Kathy Kelly, director of the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, is an outstanding worker for peace in the tradition of Dorothy Day. Her activism on the part of folks from Haiti, Iraq, and Uptown, Chicago is rooted in a love for Christ.

Congratulations on just being nominated with Denis Halliday for the Nobel Peace Prize. Was that pretty well a shock?

Actually, I feel great respect for the American Friends Service Committee. They have shown great concern for the people of Iraq by sending delegations, sponsoring very thorough reports, arranging speaking tours, and giving lots of donations. Right now the Friends have a really good school curriculum that they circulate, and they have done collections of first aid kits and things for newborn babes. When they first mentioned nominating us, I said, "Look, hang on, why don't we think about it." I actually was quite surprised when it turned out they'd gone ahead and nominated Denis and I.

How did you become involved?

I was part of the peace team on the border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq during the Gulf War; it was my introduction, really, to the Middle East. I went there as a convinced pacifist, wanting to express a vigorous opposition to the war. I was at the border for the first fourteen days of the air war and then we evacuated to Baghdad, and after four days we were evacuated to Jordan. I stayed there for six months. When I came home to the United States, I was pretty well ready to turn the page and start a new chapter that didn't involve Iraq.

By 1995 I realized the war that we were willing to risk our lives over in 1991 hadn't ever ended. It had changed into a kind of war that is more devastating, more brutal than even bombardment: that is, the economic state of siege. So in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi and nonviolence as we have tried to understand it in the past, we thought we could at least create a drama of confrontation with the laws that upheld the U.N. sanctions. And really once we thought of doing that, it all became pretty simple; how do you nonviolently resist the sanctions and break them? We proceeded to figure out to how we could go over with medical relief supplies and medicines. Then January 15, at a press conference with a letter to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, we announced our intent to travel to Iraq as often as we could, in open violation of the economic sanctions, calling for an end to them.

By January 22 we had a letter from the Treasury Department saying that if we persisted with the plan, we would risk twelve years in prison, a one million dollar fine, and a $250,000 administration fine. We thanked the government for the clarity of their warning and assured them we felt we couldn't be bound by cruel and pitiless laws, that we wanted to be governed by a law of love and invited them to join us. At the time that was all we had heard from them, but that was the beginning of our thirty-two delegations that have traveled to Iraq. I have had a chance to go twelve times since 1996.

How much medicine and supplies did you take to Iraq?

A drop in the ocean. Really, we feel almost embarrassed with the paucity of what we bring in terms of relief. It's symbolic, actually. We see other groups and feel respectable, but even the combined efforts of all the nongovernmental organizations to do humanitarian relief in Iraq are not actually that impressive.

How did your upbringing affect your vision of things?

The neighborhood where I grew up had some severe problems, especially racism. I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago; I remember once two friends from South Africa came to visit me when I was older and said, "This isn't that different from apartheid." And it's still the case. There is a dividing line on the southwest side of Chicago, and I grew up on the white side of that line. But I was lucky, I think, to have had certain people as teachers; I went to an experimental school half the day, a private Catholic school, and half the day to a public school. Our Catholic teachers really helped us to expect that if you were going to study the Gospels and the Old Testament, you had to try to apply some of that teaching to your life.

Well, this isn't to say I did that. During the Vietnam War I never got involved in any political activism. I might have been someone who wanted to be good-hearted, but I sure didn't want to be an activist. I studied for a degree in theology, a masters program, and wrote papers on the cry of the poor. And suddenly I just couldn't escape it anymore. So I finally found my way up to a soup kitchen and a house of hospitality in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. It just came easy after that. It was such a relief to feel as though efforts to put your life and body in alignment with how you act were reachable. It wasn't any big deal, it began to feel normal.

Now some people can talk themselves into fearful ways of thinking and feeling, sure that everybody that's different from them is someone who is a threat or an enemy. But there is a completely different way to view it, a more whole way to view our neighbors even when they are different from us. I'm so, so grateful for that ten-year stretch of living in the Uptown neighborhood and learning not to be afraid of my neighbors.

I understand you spent time in jail due to your activism.

I spent a year in maximum-security prison, and my so-called crime was planting corn on a nuclear missile site. Prison was one of the most educational years of my life. I don't in any way want to make light of the prison system; I think it is one of the most stupid and cruel systems feasible. But as far as meeting these "bad sisters" everyone thought I would run into in prison, I don't know where they were keeping them. The only sisters I met there could have been my coworkers, my next-door neighbors, my in-laws. They were people whose lives had gone awry, many of them because of poverty and lack of education. They got into things that they shouldn't have gotten into.

What are some nitty-gritty ways in which people could bring peace into situations of potential violence?

I spent most of my time from 1990 up until my involvement with Voices in the Wilderness participating in various peace team efforts. If you had, for instance in Haiti, one hundred copies of the team I was part of in a small town in the southern finger of Haiti, I think that there could have been a big dent made in the violence being reaped by Haitian people. I was only there for three months but there were others who were there for a longer stay, and the commandant in the town said, "I am ashamed and embarrassed that it was left to the foreigners on the hill to preserve the peace and security of this region." And how did we do that, we foreign women? We had Birkenstock shoes, spiral notepads, pens, and sleeping bags. Every morning we woke up and walked as far as we could and took notes from anyone who wanted to tell us fears, anxieties, abuses that they were nervous about or that had actually happened. As it turned out, the militia folks who did live there in that area and had been threatening their neighbors didn't want to be on our list.

