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Kathy Kelly’s Song of Peace
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Maureen Smith
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One February evening, my friend Valerie and I went out in the rain and sleet to hear peace activist Kathy Kelly speak. Kelly has traveled to Iraq 26 times. She intentionally returned to be with the people of Baghdad before the bombing began a year ago and has returned to Iraq twice since occupation.
Kelly is an amazing woman. After her latest trip to Iraq, she went to Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest against the School of the Americas and crossed the line in an act of civil disobedience. She will soon be going to federal prison for three or four months. Her sister, trying to cheer up their mother with typical Irish humor, said, “Kathy’s safer when she’s locked up.”
Kathy Kelly describes herself as “an ordinary Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a Chicago suburb.” She’s a small woman, somewhere in her 50s, extremely smart, articulate, and strong. I was impressed by her kindness, sweet spirit, and radiant inner peace. She is passionate without being the tiniest bit strident.
Kelly began her speech by telling her experience of being arrested in Georgia. She was treated in a brutal and dehumanizing way in a five-on-one assault. They hogtied her, had her lying face down on the floor, and all of them were kneeling on her and crushing her under them. Only when she cried out that she’d had four lung collapses did they relent.
She said she isn’t a whiner (and she isn’t)—she believes that you “don’t do the crime if you won’t do the time”—but she told us her experience for one reason: If military people are trained to react in such an aggressive way against a U.S. citizen weighing 105 pounds and representing no physical threat to them at all, imagine what must be happening in Iraq. After all, they hogtied Kelly even though there has never been a violent incident in all the years of protests at Fort Benning, and despite the presence of witnesses—three of them priests.
Kelly told us a story from Iraq: A group of U.S. soldiers broke down the doors of a house, came in shooting, and shot and killed another group of soldiers coming in another door. The inhabitants had run from the house in terror, and the soldiers were so enraged by their own mistake that they went outside and shot and killed these innocent civilians. I asked Valerie if she had heard that story. She said no, we wouldn’t hear something like that. We’re getting worse than no news from Iraq, she said.
Someone asked Kelly how many Iraqi civilians have been killed. She didn’t give a number but recommended the Web site www.iraqbodycount.net. As far as I can tell, it gives a total number—8,581 minimum, 10,430 maximum—of reported civilian deaths (as of March 18, 2004). Then the site gives details of as many deaths as it can.
I was especially interested in Kelly’s answer to the question of why the U.S. invaded Iraq. She linked it to September 11, 2001, but not in the way we usually hear. Of the 19 hijacker-terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks, she said, 16 were from Saudi Arabia, none had ever been in Afghanistan, none were members of Al Qaeda, and only three were even connected in any way to Al Qaeda. But the U.S. couldn’t bomb Saudi Arabia, so our government bombed Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean the Administration forgot about Saudi Arabia, she said. They decided then and there that the U.S. needed a new client state and picked Iraq. Already they have built four huge military bases in Iraq as part of that plan. Once Iraq is securely established as a U.S. client state, it will be “Goodbye, Saudi Arabia.”
What does Kelly think should be done in Iraq, now that we’re there? She said the overriding criterion should be: What’s best for the people of Iraq? We have brought so much destruction on them that we are morally obligated to rebuild. They do desperately want security, so we cannot just pull out without arranging for someone—some neutral force—to replace us. Her recommendation (but we all know the chances of this happening) is that the U.S. go to the United Nations and say, “We made a colossal mistake. Please help.”
Now I want to tell the story that really touched me and broke my heart. Before the bombing of Baghdad, Kathy Kelly had made friends with the students, teachers, and musicians at the Baghdad School of Music and Folk Ballet, a beautifully equipped school. After talking with one boy who drew a picture of a plane flying into a tall tower and said, “Allah wanted it to happen so that the American people would learn what it feels like to suffer,” she tried to figure out how to respond.
Kelly knew that one song was played at the memorial services for at least 150 of those who died on September 11, 2001: “This Is My Song.” She decided to teach it to the Iraqi children in this school. Someone translated it into Arabic, and the children loved it. They learned it and sang it for her, and someone recorded it.
Then, after the bombing and the fall of Baghdad, when friends were happy simply to discover each other alive, two musicians from the school sought Kelly out. They told her the heartbreaking story of the looting and total destruction of the school. They told her that the Baghdad School of Music and Folk Ballet was no more and only one item had been saved. It was the tape of the children singing “This Is My Song.”
Tears were streaming down my cheeks as Kelly closed her speech by singing that song in Arabic, then translating it (words by Lloyd Stone, to the tune of “Finlandia”):
This is my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is,
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine. |
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Cost of WAR
The media rarely reports civilian casualties of the war on Iraq.
For information on these deaths, click here.
As of March 18, 2004, iraqbodycount.net estimated civilian deaths between 8,581 and 10,430.
For a running account of the money used to fund the war on Iraq, click here. The site also allows you to compare this cost to the cost of various domestic social programs.
Word Up
As of March 18, 2004, costofwar.com estimated the cost of the war near $107 billion.
“. . . It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
—Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in A Certain Terror: Heterosexism, Militarism, Violence & Change. Richard Cleaver and Patricia Myers, eds. Chicago: Great Lakes Region American Friends Service Committee, 1993, p. 377.
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© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete April 2004 Index - click here
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