March 12 2003

BAGHDAD, MARCH 7 – The sun comes up sulfur yellow over the Daura Oil Refinery here in west Baghdad. The air quality is not too hot either. Fireballs that can be seen all the way downtown erupt from the stacks, and the burn-off of toxic waste sears the eyes and smothers the lungs. Last night three U.S. citizens and a virtual international brigade of volunteers from South Africa, Great Britain, Slovenia, Catalonia, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan slept here under the roar and whistle of the stacks, waiting for President George W. Bush to drop his bombs on this prime target, which was severely blasted in the 1991 holocaust, knocking a key fuel source off-line for a full year.

On March 2 the hundred or so human shields currently in Baghdad faxed the White House to inform Bush that we are at the Daura refinery and four other civilian infrastructure sites in Baghdad, all of them designated by the United Nations Development Program as human-directed installations. We reminded the U.S. president that by bombing these important facilities, he would be endangering the lives of his own citizens as well as those of 34 other nations, people who have come to Iraq to interpose their bodies between the U.S. death machine and the people of this unfortunate land. We also sought to make it clear that aerial bombing of civilian sites is a violation of the Geneva Convention and would make the U.S. commander in chief subject to international prosecution for war crimes. We are not hopeful Bush will take our lives into account as his mad conflagration looms on the tarnished horizon, but at least we tried to make it perfectly clear that murdering us will not go unpunished.

The Daura refinery is a little neighborhood unto itself. Muslim and Christian families live on either side of the guest house in which we are installed and sometimes invite us in for tea. Stray soccer balls occasionally bounce into the courtyard, and laughing kids rush in to retrieve them. A woolly goat lives just across the street, which is largely populated by refinery engineers. A child care center is a few hundred yards away, with a primary school next door. Each morning I walk with the scrubbed, smiling children to class, and they practice their English with me.

The other day, when Faith, one of the U.S. volunteers, visited the school and the carefully tutored children were intoning the usual chant of "Down, down America!," the teacher abruptly shushed them to insist that not all Americans were like Bush. I suppose this was a sort of tactical victory in the battle to unburden the name of the American people from the sins of their unelected president.

I write this article as six minders prowl through the guest house. To say these burly men with Saddam mustachios and leather jackets are trying to control us is not an exaggeration. But as they told my friend Andre, an ebullient volunteer from Jo'berg, the other day, "you are very difficult to control."

At a mass meeting of all volunteers last Saturday in the ballroom of the ritzy Palestine Hotel, the chief of the minders, Dr. Al-Hasimi of the Peace and Solidarity Committee, ordered all potential shields to immediately deploy to 60 government-selected sites or leave the country the next morning. The human shields, who have voluntarily set up camp at water-treatment, food-storage, and power plants in addition to the refinery here, took umbrage at such ham-handed manipulation. They once again demanded they be allowed to place their trainee corpses on line at hospitals, schools, and archaeological sites, which the Iraqi government, in a supreme political blunder, has time and again denied them. The rebellion resulted in the overnight exodus of nearly 30 shields, who fled overland to Amman, Jordan, in protest at such coercion. Nonetheless, nearly a hundred volunteers remained in Baghdad and utilized the moment to deploy to sites where they had already established a presence.

But the government men were not to be satisfied. They forced dozens of volunteers aboard buses and ferried them out to the installations, temporarily taking back the initiative. The newcomers' ranks were padded out by an assortment of dangerous-looking types who seemed more like volunteers from the French Foreign Legion or escapees from Devil's Island than human shields. On my second night at the Daura refinery, I bunked with a fellow who jabbered past midnight about the humanitarian attributes of the Basque terrorists who hide behind the initials ETA. But by the next evening full-blown community had settled in, and old and new volunteers gathered in friendship around the house hookah.

One after another, snide young reporters, for whom the imminent war is little more than a crass career move, come to us with worst-case scenarios: we will be taken hostage, as happened in 1991; we are worth more to Saddam Hussein dead than alive; we will be swallowed up in the civil unrest that will follow the war and swing from local lampposts; and the worst of the worst, in which we are rescued by the yanqui troops and earn a free trip to Guantánamo Bay. Bush will motorcade triumphantly down the boulevards of Baghdad as the Liberator of Iraq. Ad nauseam.