Every week we would use a ham radio to get those messages back to the United States, and from there send it via e-mail across the entire network of Christian Peacemaker team people, people who are ready to act on these reports. It's significant to me that the funding for that team was almost nil. And though the Haitians did welcome the U.S. military when it came, our way would have worked if there had been enough of us to make a larger difference.

I've seen groups make mistakes. I've been a part of making a bunch of those mistakes. I can arrange them topically, geographically, chronologically, so I, you learn from that. But I would say, for instance, the Christian Peacemaker teams, coming from these traditional peace churches (the Quakers, the Brothers, the Mennonite) in their experimentation with teams in Haiti, Mexico, Washington, D.C., and a number of the Native American Indian tribes, learned a great deal about how to form a team of people who can in a small way make a difference. I think that the tradition of pacifism needs to comprehend the potential of going into situations of deterioration and hostility, going in massively, going in before the deterioration is so great that people are ready to kill and torture and punish the ones who at one point have been their neighbors. Where will the resources ever become available to help create the teams of people who can accomplish this massive intervention? Could we cut just 1 percent of our military budget and put it directly into creating teams of people ready to go into situations of conflict to bring peace?

Where would a good training ground for someone wanting to learn peacekeeping be?

Well, I think one of the best training houses would be one of these houses of hospitality where people have generally learned how to resolve conflicts without carrying bullets. You learn how to be spontaneous and flexible and deal with situations that you can't always have control over. You learn how to build a team that will work together cooperatively and try to support and nurture and care for one another. You can do it right in the backyard of your own city and still have contacts with other people who can be mentors or give you a mirror for what's going on.

I think you can always find a way to change or win people over, and that conversion might create a lot of goodness and balance in the future. For instance, a New York police officer was on duty when we were fasting across from the U.S. Mission to the U.N. We were on about day twelve and were planning to fast for twenty days. There were twelve of us in this tiny little area we were allowed to occupy, with our coolers and our signs and our banners and our other stuff. Anytime someone stepped over the line in the cement, we knew that there was a good possibility that one of the police would come over and reprimand us. So this guy came over, he was a large African American policeman who was just sweating bullets. He didn't look very happy. I thought, "Oh brother, he's coming to tell us that somebody stepped over the line. Doesn't he have anything better to do?" And he comes up to me and says, "Now I don't want to make a big deal out of this, and I'm not going to say too much. But all I've had to drink all day today was a glass of ice tea, 'cause I figured that if you guys can do this for twenty days, I could do it for at least one of them and work with you."

Another time, when I'd gotten in trouble for planting that corn on the nuclear weapons site, I had a soldier standing with a gun to my head while I was kneeling handcuffed in the field. I'm sure his rules were not to talk to me, but I finally asked him, "Do you think the corn we planted here will grow?" He replied, "I don't know, ma'am, but I sure hope so." So I said, "Would you like to say a prayer?" After he said, "Yes," I prayed the St. Francis peace prayer and we both prayed the Our Father together, which he ended with a very strong Amen. Then he asked me, "Ma'am, would you like a drink of water?" and you know he had that gun to my head.

I just remember him saying, "Ma'am, would you tip your head back?" I don't know why I didn't turn around to look and see what was happening, but I can only guess he had to put that gun down to unscrew the canteen's cap. And he poured a drink of water into my mouth. That soldier touched me so much; the whole point of nonviolence is to reach out to the people we don't think agree with us, needing to persuade them. It was a wonderful example that he set of taking a risk in order to perform an act of kindness to a total stranger.

Have the churches become aware of how detrimental to the citizens of Iraq the sanctions are?

Nearly every denomination has come out with a statement calling for the lifting of the sanctions. We are embracing the teaching of loving your enemies, loving your neighbors, and hearing Jesus' message: "Let the little children come to me" [Mark 10:14]. Jesus beckoned the kids to come unto Him and said unless you become like a little child, you can never be ahead in the kingdom of God. Well, that was saying that you have to become like one who is very vulnerable, who is at risk. I feel positive that if preachers were to see the condition of the children of Iraq under the sanctions, they would bring them front and center in their communities and say, "Enough is enough. We cannot participate in child slaughter any longer, we can't hold these children hostage, we can't punish these children." I don't think these sanctions would stand the light of day.

  As we go to print, Richard Butler (former director of the U.N. weapons inspection team, UNSCOM) has added his voice to the chorus of U.N. officials publicly criticizing the sanctions. Butler was in charge of the weapons inspection drama in 1998 that touched off the Desert Fox bombardment. This increasing dissent is a ray of hope for the people of Iraq. Kathy will be leaving later this month for Basra, where she will join a group living among the people and subsisting only on the meager Iraqi food basket. Look for Kathy’s essay, “Raising Voices,” in the new South End Press book, Iraq Under Siege.

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 29, Issue 119 (2000), p. 29
© 2000 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.