Scenes from an anti-war rally
March 19, 2003
Tuesday, March 11, 2003. Noontime sun swells over the university quad. Campus sighs with spring. Spirits are high.
And today, below a bliss-blue sky, I’m working hard to suspend my disbelief. Those aren’t crudely shaped cardboard cutouts, stapled to stakes and driven into the grass. Those are headstones.
Oh, and those stuffed, gleaming black garbage bags strewn haphazardly across the middle of the lawn? Those are kids’ body bags.
That’s not just a loosely gathered cluster of students murmuring and muttering over lunch, either. Please. Don’t insult me.
That’s an anti-war rally. They’re just running a little late.
They are part of today’s conspicuous “Displaced by War” exhibit, a stylized approximation of the type of Iraqi refugee camp that would result from a U.S.-led attack against Saddam Hussein. They encircle tables at the fringe of the grass, overseeing stacks of fliers weighed down against the breeze.
A passerby looks up from a flier at a young man standing behind the table. He glances around, hardly official, before the woman speaks to him.
“Is there supposed to be a rally here today?”
“Yeah,” he says, “but the people from ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) just went to get some food.”
He faces away from the woman, groaning: “I don’t know. I’m so out of it.”
12:15 p.m. Desperate for something to do, I cruise over to read the exhibit’s “headstones.” These aren’t regular “headstones,” however; these are genuine “anti-war rally headstones,” each inscribed with some statistic or figure intended to illustrate Iraqi suffering since 1991’s Gulf War.
“Iraq has been bombed for the past 20 years,” says CSUS junior Basma Marmosh. “It’s not like it’s something new. But now that it’s a full-fledged war, there are going to be more people made orphans, more people made widows, more people suffering. The conditions are horrific, and by going to war with these people, the outcome is going to be even more devastating.”
Marmosh refers me to a list of 69 U.N. Security Council resolutions currently being violated by Israel. I ask if it would be OK to go into Iraq if we enforced the resolutions in Israel.
“We are focusing on one nation,” Marmosh says, “and leaving the whole other country that is capable of doing more destruction. Israel is one of the other countries that is known to have nuclear weapons.”
I guess that means the rally is starting now.
12:25 p.m. Some fragmented chanting begins around the information tables while local activist Margo Schulter talks at me. And I mean AT me, like a jazz musician who just learned circular breathing.
And to my disadvantage, I try to listen circularly. It doesn’t work so well.
“It’s sort of a natural attraction between two senses of manifest destiny…”
“…No war for oil… No war for oil…”
“…For all the horrible things Saddam has done, (Iraq) is a place where women’s rights in the Arab world are relatively respected…””…Hey hey, ho ho, this racist war has got to go…”
“I would say you can have selective sanctions which are directed specifically at limiting arms sales and military development while providing the people with decent conditions…”
Dream on. After the Gulf War, the U.N. repeatedly proposed a program in which the West would supply humanitarian aid to Iraq in exchange for oil.
But according to David Cortright in the December 2001 issue of “The Nation,” Saddam “flatly rejected the proposal as a violation of sovereignty.” Iraq relented five years later when the U.N. entitled Baghdad to control aid distribution in the country’s ravaged southern reaches. Cortright adds that Iraq’s “oil revenues during the last six months of 2000 reached nearly $10 billion,” and U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan reported in 2001 that “responsibility for the sectoral allocations in the distribution plans remains with the Government of Iraq.”
“…No justice… no peace…”
12:40 p.m. The demonstrators total 30. An anonymous protester makes the most powerful statement of the day:”Are we gonna fight the rich man’s war? I’m hella tired of this crap!”
Stirring, eh? 1:00 p.m. The rally winds down, but not before one particularly distasteful speaker bemoans a “war for world domination by someone even worse than Hitler,” and not before a rousing chant of “Hey, Bush, what do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”
On the walkway in front of the quad, the demonstrators have set up a sign showing a girl who is said to have lost her arm during a U.S. bombing raid in Iraq. The caption asks, “Are you willing to kill this girl to get Saddam Hussein?”
Marmosh knows the sign is provocative. Does she know, however, that it’s also exploitative and misleading?
“If you’re looking at it,” Marmosh explains, “and you say it’s misleading or if you say it’s too much, the way I look at it is as realistic, and it’s not enough. We have to show more.”This child will either be orphaned or killed.”
The information on display today supports Marmosh’s theory, but it leaves out one critical factor: Saddam Hussein. In Annan’s 2001 report, he writes that under the oil-for-food program, “the Government of Iraq is indeed in a position to address the nutritional and health concerns of the Iraqi people, particularly, the nutritional status of the children.” And nowhere among the data on display in the quad is the UNICEF study that shows the death rate of children ages 5 and under climbing 19 percent in the years Saddam refused U.N. aid.
But the dissidents today will tell us that now isn’t the time or place to hold Saddam accountable. The bottom line is that the U.S. is responsible–each time, every time. If kids are dying, the U.S. either killed them or didn’t do enough to help them. If Saddam misappropriates $10 billion of U.N. humanitarian aid, it only follows that U.S. sanctions alone are to blame for malnourished Iraqis. If Saddam stalls and deceives U.N. weapons inspectors, then the U.S. should target Israel.
If I could suspend my disbelief, it all might make sense. But those headstones are still crude cutouts, those body bags are still garbage bags and this rally betrays the truth that nothing about the U.S. and Iraq can be this black and white.
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