do not want a Shiite uprising in the south like that in Saudi Arabia or that in Kuwait." And the Turkish allies were saying "...We do not want an uprising in the north that would threaten Saddam and then we've got liberated, autonomous Kurdish people expecting to be in our borders." So knowing the U.S. public would not figure out what was going on, they went on the news as fast as you could say "squash that story." The U.S. just kind of let the whole thing descend with economic sanctions and Saddam's power being around. And now we're supposed to say, "Oh, Saddam Hussein is a big threat to the United States." He wasn't a threat to the United States. He might have become a threat to the U.S.'s ability to dominate Iraq's oil reserves. None of this war-making had to happen. We should have never allowed ourselves to let the war-mongers and the war-makers tell us there was no other way.

GS: Why do you feel nonviolent forms of protest are important?
KK: I think that it’s the most important question in our world today. How can we learn to live together without killing one another? I think we’re at a very critical point in our world today of the possibility that the planet can’t survive another consumption of a great constant. Nonviolence to me is all about simplicity, service, and nonviolent direct action to resist cruelty. When I think of all those people who are at risk and the planet’s survival, I think we’re facing the moral imperative the Germans would have faced as they saw what the consequences of Nazism were going to be. You don’t collaborate with war-making. You don’t whisper it. You don’t make money from it. You don’t pay for it. You find an alternative kind of living that gets a witness. You take serious risks to your convenience, maybe to your health, your longevity, your capacity to get a job. You take those risks in order to nonviolently resist what’s going on that is so fundamentally unjust and cruel.

GS: Do you feel that what you are doing is effective?
KK: Everybody is a drop in the ocean. From my little drop, I know that I’m speaking out with as much energy and effort [that I can]. The effect of this question is a big one because you don’t want to be pissing in the wind. I never want to be dismissive about it. You want to figure out how small groups of people can be true to their beliefs, live in accord with their beliefs and still try to make a difference. If you’re finding that there’s a sense of well-being and energy in the work, in the effort, then I think there’s reason to continue, even though it looks like David and Goliath and Goliath is so huge that David looks like an embryo, practically. I would take that back to the beginnings of the women’s suffrage movement. You have women being thrown in jail, despised by their families, and looked down upon. And then, women have the right to vote. There are times when movements have to be moved. That’s why we’re committed to nonviolence and peacemaking. There are lots of obstacles and lots of misunderstandings and not near the resources that we probably needed. But that’s perhaps true of every movement.

GS: In the face of all of these obstacles, how do you sustain your passion?
KK: I’ve been able to say, “These are the few truths that I know passionately, these truths are who Kathy Kelly is, and I get to put them to practice.” To know a few truths and know them passionately and among those truths for me is the belief that I never want to let inconvenience interfere with or prevent the possibility of acting in accord with what I believe. To believe that we’re all part of one another and equal, and to believe that there is a real plus side to trying to live more simply and share resources. I’d love to be able to keep doing this for a long time. But my life has been so fortunate so far that if this is the last day, I won’t begrudge it.

GS: What inspired you to be an activist?
KK: Where I grew up, it was a very blue-collar working class neighborhood, where literally the [only] professional people we ever saw by and large were nuns. The people we looked up to and admired a whole lot were the nuns. [They] gave no visible sign of doing anything for their personal wealth. I think that made an impact on me, that I could see people doing many good things, seemingly happy people, and they didn’t own anything. One film that really made a big impact on me was a film made by French artists, historians about the holocaust. [It was shot] at the camps and you could see everything. You can see these camps were not that far away from neighborhoods. Sometimes there were train tracks that went through them. [I thought], would I ever sit on the sidelines, be a spectator in the face of this horror?

GS: Do you feel you have encountered any discrimination as an activist, because you are a woman?
KK: I was given extensive hospitality and tolerance in the Arab world. People went out of their way to help me. When I think of how my own life has gone, there is no point that I ever wished I had more power in this world, or more privilege. At this point, I would be saying, the power and privileged people have taken advantage of the entire planet. There’s so much else to think about and work on and try and be in alliance [with]…. I don’t have any time to say, “Oh, he oppressed me.”

GS: Do you ever get criticized by people who are close to you?
KK: I think I’ve disappointed some people who are close to me because it’s very hard for me to sustain a friendship. It requires a lot of tolerance [because] I’m not often around. Now, there are some people that are close to me at work who are critical. I really need to solicit those [criticisms] and listen to them and to try to understand them.

GS: How do you handle the negative criticism?
KK: I’ve got a really thin skin for criticism. It’s something I always have to work harder to adjust to, appreciate what’s being said, listen without having to defend myself or make sure that no one else ever agreed with this criticism. I need always to stop, take a deep breath, and try to come up with a different set of questions and concerns, and not be vulnerable to what I would call the “illness of victories.”

GS: Can you tell us about some of your experiences in Iraq?
KK: Probably the people I most understood and sort of felt connected to were the people I lived with in a poor neighborhood in southern Iraq, in Basra. For the summer of 2000, I was able to spend three months there. Temperatures were 140 degrees. You just got up in the morning and cooked a little food before it got unbearably hot and kept it on the stove for later, we studied Arabic until we were making our papers so wet that the ink was running because we were sweating so much. Then, everybody would try to lie down and sleep for a couple of hours because it was too hot to go outside, and then you could venture out and go and sit with people and listen and enjoy their children and small talk with limited vocabulary. It is the life for many people who are not living in a big metropolis and listening to lots of news or engaged in lots of civic affairs and professions. It's a very simple life.

GS: Do you feel like the Iraqis you’ve worked with have ever felt like charity?
KK: This is where, especially if you're handicapped by not knowing the language, it's a very good idea to not give the impression of not having time to sit down and have a cup of tea. You sit down, drink tea and play with the kids and let them see that you have a cold and your nose is running or that the heat is ready to knock you out or that you're struggling with the language and embarrassed. I think that's a lot for other people to see, that you're a pretty normal person who doesn’t exactly have their act together. People tend to be pretty good judges of character, by and large, and they tend to think, "Oh, here's a person who is easy to warm up to and communicate with, who is sometimes funny and sometimes kind of quirky." What I don't understand is how people kept accepting us and tolerating us. We come from the country that's waging war against them, we might be bringing Iraqi secret service in with us, jeopardizing them and their children, and we're going to leave, and it's going to take us about eight seconds to adjust to being back onto electricity. Yet, when we go back, people accepted us. It was an extraordinary level of hospitality, acceptance. It wasn't pretend friendship. People really liked us and wanted us to stay in touch. But one thing is, when you don't have anything to give away, people don't feel like you're treating them like charity cases. We'd buy duffel bags we'd stuff with bottle of aspirin, antibiotics, Tylenol, which was so needed, children's Tylenol, and children's cough syrup. I don't think anybody felt like a charity case if we said, "Look, we've got two bags. Can you send this through your family network and share it?"

GS: How do you recommend people become more educated? How can we learn more about the issues?
KK: If you spread the peanut butter too thin, the bread rips. It’s okay to have a focus on one issue that really impassions you. If you wait until you’re perfectly educated before you act, you’ll wait a very long time. There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets through. You just can’t wait until you know everything, which means that sometimes people are going to humiliate you or make fun of you because you didn’t know everything.


To learn more about Voices in the Wilderness, please visit their website at http://www.vitw.org