Peace activist views Iraqi war zone
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
As his teammate pulled the small metal cubes from the wall of a bombed-out Iraqi duplex last month, peace activist Jim Douglass' mind drifted back 30 years to Hickam Air Force Base.
A different war was raging and Douglass, then a religion faculty member at the University of Hawai'i, demonstrated his opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in the most striking way he could think of: He went to the O'ahu base and poured blood on top-secret war files.
Douglass had been spurred to protest, in part, by photographs of Vietnamese children maimed by U.S. fragmentation bombs — bombs designed to hurl small metal cubes when they explode.
They were the same type of fragments Douglass and his team found embedded in the walls of the Baghdad apartment.
Douglass was arrested for his 1970s protest. It was his second Hawai'i arrest: In 1968, he tried to block a troop convoy at Fort DeRussy. "That was the end of my academic career," he said with a hint of pride.
In Iraq, however, Douglass couldn't be certain who had launched the attack. An Iraqi family of three was injured by the blast, but no one was killed.
"It was like that everywhere," Douglass said. "Nobody could be sure where any of the bombs that fell came from."
In his fifth visit to Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, Douglass said he witnessed a country struggling to reconcile its hatred for Saddam Hussein, a tyrannical ruler who lived in luxury while his people starved under UN sanctions, with its distrust for the American president who would topple Saddam Hussein from power.
Douglass said he went to Iraq to witness the war for himself and to stand, as he put it, with innocent Iraqis beneath the bombs his own country was dropping.
The peace activist, who now lives in Alabama, joined friend Jerry Levin (the former CNN bureau chief who was taken hostage in Beirut in the mid-'80s) and seven others as members of a Christian Peacemaker Team.
The team's mission was to accompany and befriend Iraqis, document human-rights abuses on both sides, and promote nonviolent solutions to conflict.
"We wanted to go and see things for ourselves rather than relying on official sources or 'embedded' journalists," Douglass said.
The team entered northern Iraq through Jordan on March 25, enduring a 13-hour drive through desert.
Once in Iraq, they had to carefully negotiate their way through a series of U.S. and Iraqi checkpoints.
"At the first one, we saw a group of Iraqi soldiers surrendering at gunpoint," Douglass said. "The U.S. soldiers were on a hill above us about 40 yards away with a couple of tanks and four armored personnel carriers.
"At one point, the Iraqi soldiers saw our Iraqi (license) plates and came running over, thinking they could get away," he said. "It was confusing. Some of the U.S. soldiers were telling us to stop, others were telling us to move forward. It was kind of scary."
In Baghdad, the team split up to visit bombing sites, hospitals and other areas of interest, all the while accompanied by Iraqi government "minders."
The apartment where he found the bomb fragments was next door to the Balquis Secondary School for Girls in northern Baghdad.
"It was difficult to talk to people because they were always there," Douglass said of the minders. "They wanted us to see certain sites, but we had to take everything with a grain of salt."
Douglass and the team spent two nights camping out at the Al Wathab water treatment plant, hoping their presence would deter a U.S. strike that would deprive Iraqis of drinkable water.
"We could hear bombs going off at certain times of the day, followed by chanting from a mosque nearby," he said. "At first, we thought it was a coincidence until we realized that it was the Iraqis' response to the bombing. They were saying, 'Allah akbar' — God is great."
It was the Iraqis' faith with which Douglass felt most sympathetic, he said.
"What we could see of the Iraqi military forces was pitiful," he said. "We'd drive by and see artillery pieces on the side of the road and one or two soldiers next to them.
"It looked like something you'd find at a five-and-dime store — like toy soldiers — and they were up against the power of the U.S. military. More powerful than their military strength was their faith."
What also struck Douglass, he said, was the ambivalence of ordinary Iraqis about the United States' stated intent of "liberating" their country.
In Jordan, he met an Iraqi man who had been tortured by Saddam Hussein's men.
"He showed us the marks of torture on his body," Douglass said. "And yet he still hoped to return to Iraq to fight in defense of his country."
Even as he watched the cathartic celebrations of Iraqis in Baghdad on television in recent days, Douglass said, he sensed the confusion and apprehension that exists behind it.
"It's the ambivalence of people who have been freed from a dictator yet are concerned about coming under the domination of another country," he said.
"They celebrate the demise of a regime that oppressed a large number of people, yet they are apprehensive about what comes next."
Douglass was with the last members of the team to leave Iraq on April 1. During their last night in the country, they watched the bombing of a palace complex on the Tigris river.
"There were thunderous explosions that shook our hotel," he said. "I think everyone there (in Iraq) felt personally endangered all the time. It was constant. But for us, it was a mission of faith. It was a time to listen, learn and absorb what was going on."
