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Peace activists are flocking to Iraq to put their bodies in the way of American bombs, with no training for what they'll face in a war zone. Are they heroes or dupes?
Feb 21, 2003 | On Sunday, Feb. 16, two red double-decker buses full of self-described human shields rolled into Iraq after a cross-continent journey that began in London, disgorging 75 Westerners who have sworn to put their bodies between American bombs and Iraqi civilians. As the Europeans, Australians, Canadians and Americans stepped off the bus, they were greeted by an adoring Iraqi throng chanting the praises of Saddam Hussein. An Iraqi group called the Friendship, Peace and Solidarity Organization helped the volunteers find accommodation and offered tours of potential bombing sites where the shields might station themselves.
The volunteers were organized by a British group formed in January called Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action, which has already sent 50 more people to Iraq to join the first 75. According to Ben Granby, a 27-year-old activist from Madison, Wis., who has been living in Baghdad for the last month, other European shield groups are also pouring into Baghdad -- as of Wednesday, he said, there were about 300 would-be shields in the country. Many others are on the way. Truth Justice Peace Action, or TJP, has a delegation of about 140 gathering in Amman, Jordan, on Friday to take the 10-hour bus journey across the desert to the Iraqi capital. Saddam Hussein's government is thrilled to have them -- the country has granted TJP group visas to bring volunteers into the country, and Iraq's ambassador gave flowers to the first caravan as they rolled through Ankara, Turkey.
The volunteer shields are part of a movement firing the imaginations of activists worldwide who are frustrated with mere marching against the war. They're willing, they say, to die for Iraq. Even as American troops mass in the Persian Gulf and news programs contemplate vicious ground battles, the would-be shields seem intoxicated with the idea that they can stop not just this war, but all war. "It's become fashionable," Granby says.
Among the shields are people in their 20s and people in their 70s. Some are committed pacifists, others are anti-globalization activists or champions of Third World liberation movements. A few, alarmingly, seem not to have thought much about politics at all -- their decision to face down American bombs came upon them like a religious revelation. Most have no medical training or combat experience. None have an exit strategy.
The shields are a loose, fairly anarchic confederation, but if they can be said to have a leader, it's Ken Nichols O'Keefe. It was less than two months ago that O'Keefe, an American who also goes by the name Kenneth Roy Nichols, founded TJP. O'Keefe is a handsome, gaunt, 33-year-old ex-Marine with a dark goatee, burning hazel eyes, "Expatriot" tattooed on his right fist and a teardrop tattooed under one eye. While serving in the first Gulf War, he says he was exposed to depleted uranium that he believes may someday kill him. When he left the military a year later, he immersed himself in the literature of dissent, emerging as a furious opponent of the United States, a country his Web site calls the "#1 Terrorist on the Planet with the political goal of total global domination." In December 1997, his wife had a miscarriage, which he attributes to uranium poisoning. In July of 2002, while living in Holland, he served notice at the United States Consulate in Amsterdam that he was renouncing his United States citizenship; the action garnered press coverage in both Europe and the Middle East.
O'Keefe, who was traveling and couldn't be reached for comment, has developed a kind of cult following, one that's expanded exponentially with his human shield movement. "The thing has snowballed," says 27-year-old Torben Franck, a volunteer at the TJP office in London who describes himself as O'Keefe's spokesman. "There's been a huge, overwhelming response from all over the world." Past peace movements have taken years to spawn messianic offshoots. This time, it happened in months.
It's no surprise that the Iraqi government would want the shields there. Shortly before the first Gulf War, Saddam's regime kidnapped hundreds of foreigners and forcibly used them as human shields around factories and military installations, finally releasing them after four months under intense international pressure. Though the voluntary human shields say they're only going to protect civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure, an Iraqi ambassador has said they'll be put at "vital and strategic installations," just like their hostage predecessors.
The American government, for its part, insists it's just as much of a crime for Iraq to use volunteer shields and captured ones. At a Wednesday press briefing, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the volunteers converging on Baghdad and said, "If death or serious injury to a noncombatant resulted from these efforts, the individuals responsible for deploying any innocent civilians as human shields could be guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions."
But it's not just American officials who are critical of the shield movement. Some peace activists are starting to question the wisdom of recruiting untrained volunteers to the frontlines of a looming war, without preparing them for what they may face. "You're taking a large group of people to a war zone," says one early TJP organizer, Lawrence Rockwood, who has since disassociated himself from the group. "The more I worked with them, they didn't seem interested in how things are going to work on the ground." And even those reluctant to criticize the shield volunteers admit they're worried about what will happen to the inexperienced altruists when the bombs start falling.
"It's a big fear, I'll admit it," says Ben Granby, who works with the antiwar group Voices in the Wilderness, which takes a far more rigorous approach to selecting and training the volunteers it bases in Iraq. "I'm very skeptical that they'll actually maintain cohesion." He worries that the shields might become a burden to more experienced volunteers. "It only takes one person to bring down everything," Granby says.
The most scathing critics of TJP and the human-shield volunteers, though, are those who spent time as involuntary human shields during the last Gulf War. "There are no words to describe how naive these people are in my eyes," says Paul Eliopoulos, an American whose hellish four months as a hostage in Iraq have left him plagued with panic attacks, nightmares and depression. "It's ridiculous to think they're anything but pawns in a game that's bigger than anything they can imagine."