Given our uncertain status, trapped as we are between governments, we are susceptible to panic attacks. But then comrades from Mexico City suddenly, miraculously, appear, and we are chanting "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido" in Martyrs Square, and the light at the end of the tunnel is not a freight train barreling down upon us in the claustrophobic dark.

Maybe I'm delusional, but it sometimes seems to me that war is not inevitable. The Turkish parliament has thus far resisted the sledgehammer pressures of Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney to land 40,000 G.I.s on its turf for an invasion from the north, and key Kurdish leaders have nixed Bushwa's ploy to exploit their fierce opposition to continued Hussein rule. Most of all, Baghdad does not seem to be preparing for doomsday. Each Monday and Thursday evening young couples marry to the tumultuous honking of horns, the blaring of trumpets, and the pounding of drums. Front-loaders dig trenches to lay fresh sewage lines, old men wash cars in the street, and the candy-store man down the avenue just took in a fresh inventory of sweets.

Last weekend Grace, who has become my steady squeeze on this torturous adventure, and I considered doing a John and Yoko 40-day stint in bed to make love not war, but then Dr. Al-Hasimi's deployment edict came slamming down, and she decided she would be of more value battling the Bush war back home in the English Westlands. At our farewell dinner the lounge act trilled "Imagine" and Elvis knockoffs, and the only sign that war is the next item on this Grand Guignol agenda was the huge stack of nearly worthless dinars that literally covered half of the table in exchange for the sumptuous fare.

But there is no denying we have painted ourselves into a scary corner with our determination to fulfill our commitments as human shields. Last Sunday at dusk we went to the north bank of the Tigris and put little candlelit boats of palm wood into the muddy river, closed our eyes, and wished for a peaceful resolution to this frightening endgame. Then I read a poem to the handful of Iraqi National Theater workers who had invited us to this quietly desperate ritual. I declared I would "never surrender my beating heart" to Bush, but if indeed he does nail me with his accursed bombs, "I will return in the flowers in the desert and in the open veins of the people."

John Ross has been a Bay Guardian correspondent for 20 years, mostly based in Mexico City. He is the author of several books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He traveled to Baghdad as part of the human shields group, and although many of the group members have left Iraq, Ross remains. He implores you to try to save his life by informing the president of the United States that he is on-site at the Daura Oil Refinery in Baghdad and by demanding the White House cancel plans to bomb that facility and, indeed, all others in the ancient land of Iraq. '

We eat America for breakfast'
Baghdad waits for Bush's rain of death.

By John Ross

[The following are excerpts from e-mails John Ross has been posting.]

MARCH 3 – Bad craziness followed by good craziness. Last night's meet drew nearly a hundred people in various stages of commitment. It was beautifully run. We held a big press confab this noon and put dozens of folks on buses for the sites with a good press turnout – but not the majors, who are out to stick it to us. We've moved our operation to the Palestine Hotel, but I'm at the refinery, which is a great sight. We've increased our numbers on site and have more folks on their way from Amman every day. Now I can sit back, breathe deep the bad air out at the Daura, hobnob with my new neighbors, and wait for the bombs not to drop. Tell one and all that we can indeed stop this war. Abrazotes everywhere and to everyone. I put a lighted candle in the Tigris on a little palm boat as part of a ritual we performed with Iraqi theater workers and wished for two things: one, world in peace not pieces, and two, that Kobe continues his rampage. Go Lakers. Love to the whirled. – Juan of Baghdad

MARCH 2 – Call to Action. Morning after the big divide. We still have people on the sites and will continue to man and woman them. Just two Amurikkans, including myself. We are faxing Bush the details today but omitting the names. So now it is your job to get hold of both Bush at the White House and your congressfools and senators and advise them that I am at the al Daura Oil Refinery site in Baghdad as part of the human shields action and will be squashed by any bombing of that facility. We are here and will be here for the duration. Particular attention should be given to those who voted for the Bushwa war law, which I suppose is everyone except Barbara Lee, who also should be contacted. Spread the word. You are our only hope at this late date. We will probably concentrate our assets at just one site, but for now we are still at five: al Daura refinery, the April 7th Water Treatment Facility, the Baghdad Central Power Plant, al Durah Power Plant, and the Taji Food Storage site. You will note, of course, that the gub never did allow us to set up at hospitals, schools, and archeological sites, an unspeakable political blunder that caused between 40 and 50 shields to leave the country. There it is in a nutshell. Give us a hand on this one. Abrazotes to the compas. – Juanded in Baghdad

