WITNESS: Kathy Kelly is a veteran of world’s battle zones.
By DEBRA McKINNEY
Anchorage Daily News
**Published: October 5, 2006 **
From the sounds of it, about the only time Kathy Kelly can get some rest is when she’s in prison. When she’s not, there are minds to open, wars to stop, a world to save.
She’s been to many battle zones many times. She’s seen things no one should have to see and heard things no one should have to hear.
Like how a little boy named Ali, who’d lost his arms in an explosion, asked from his hospital bed if he’d always be this way. This was before he knew that, except for an aunt, the bomb that hit his home had killed his entire family.
To Kelly, a soft-spoken, 53-year-old, 106-pound woman with long, gray-streaked hair, there’s nothing “collateral” about children maimed and families dying.
“His aunt cried in my arms,” she said from her home in Chicago. “She asked, ‘How do I tell him? What do I say?’
“I don’t think there’s a very clear understanding of just how desperately people are suffering.”
Kelly is co-founder of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign of nonviolent resistance to war, and author of “Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison.” She will arrive in Anchorage this weekend to begin a speaking tour that will take her from Fairbanks to Ketchikan and points between.
Included in her long list of awards and honors are three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In his book “Hope Dies Last,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel devotes a chapter to Kelly. He calls her “The Pilgrim.”
“She has visited more countries, cities and small towns not listed in Baedeker’s guidebooks than anyone I have ever known,” he writes. “Her hosts have been the men, women and children whose homes have been under constant fire. Her pilgrimages have one purpose: to reveal the lives of war’s innocent victims.”
Jane Regan of Anchorage, who is helping organize Kelly’s visit, has heard her speak several times and says she’s “amazing.” Her talks, Regan says, are so personal they’re like hearing her read from her diary.
Autumn Hensel is a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, as Kelly once was, and is doing social work around Anchorage through Covenant House, Bean’s Cafe and others. She heard Kelly speak at her college.
“She witnesses acts around the world so that we might know,” Hensel said. “Somebody needs to go do this, to work with these organizations and to be with these people suffering these atrocities. If not, all we’re going to get is statistics.”
Voices for Creative Nonviolence is the reincarnation of Voices in the Wilderness, which Kelly co-founded in 1996 in hopes of lifting the United Nations and U.S. sanctions imposed against Iraq. Sanctions weren’t punishing Saddam Hussein, the group claimed; sanctions were killing Iraqi civilians, particularly children, through denial of medical supplies and humanitarian aid.
This was during a time Americans were fixated on the death of one child, Kelly pointed out: JonBenet Ramsey.
“Her story is so well known. But what if you said, ‘Did you know 500,000 Iraqi children under age 5 died in the time when economic sanctions were imposed on Iraq?’
“Who knew? Who knew enough to give a ring to their congressman to ask about this?”
Ten years ago, in defiance of the sanctions, she made her first trip to Iraq, where she visited hospitals and talked to doctors. It wasn’t long before people were pulling her into their homes and telling their stories.
She has been back about 30 times since, bringing medicine and other supplies, and was in Baghdad during the “shock and awe” bombardment that launched the current war.
Kelly has worked for peace in other hot spots around the world as well, including Bosnia, Haiti and the West Bank. Most recently, she was in Lebanon during the final days of the Israeli-Hezbollah war.
She can pinpoint the day she became an activist, maybe even the hour. Seeing the Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog,” with footage the Nazis shot inside concentration camps, had a profound effect on her. She vowed never to be a silent bystander while “unspeakable evil” goes on around her.
She was still in high school at the time.
After college, Kelly joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, hoping to work in Nome. But her father became seriously ill, so she stayed close to home and ended up instead in a rough Chicago neighborhood.
Kelly earned a master’s degree in religious education from Chicago Theological Seminary and taught religion at a prep school.
In 1982, she decided never to contribute a single cent to America’s military budget. By keeping her income below a taxable level, she hasn’t paid federal income taxes since.
She doesn’t have much of anything. She wears secondhand clothes and shares a one-bathroom, walk-up second-floor apartment with five other people, all doing activist work. She doesn’t own a car. She never even learned to drive.
The decisions she has made have helped her feel right with the world. But they’ve gotten her in trouble with her government.
The first time she went to prison, it was for scaling a security fence and planting corn at a Cold War missile site in Missouri. She served nine months in a federal prison for that.
She served another three months for trespassing during a mass protest at School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, Ga., where American military instructors train Latin American soldiers.
After being arrested 60 times, Kelly lost count. She lives each day knowing another stint behind bars could be coming. The now-defunct Voices in the Wilderness has a $20,000 fine hanging over its head, and Kelly has no intention of paying it. She’d rather go to jail.
If that happens, she said, “I don’t mind living with that.”
It will give her time to rest — and to study Arabic.
Reporter Debra McKinney can be reached at .
FOR MORE INFORMATION about Kathy Kelly or for information about the Voices for Creative Nonviolence documentary film “In a Time of Siege: Voices in the Wilderness Defying Sanctions and War in Iraq,” call Jane Regan, 333-1061. To purchase the DVD, send an inquiry to . Kathy Kelly in Anchorage
Activist Kathy Kelly will speak several times in Anchorage.
SUNDAY
- 9 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. at Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 3201 Turnagain St. Free.
- 1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, 825 S. Klevin St. Free.
TUESDAY
- Noon at the Alaska World Affairs Council luncheon, Anchorage Hilton, 500 W. Third Ave. $25, includes lunch.
- 5 p.m. at Title Wave Books, 1306 W. Northern Lights Blvd. Free.
OCT. 15
- 10:30 a.m. at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 2222 E. Tudor Road. Free.
- 7 p.m. at Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 2311 Pembroke St. Free.
OCT. 16
- 8-10 a.m. on KUDO radio, 1080 AM.
- 2:30 p.m. at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Social Sciences Building, Room 118. Panel discussion with faculty. Free.
- 5 p.m. at the UAA Bookstore, 3211 Providence Dr. Free
- 8 p.m. at Loussac Library, 3600 Denali St. Free
