BAGHDAD -- Cliff Kindy figures he knows how to force the Bush administration to think twice about attacking or invading Iraq.
"You get about 500 grandmas and grandpas from around the world and you scatter them around Iraq and dare the U.S. to bomb them," he said. "That would give them a collective moral authority."
It may seem outlandish, but if Kindy's proposal has any legitimacy it is because
the Iraqi government welcomes American pacifists like him in the capital these
days.
As U.S. war threats mount, Kindy is part of a band of anti-war demonstrators from North America with longtime protest experience who are hunkering down for the long term.
The Iraqi hierarchy, seeking the world's sympathies, is embracing them as potential human shields and, at the very least, as tools for a perceived embarrassment for the American leadership.
Kindy, an organic farmer from Indiana who once stood up to Colombian rebels, already is giving his idea about grandparents a test run.
Kindy is leading the first 10-day delegation to Iraq of about a dozen senior
citizens from the United States and Canada organized by Christian
Peacemakers, an American group promoting anti-war efforts throughout the world.
The group includes an elderly nun who once swam, carrying a sledgehammer, out to a U.S. Trident submarine in Connecticut and who in another incident chained herself to Israeli tanks in the Palestinian territories.
Their ranks stretch half a world away to Chicago.
"It seems like a unique opportunity to try and sway world opinion," said Quinn Brisben, 68, a former high school history teacher from Chicago's South Side with decades of civil rights activism behind him.
Brisben, who was the Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. presidency in 1992--he finished 15th--arrived Monday after a 12-hour bus ride from Jordan with others who paid $2,000 each for the trip from North America.
They came not to publicly protest the brutal regime of Hussein, his tyrannical human-rights policies or his quashing of dissent among his people. Such displays are forbidden in Iraq.
Instead their public appearances center largely on President Bush, who warns Iraq to cooperate with chemical weapons inspections. They decry, too, the international economic sanctions imposed by the West against Iraq.
"Our solidarity is with the Iraqi people," said Kindy, 53. "They are the ones suffering."
The activists' visit is coordinated by Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based group that since 1996 has worked to end the sanctions, which have been in place since 1991.
Sanctions have lost strength in the last several years largely because of smuggling encouraged by Hussein and increased foreign-aid money from permissible Iraqi oil sales.
Rare privileges extended
In recent weeks, with war looming, Voices has broadened its mission to form
an "Iraqi Peace Team"
made up mostly of volunteers in their 20s who hope to live in Iraq for months
at a time. They are granted visas and extensions not normally afforded to foreigners,
even visiting journalists.
"I kind of like the idea of having people here with the experience and wisdom to be on the front lines," said Kathy Kelly, a former Chicago English teacher who founded the Voices group and has visited Iraq 16 times in the last decade.
Until most foreign reporters were asked by the Iraqi authorities to leave this week, Kelly arrived daily at the press center trying to drum up interest from mainly disinterested reporters.
At one demonstration last weekend, Kelly and three others held up anti-Bush banners outside the United Nations office on a busy roadway where passing Iraqis paid them no mind.
The Western media outnumbered the protesters by at least 3-1, and at one point reporters got into a pointed exchange with Kelly over Voices' seeming cooperation with the edicts of the Hussein regime.
Kelly, 49, insists that she makes known her displeasure with Hussein's policies in private with Iraqi ministers. Her target, she said, is mostly the leadership of her country and not Hussein's rule.
"I am an American and my responsibility lies to ask my government the tough questions," said Kelly.
On tours of orphanages, hospitals, and government ministries, Iraqi officials often meet Kelly with hugs and warm embraces. She is on a first-name basis with influential people in government posts and sometimes can gain entry into doors closed tight to Westerners.
This week, Kelly took the generic delegation on a tour of Baghdad, into meetings with high-ranking Iraqis and to stand on the streets outside foreign embassies.
Brisben, who took copious notes, doesn't see himself being used as a pawn by the Iraqis. He came of his own will and with strong anti-invasion sentiments, he said.
Chicago activist to return
Even though he is hobbled by frail health and walks with a cane, Brisben figures that he will be back on the South Side before U.S. bombs fall in Iraq.
"I'm not really brave man and I am nowhere adequate as human shield," said Brisben, who a few years back was a featured character in a book about faith and death by author Studs Terkel.
"I don't want to die," said Brisben, whose wife of 47 years, Andrea, is recovering in a Chicago hospital after dual knee-replacement surgery.
"Anyway I don't think Mr. Bush will bomb me until after Election Day next week in the U.S.," he said.
"By then, I think we will have shown a firmness of the faith here in Iraq
and [Bush] will certainly have to back down," Brisben said.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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