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FROM: JOHN ROSS In early February, John Ross will join hundreds of international anti-war activists on the Human Shield Action Caravan to Baghdad in an effort to stop U.S. bombing of Iraqi civilians before it begins. The caravan is being organized by Ken Nichols, a former U.S. marine who participated in Operation Desert Storm. All travel expenses are being paid out of pocket by the volunteers and Ross, an aging poet-author-journalist-activist who dwells in and around the poverty line, is appealing for contributions from those who would like to be part of this action for peace but are otherwise committed, to offset the plane fare to Istanbul where he will join the caravan on February 4th for the bus ride to Iraq. Please send what you can to John Ross/1030 Capp Street/San Francisco Ca. 94110. Ross's Statement of Purpose follows: STATEMENT: "I GO TO BAGHDAD TO STAND WITH THE IRAQI PEOPLE, NOT WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN" A decade ago, in the wake of the Persian Gulf conflagration, I traveled to Kuwait on behalf of the Palestine Aid Society to expose human rights abuses against Kuwaiti Palestinians by the Bush-Sabah regimes. During that mission, I had occasion to visit the infamous "Highway to Hell" where on February 28th, 1991, 22,000 fleeing human beings (United Nations estimates) were incinerated by wave after wave of U.S. warplanes flying in off the Gulf, a little-remembered massacre now. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel" one U.S. pilot told the press. By the time we got there, the desert was a vast parking lot of charred vehicles. Unexploded cluster bombs and infants' car seats were strewn along the shoulder of the highway. The Yanqui ground troops had come in with spray paint and scrawled obscene slogans on the burnt-out cars. The scene put a heavy hurt on my heart and I vowed to myself that this would not happen again - at least not in my name. I am a journalist and an author based in Latin America and war and repression, often the result of U.S. policies, are the coinage of the countries in which I work. Nearly 40 years ago I traveled from my home in the Purepecha Indian mountains of Michoacan Mexico to sing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" to a judge, and read him a poem by Bertolt Brecht which says we live in an age so dark that it is a crime to write a poem about a tree because it is a kind of silence about injustice. Then I was led off to Terminal Island federal prison in chains, the first draft resister from the San Francisco Bay Area to go to jail for refusing to kill my Vietnamese brothers and sisters. I have opposed every U.S. aggression against the world's people since and George W. Bush's impending dismemberment of Iraq is no exception. I go to Baghdad gratefully to stand with the Iraqi people, not with the corrupt and undemocratic regime of Saddam Hussein. I have no illusions that the U.S. President will hesitate to bomb his own citizens as well as Iraqi civilians. After all, over the past decade the White House has seen fit to inflict death on hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children for the crime of having been born in a country ruled by Saddam Hussein. The coming war will be a cruel one. Early United Nations estimates calculate a half million casualties - we may indeed be included in that total. But what else can we do? In recent years, I have become closely identified with the rebellion of the largely Mayan Indian Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas about whose struggle to preserve and strengthen their indigenous identity and still be players in the wider world, I have written three books now. The Zapatistas' war against oblivion, against being obliterated from the face of this malevolently globalized planet, is the story of all peoples rooted in history and the earth, and the Iraqis are some of the world's most ancient peoples. If George Bush is to consummate the genocide of the Iraqi people, I'm sorry to say that it will have to be over my dead body. john ross |