MARCH 1 – Machine crashed just as I was about to send this – suspicious. The party's over here. The big boss tried to force the shields to deploy at 60 sites today, and we nixed it. Five of them were the sites where we are right now, but they wouldn't acknowledge this – ham-handed assholes. Folks refused to be ordered around, and the rebellion spread at a big general meeting. Went and checked some of the sites on the gov's ultimatum, and they don't even exist. About half the crew is heading out, leaving a rump crew of maybe 40. I'm a rump man as usual. The dance gets stranger and stranger, and of course it exploded around the core issue – the humanitarian sites. Politically I've been correct on this one, but what does that matter? People are bailing right and left. We're all thrown out of lodging tomorrow. Anyway, I'm still alive, weary and wary. The minders instructed us not to close our office door today, and when I walked into the Palestine [a hotel where Ross has Internet access], they were reading my e-mail. Hoo boy – this is probably only the beginning of the bad stuff, but at least we're still in touch. All my besos to the multitudes out there. – Juan in a whole

BAGHDAD, FEB . 28 – The afternoon sky over Baghdad browns ominously as the sandstorm swirls in from the surrounding desert. Suddenly the dirt is flying everywhere, filling the mouth with grit, filling the mouth with grit and a choking blast of hot, stifling air that won't abate until near midnight. Some taxi drivers curse, fearing the worst for their already damaged vehicles, while others are enthused. "God is great!" rejoices the ferret-faced, bearded driver who carries me home from a crosstown meeting.

Indeed, the storm is a portent of weather to come as the desert heats up to 100-plus degrees. Here the spring and summer sandstorms blow like the Russian snow that snatched victory from Napoleon and the Nazis back in history's frozen museum. The heat here, they say, will fry the brains of the invading army, and because the brains of the U.S. barbarians are now embodied by killer computers, their machines of war will slow and decalibrate, and the 3,000 missiles George W. Bush brags he will drill down on us in an unprecedented 48-hour blitzkrieg are not guaranteed to kiss their targets with any precision. Above all, this is not good news for my new neighbors here.

Everywhere I travel, the war is in the air. In Mosul, 200 miles to the north, where the desert climbs into the cold mountain rain, a bloodbath seems inevitable if the experience of 1991 is any teacher, as U.S.-proxy Kurds and Turkish troops (if their Parliament green-lights their participation) will go at it with the Iraqi army, trapping the civilian population in a deadly squeeze.

A delegation of human shields, who have come to Iraq to interpose their bodies between the Bush bombs and the people of this unlucky land, visit the edge of town and pause before one of this ancient city's 15 crumbling gates, each embossed with the emblem of the eagle king Asyripanipani. He protected Mosul from other barbarian hordes long centuries ago, much as the shields dream of doing now, although such a defense, we know in our open secret hearts, is a mere symbol, a kind of metaphor before the coming slaughter.

Mosul still bears the unmistakable scars of 1991. We visit sites blasted by the U.S. "smart" bombs a dozen years back – the telephone company smashed to smithereens, a Christian church where the roof literally blew in, killing four worshipers at prayer, we are told by the young house priest. Mosul is the site of some of Christendom's earliest crusades, a multicultural oasis where 8,000 orthodox Catholic families still reside. We bus down the valley to a fourth-century monastery hewn from the surrounding mountains – the ruins of a church built in A.D. 150 are said to be nearby, in spitting distance of Jesus Christ himself, as an erudite fellow shield observes.

This particular monastery, whose chambers breathe a musty antiquity, was damaged in a firefight between Kurds and Iraqi troops after the U.S. assault, and more such engagements are a certainty once the American death machine has done its dirtiest work here.

