March 18 2003

AMMAN, JORDAN, MARCH 11 – On March 7, the day the fatal Blix report would be broadcast to an expectant universe, my Turkish comrade Tolga Temuge and I were perched on the roof of the engine house at the Daura Oil Refinery in west Baghdad, marking the site with industrial black paint to signal that the refinery was a U.N.-certified civilian site. We had a few letters done when a delegation from the Friendship, Peace, and Solidarity Organization, our hosts in Iraq, summoned us down to the ground floor to read us the riot act.

Under a fatwa issued by Dr. Abdul al-Hashimi, the "nongovernmental" group's director, we were ordered to leave Iraq immediately because we had usurped the function of an existing NGO by facilitating the deployment of more than 100 shields to five key infrastructure sites in and around Baghdad. Others to be forcibly removed included the initiator of the Human Shield Action, ex-Desert Storm Marine Ken Nichols O'Keefe. Al-Hashimi had announced the eviction order the previous evening, accusing us of, among other heinous crimes, "forcing volunteers to attend three-hour meetings against their will."

After gathering at the Meridian Palestine Hotel for our ordered leave-taking, we embraced dozens of the shields we were leaving behind, led a rousing chorus of "No War!" and, accompanied by four drum-pounding Buddhist monks, got on the road. Later, in the desert, marginally illuminated by the sliver of a new moon, I eyed our minders. Would our hosts veer suddenly into the wilderness, order us out, strip us naked, and riddle our corpses with dum-dum bullets as payback for gratuitous disobedience? Would the iron gates of Saddam Prison yawn open to receive us? None of the above.

Our hosts were genuinely embarrassed by the prospect of expelling us from a country we had come to protect with our lives from U.S. Murder Inc., and they treated us with kindly kid gloves, shaking our hands at the border and inviting us back once the terrible deeds were done. I reflected on other deportees, on Mexican workers back home in my own country, chained up and dragged back to their border for the sin of working a job so low on the ladder no one else would do it. Ironically, we passed a carload of eight Mexican compas, one of them a nun from the San Carlos Hospital down in the Zapatista zone of southeastern Chiapas, on their way to Baghdad to relieve us as "escudos humanos."

The morning sandstorm blew furiously as we swerved up toward Amman, dodging the endless train of rusting tanker trucks that defy the unconscionable U.N. sanctions by ferrying fuel to Jordan. Such weather will sabotage Bush's war from the ground up. And recruiting teenagers off ghetto streets and country farms to fight under such conditions is tantamount to premeditated homicide, just as packing them off to the jungles of Vietnam was.

Iraq will not be the piece of cake the Pentagon brass advertises. I'm convinced the new shields who replace us have not all gathered there to interpose their bodies between the bombs and the civilian infrastructure. Many are hard-eyed fighters who have come to take the heads of the hated invaders. Despite the 3,000-missile blitzkrieg Bush never tires of boasting about, there will be a lot of street fighting in the very near future. "We will fight them block by block just as our grandfathers fought the British colonialists," warns Mr. Al-Karash, the general manager of the Daura refinery.

Up ahead in Amman, wanna-be shields and recent escapees from Baghdad have gathered at the Al Saraya hotel, a cheesy fleabag by the bus station. Many have been there for weeks fruitlessly trying to enter Iraq. Others have recently evacuated, exasperated by government manipulation or propelled by their own fears of dying under the gringo bombardment as the war crescendos. Most are in terminal stasis, hanging on until the bitter end. A sizable number who were living in Euro squats or on the streets have no home to go home to.

It's time, I suppose, to take measure of what happened to the shields. In a very real sense, we fulfilled our mission. Like the double-decker buses that have long since returned to London, the action was merely a vehicle for inciting the massive movement against Bush's planned genocide and honing the commitment of our own combatants. We succeeded in making the bombing of civilian targets a frontline issue, put hundreds on those targets, and raised the stakes by daring Bush to bomb us into oblivion. In this small light, we may indeed have made the White House more cautious about leveling the civilian population it claims to be liberating. We even opened a thin slice of democratic space with our spontaneous street demonstrations, which may be remembered by civil society whenever its time comes round again.

It's time to return to our countries and communities, our loved ones and compañeros, and rejoin the bigger movement of millions and millions who have marched month after month against the prospect of this war. At least, that is what I intend to do. I want to thank the Iraqi people one more time for opening their arms to us, for feeding and housing us and telling us time and again that they love us. "We love you," they smiled when we walked the streets of their cities, "We love you."

I've left a good chunk of my heart back in Baghdad under the roar and whistle of the stacks at the Daura refinery. May it survive Bush and his bombs in fighting style in the awful days to come.