A year in a maximum security prison for nonviolent protest was a stepping stone in Kathy Kelly’s lifelong quest for peace.
The two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee shared with 25 students and Evanston residents Tuesday night accounts of her trips to Iraq to counter U.S. sanctions. Kelly spent a year in prison for planting corn on a nuclear missile silo site near Kansas City, Mo.
Kelly co-founded Voices in the Wilderness, an organization pushing for an end to economic sanctions in Iraq. She told stories of starving children in the streets, civilians slaughtered by bombings, and a nation plagued by the regime of Saddam Hussein and the policies of the United States.
“How can we learn to live together without killing each other?” Kelly asked. She went on to describe the sanction-related turmoil she has observed in Iraq during her 13 trips there since 1996. Kelly also visited Haiti for three months in 1994, where she protested U.S. sanctions, and went to Bosnia in December 1992 to protest the bombings there.
The United States found it convenient to have Saddam Hussein in power because it encouraged neighboring Middle Eastern states to buy weapons from the United States, Kelly said.
“Our top crop is weapons,” she said. “If a country can engage in a shooting war and a bombing war, then it can engage in an economic war.”
Carl Schoby, an Evanston resident who protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s, said Kelly’s message is an important step toward peace.
“It shows what’s being done,” said Schoby, 52. “They’re trying to starve a country into submission. It isn’t Hussein who’s suffering.”
Kelly’s anecdotes described the horrors of the U.S. bombings since the end of the Gulf War. Kelly told a story of a mother forced to leave her son killed by an explosion to race her other injured son to the hospital.
McCormick freshman Thor Gudmundsson, who lived in Turkey from 1991 to 1994, said he could relate to Kelly’s accounts.
“I remember seeing the U.S. planes fly from Turkey to patrol the no-fly zones in northern Iraq,” he said.
Sanctions must be lifted, all weapons sales to the Middle East must end and private investment must be encouraged to move forward, Kelly said.
She suggested the government cut 1 percent of the military budget and use the $3 billion to create a think tank that would provide alternate solutions.
The event, sponsored by Amnesty International, the Arab Cultural Society and the Peace Project, is part of Amnesty International’s quarter-long focus on violence in Iraq and Colombia.
“She spoke on campus last year, but we thought the issue was vitally important, especially in terms of the (Bush) administration,” said Education junior Claire O’Connor, NU Amnesty International president.