The sinister Moloch, with its head of a snake and fearsome eagle talons, will greet the invading army when it descends upon Babylon, now a dusty, sparsely visited tract an hour south of Baghdad. Its reconstructed walls will surely fall when Bush's missiles zero in on the presidential guest house here in their painstaking search-and-destroy for Saddam Hussein. Erasing his ubiquitous portraiture from public buildings alone may take a thousand times the number of heat-seeking rockets in the yanqui arsenal.

We stroll through the ruins, a world heritage site, with a friendly posse of schoolkids, the only visitors this late February morning. They trail behind us, chanting, "Down, down, Bush!," practicing their rudimentary English and slapping fives. "How are you?" and "Hi, my name is Muhammad" are particular favorites.

The shields have come to Babylon hoping to set up shop here, but the Iraqi authorities build roadblocks. The minders want us to install at what they consider to be priority infrastructure sites – refineries, power plants, water treatment facilities that are sure to be bombed. Not hospitals, schools, or the ancient ruins that define this place. In pursuit of a quid pro quo that would grant us access to the humanitarian sites we've come here to protect, we send our volunteers into the facilities the government insists we occupy. However, there is no real dialogue with the authorities, and the push-and-pull exercise concerning where the shields in Baghdad will be deployed seems destined for a dark end. Spanish and Turkish comrades have already threatened to return to their home countries unless they are allowed to pitch their tents in front of local hospitals, but how easily their exit will be accomplished is anyone's guess. No, we are not yet unwelcome guests, but the writing is indeed on the wall, and the choices narrow as the war draws near.

In any case, settling in at the Daura Oil Refinery and the Seventh of April Water Treatment Facility is only half of the business we are about. The international volunteers are resolved to maintain a steady drumbeat of street protest, and almost daily we parade along the boulevards of Baghdad, yelling at Bush and Tony Blair to get off the Iraqi peoples' backs. On Feb. 23 we strung up a 17-meter-long banner on one of the eight bridges that connect the banks of the Tigris River (all were blown up the last time around), strumming guitars and shouting poems to the joyous honking of horns. "Bush – The Whole World Is Watching You!" the banner reads, but whether it can be seen 10,000 miles away in Tampa, Fla., from whence the missiles will come, is not assured.

That same morning we marched on the United Nations headquarters here, our hands tied together by thick rope, to ask that international tribunals be convened to try us for the war crime of being human shields, as suggested by U.S. "defense" secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Should we be declared innocent, we demand that Rumsfeld be tried instead for the potential million murders his grotesque weaponry could rack up in the coming days.

The day before, the Turkish comrades danced through Martyrs' Square, pounding drums and tambourines in an exuberant effort to drown out the dirges of death that Bush and Blair duet. Earlier that morning we descended on the International Press Center, hollering, "No more lies!" into the cubicles of corporate media – which just love this war (more likely a massacre) because it means booming ratings and bigger budgets, billions in expanded advertising revenues, and extravagant overtime for the all-star correspondents and their crews. "No more lies!" we shouted at a CNN flunky, Ingrid Kormanack, who stomped out of her cardboard-walled cave muttering, "I ask the questions around here."

But for all of our fury, in the still of the soon-to-be exploding, we know this is a pantomime. The missiles will whistle in very soon – and many here would just as soon get it over with as quickly as possible because the waiting is killing their souls. "We eat America for breakfast," says Bassam, an ex-army man who invented a way to feed sheep chicken-shit (32 percent protein) in the aftermath of the last war and now works as a driver at the swank Palestine Hotel. "Every morning we listen to the news. If it is good, our day will be good, but if it is bad, we cannot eat ..."

Bassam and I have agreed to celebrate our birthdays together – my 65th is March 11, when we may still be alive, but his is April 19, by which date our fate will surely be sealed. Only an impossible miracle – the apparition of the pope in Baghdad or a transplant of Bush's evil heart – can save us now.

Countdown to the cataclysm
Human shields in Baghdad wait for Bush to bomb

BAGHDAD, FEB. 22 – The Syrian-Iraqi border after midnight is a dimly lit no-man's-land. We sit in a smoke-filled café on the Syrian side, dining on kabobs and guzzling Turkish coffee on the house. When George Bush pounds a podium on the café TV, multiple American flags unfurled behind him, the truck drivers, low-rent travelers, and human shields in attendance convulse in waves of derisive laughter.

