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LOCAL News :: International Relations : Peace

100,000 RINGS EVENTS ILLUMINATE IRAQI CIVILIANS’ DEATHS

The tolling of bells echoed down Dearborn St. once every minute last Thursday and Friday, reverberating off the orange Calder sculpture, causing the businesspeople and shop-goers scurrying past Federal Plaza to take a second look. No, no new churches had been suddenly erected in the middle of downtown, and it was too early in the year for Christmas handbell-ers. The solemn bell-ringing ceremony, entitled “100,000 Rings,” was the work of the Uptown group, Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCN).

In nearly 100 communities worldwide—including Chicago—anti-war groups gathered on October 24-28, ringing a bell once a minute, 1,000 times, symbolizing the more than 100,000 deaths of Iraqi civilians since 2003 when the war began. Though casualty estimates vary, this widely accepted number was published in a study by the British medical journal, The Lancet, on October 29, a year ago.

VCN co-coordinator Scott Blackburn, who initiated the project, estimates that the death toll is now well over 100,000. The intent of 100,000 Rings, he says, was to bring public attention back to hard numbers, numbers that vividly portray the gravity of the US’s impact on Iraq’s population.

“As people opposed to the US/UK war and occupation, we act to end the silence about the suffering and death in Iraq,” Blackburn said. “We want to publicly unlock the grief that it has caused.”

In Evanston, Rosalie Riegle of North Shore Anti-Violence Coalition rounded up over 30 vigilers, including several Northwestern students, and set up camp from 4 to 7 pm each day in Fountain Square. They read the names of Iraqi dead, handed out leaflets and displayed pictures of the war, hoping to quietly engage passersby.

Chicago-area bell-ringers were not alone: last week’s reverberations echoed from London to Geneva to Pittsburg to Munster, Indiana, with each group taking responsibility for 1,000 rings of the bell. Last Monday, two of the project’s key organizers were arrested during their bell ceremony in London for protesting in the vicinity of Parliament.

Voices for Creative Nonviolence members hope that the bell-ringing ceremonies will cause wide-ranging populations to question the US and UK’s military policies, said Kathy Kelly, co- founder of VCN and two-time Nobel Prize Nominee.

“All over the world, people can see that the U.S. went to war against Iraq partly because the ruling elites in this country knew Iraq couldn't fight back,” Kelly said. “Now we are mired in a war that could last ten years. We're ringing the bells to express alarm and grief over the horrific waste and carnage caused by this war.”

The Lancet study, which determined the body count of 100,000, was one of several similar independent studies released last year. Yet the US government has itself released no statistics, VCN members said.

“Lives lost by US and 'coalition' soldiers are carefully recorded and mourned,” reads their Call to Action for 100,000 Rings. “The lives lost by Iraqi citizens have no official importance. They are nameless. They are not even numbered.”

Riegle, who has family in Iraq, agreed. Noting that vigils were held nationwide last week as US casualties reach the 2,000 mark—vigils she helped to organize in addition to 1,000 Rings—she believes it is important to show the discrepancy between the US dead and Iraq dead.

“I'm hoping the Iraqi people learn of the 100,000 rings event and realize that at least some of the world grieves with them,” she said.

100,000 Rings began as a smaller project of Blackburn’s. In May, he carried out a solo mini-version, heading down to Water Tower at 8 am on May 8 and staying there over 26 hours, ringing a bell once a minute for each US troop that had perished in Iraq. Staying up all night was an act of solidarity with the troops who were required to keep 24 hour vigil, he explained. The one-minute separation between rings was intended to let the sound resonate, slowly diminishing to nothing, fading like death.

“I wanted to do something that didn’t include barking, carrying big signs, or being part of a crowd,” Blackburn said. “I wanted to be able to talk to people.”

Talk to people he did: he even conversed with an Iraqi family that wondered why he was not holding vigil for the fallen Iraqis, who were far more numerous than the US dead. Blackburn agreed, and began to organize 100,000 Rings, keeping in mind the goal of a serious, quiet ceremony despite the larger scale.

Indeed, Milan Rai, one of the organizers arrested in London, described the Rings project as just as much of a private endeavor as a public display.

“Reading the names of the dead and listening to the bell ringing is a form of meditation on the war and the reasons why we're active,” Rai said. “Beforehand I was afraid I might be bored or numbed by four-hour bell-ringing sessions. Instead I've come out of our process (over three days) with more energy and more determination.”

Kelly points to the simple sound of the tolling bell as a reminder of personal responsibility.

“This project is a chance to raise John Donne's line, ‘Do not ask for whom the bell
tolls. It tolls for thee,’” she said.

100,000 Rings is just one of the many projects emerging from Voices for Creative Nonviolence’s small, apartment-based office in Uptown. Several members have lived in Iraq before, during, and after the U.S. invasion in 2003. In September, VCN and the UK group Justice Not Vengeance held a two-week fast in Washington DC in response to the IMF and World Bank Meetings. They called for the cancellation of Iraq’s remaining debt, incurred under Saddam Hussein and now left to the Iraqi people.

In the coming months, Voices will organize a team to travel to Jordan to learn Arabic, while living among Iraqi refugees and documenting their experiences. Like 100,000 Rings, the language immersion program aims to find new ways to communicate the message of peace, Kelly said.

"We see the project, undertaken by volunteers at their own expense, as a tiny arrow pointing to what could be done if the US were to shed the warlike culture that so sadly dominates us," she said.
 
 

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