And A Time For Peace

Kathy Kelly Puts Herself In Harm's Way To Oppose War

In March 2003, while most of us observed the United States military’s devastating “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq on television, Kathy Kelly was in Baghdad, experiencing the bombing firsthand. She had gone to Iraq — and not for the first time — to show her support for the suffering Iraqi people. Her most recent book, Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison (CounterPunch, AK Press), was written mainly in small hotels in Iraq and Jordan and in U.S. prisons and jails, where Kelly served time for civil disobedience. She writes that she felt sadness and anger about the bombing, “but also a familiar sense of determination not to let the bombs have the last word.”

Kelly’s parents met in London in 1944, when that city was under bombardment by the Nazis. Her Irish American father, Frank Kelly, was a U.S. serviceman and former member of the Christian Brothers religious order. Her mother, Catherine, had been born an indentured servant in Ireland and later worked in a children’s hospital in England. Kathy was born in 1952, one of six children. Her family home was small, and as a teenager she slept on the living-room couch. The Kellys lived on the southwest side of Chicago, where racial tensions ran high. Kathy attended classes each day at both a private Catholic school and a nearby public school, as part of a “shared time” program. The halls of the public school were sometimes guarded by police with dogs, and it was common for fights to break out between black and white students.

It was at Catholic Saint Paul High School that Kelly discovered the writings of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated nonviolence and encouraged fellow Christians to live according to their beliefs, even at great personal risk. Kelly became determined never to be a passive bystander to injustice and violence.

Kelly received a BA from Loyola University in Chicago and a master’s degree in religious education from the Chicago Theological Seminary. During her graduate studies, she became dissatisfied with just writing about poverty and moved to a poor Chicago neighborhood where the Catholic Worker Movement sponsored a soup kitchen and shelter. In 1982 she married activist Karl Meyer, who challenged her to take part in protests against draft registration.

Kelly decided to devote herself full time to peacemaking after a 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where she met the victims of the U.S.–supported Contra rebels. She went on to visit Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and later Bosnia and Haiti, participating in antiwar actions in each country. Kelly has also been a war-tax resister for twenty-three years.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the United Nations, under pressure from the U.S., imposed on Iraq the most comprehensive economic sanctions in modern history. Eight years later a UNICEF report estimated that half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the sanctions. In 1995 Kelly and a group of other activists formed Voices in the Wilderness (VITW.org), which openly broke the sanctions by delivering aid to the Iraqi people. Since then Voices in the Wilderness has organized seventy trips to Iraq to bring medical relief supplies, and Kelly has been to Iraq twenty-seven times.

Nonviolent civil disobedience has landed Kelly in jail on many occasions. In one instance she was arrested for planting corn on top of a nuclear-missile silo and served nine months in a maximum-security prison. In November 2003 Kelly was arrested during a protest at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas), in Fort Benning, Georgia. The institute has been accused of training South American military and law-enforcement personnel in techniques of terror and torture. Kelly, along with twenty-seven other activists, was arrested for trespassing and spent three months in Pekin Federal Prison Camp, where prisoners earn $1.15 an hour or less making armored plates for U.S. military vehicles.

Kelly teaches in Chicago-area community colleges and high schools, and she continues her patient and resolute opposition to violence. When she traveled to Baghdad before the start of the current war with Iraq, she ended up extending compassion not only to Iraqis terrified by the bombing, but also to U.S. soldiers. As the marines arrived in the Iraqi capital to begin the military occupation that is now more than two years old, she and other members of the Iraq Peace Team offered the tired and thirsty soldiers water and fresh dates and listened to their stories of crossing the desert and of the violence they’d experienced.

In Other Lands Have Dreams, Kelly writes, “One of the greatest gifts in life is to find a few beliefs that you can declare with passion and then to have the freedom to act on them. For me, those beliefs are quite simple: that nonviolence and pacifism can change the world, that the poor should be society’s highest priority, that people should love their enemies, and that actions should follow conviction, regardless of inconvenience.”

The first time I talked to Kathy Kelly was in 2003, at the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California. She had just returned from Iraq and seemed simultaneously filled with relief to have survived the massive bombardment of Baghdad and stricken with regret over having left behind the friends she had made there. We met again in May 2005 at a private home near Salinas, California. Her eyes shone with a fierce compassion as she described holding dying Iraqi children in her arms, encountering U.S. soldiers as they invaded Iraq, and going to jail for committing nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.

Malkin: You’ve written, “Where you stand determines what you see.” When you were standing in Baghdad during the “shock and awe” bombing campaign, what did you see?

Kelly: We were about a hundred yards from a presidential palace that had been built for one of Saddam Hussein’s sons. So what we heard was intense and terrifying bombardment. Morning, noon, and night, U.S. planes were bombing not only that palace, but some government buildings close by. Thankfully nothing else around us was hit. Following the bombing, just when we had started to exhale a bit, came the looting, and then the occupation. It was a very dramatic and intense time. Every day that one survived felt like a precious gift.

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