People Protectors

Benjamin Joffe-Walt

Benjamin Joffe-Walt lifts his white t-shirt to absently scratch his back as he addresses the room. He's going to work in a Baghdad hospital he says, in the hopes of deterring American bombs from dropping there. Upon hearing this, one hopes he knows about standing in doorways, the safest part of a room to be if the building begins to fall.

Joffe-Walt, an OISE student at the University of Toronto, arrived weeks ago in Baghdad to act as a human shield with 150 volunteers from North America, Western Europe and around the world. Former U.S. Marine and Gulf War veteran Ken O'Keefe organized the group, and their plan is to place themselves in areas of extreme importance to Iraqi civilian life to act as a deterrent to military attack. The British convoy left London in a taxi and two double-decker buses, and snaked through Europe en route to the Iraqi capital, picking up volunteers along the way. They say they will stay in Iraq "until the imminent threat of war has passed." Ben learned about the Human Shields group reading a leftover paper on the TTC.

I met Ben when he stood up and addressed the room at an anti-war conference in Toronto in January. I thought he was very creative and impressive, and I promised to help him find publicity in any way I could. My friends think he's an idiot.

My roommate Hale thinks he's just arrogant. Some spoilt, tantrum-having leftist who thinks that his being there will make all the difference. My classmate, May, shakes her head. This war is so much bigger than that, she says. He's a tiny cog in a political machine bigger than he could ever understand. An unwitting Saddam supporter, who will either bring Saddam justice or die as a foolish, invisible sacrifice. My friend Ani even gets upset about it. Why is he doing this? Get him the hell back home.

Public critics are harsher, asking why now, why this war. Why didn't he fly into Turkey when Saddam attacked it in 2002? And does he know that Iraqis have a name for people like him? It's something along the lines of national idiots.

To me, Ben is demonstrating that in this world some lives are more valuable than others. The difference is how much you make, or what your passport is. In a way he gives me hope; even if we feel powerless we always have something to offer. The human shields dare their leaders to drop bombs on their own middle-class, voting, studying, subway riders. In January, families of 9/11 victims flew to Baghdad for a week to make the same statement: if Iraqi lives don't matter to the Bush administration, maybe ours will. The argument isn't about Saddam. The argument is about the value of human life, and Bush and Saddam are together on the opposite side.

The action has attracted volunteers of all ages and backgrounds. In their first week in Baghdad the group has been visiting various sites bombed in the 1991 gulf war such as hospitals, water plans and bomb shelters.

Ben himself has been actively addressing American missions and has been on Arab television stations. The group has received three hundred new submissions from people wanting to go in the last week and hopes hundreds of people will join. This is the first in a series of convoys all travelling over the coming weeks.

If Bush's shock and awe campaign begins and the bombs drop in Iraq, I'm going to be thinking of Ben somewhere in the city, standing in a doorway.

- For more information contact HumanShieldsPress@hotmail.com

- Lim is a graduate student in English at the University of Toronto

- Photographs courtesy and © copyright Human Shields Press