The trip has been filled with such moments. The U.S. president's cowboy shtick plays very badly in this seething corner of a world he seeks to conquer with bombs and bribery – his yahoo demeanor makes it one of the top comedy acts east and west of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

On the Iraqi side, dour immigration officials register and sometimes confiscate cell and sat phones, laptops, video cams, and other electronic gear. By dawn the inventory is complete, and the British members of our group start kicking around a soccer ball with the Iraqi border guards.

The Human Shield Action Caravan, 35 bedraggled antiwar warriors hoping to keep Bush's bombs from creaming the civilian population, enter Iraq in two battered London double-decker buses on the morning of Feb. 15, a day set aside for unprecedented protest against the Bush-Blair war on this still-resilient republic. We are trying to reach Baghdad for a huge, wild midday rally, but the rage is patent enough on the border, a dusty, flyspecked wedge of desert where the kids press up against the bus, chanting and dancing so feverishly you can feel the heat of their bodies. They wave portraits of Saddam and rain curses down on Bush, and their youthful energy seems capable of dismantling our wheezing machines.

We follow the worldwide marches on truck-stop TV screens, the customers loudly dissing Bush and buying us jiggers of tea and fragrant coffee, a timely reminder of how fervently much of the world hates Yanqui Doodle imperialism but not necessarily the American people.

Given 20 years of war and affliction, much of it manufactured in the United States, Baghdad is not what you'd expect. A thoroughly streamlined capital of five million, it's skylined by modernesque high-rises, with ample green space and boulevards as broad as Texas, a sort of Middle Eastern Houston powered by great gobs of oil money.

The first Bush tried to bomb Baghdad back to the Stone Age, and the Iraqi people built it up again in record time. Now Baby Bush seeks to reflatten it and give the construction contracts to Dick Cheney's Brown and Root (a division of Halliburton Inc.). Yet despite the Bushwa that threatens them, the residents repeatedly stop you on the street just to tell you how much they love you. Yes, love you! In four decades of gallivanting around the globe, that has never happened to this reporter before.

Slovenians and Japanese, an indefatigable Turkish contingent, busloads of Barcelonans and Germans, Italian brigadistas, Syrians, Estonians, a reported 60 Russians (still on the road), and multitudes of Scandinavians and Anglo pacifists stage daily marches, antiwar auctions, peace drum festivals, and die-ins in an outburst of creative outrage that must surely cause Saddam Hussein to wonder what all of this unprecedented protest is leading up to.

On Valentine's Day 1991, Papa Bush's stupid but murderous "smart" bombs incinerated 407 human beings inside the El Amiriya bomb shelter; their shadows were forever etched into the structure's walls. On Feb. 19 of this year a handful of U.S. citizens gather outside to mourn that attack and contemplate the coming assault. (Baghdadis universally refuse to return to the shelters.)

The shields are presently ensconced in a moderately priced hotel near the Tigris at government expense, until we can figure out how to wiggle off that hook. All week the minders – not as menacing as the New York Times would have you believe – have been bussing us from site to site in an undisguised effort to convince us to position ourselves near infrastructure such as power plants, water treatment facilities, and the Saddam Children's Hospital. At the latter facility Dr. Sefik Salam (not his real name) complains about the never-ending parade of journalists and pacifists and the manipulation of vital supplies made scarce by 10 years of United Nations sanctions.

Although the shields resist the manipulation and seek out less Saddam-related sites in which to install themselves, defense of the civilian population necessitates compromises. This weekend a score of shields will move into a south Baghdad power plant bombed in the last war, paint huge logos on the roof, and inform their governments back home that they are there.

Also on the list of sites to receive human shields are archaeological ruins like Ur in the south, the birthplace of the biblical Abraham, damaged in the first Bush war, and Nineveh and Nimrod, around Mosul in the north. This shield has proposed to settle in at Babylon, a cradle of civilization 90 kilometers south of Baghdad that the U.S. president seeks to erase from the face of the planet. What more could a poet ask for when the Bush bombs fall?