Whole Life Times: Righteous Warriors in Rose

March 2005

Righteous Warriors in Rose

by Terrence McNally

In a classic moment, Jodie Evans interrupted George Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican Convention by pulling off her dress to reveal a pink slip bearing the words, “Fire Bush! Women Say Bring the Troops Home Now!”

As a “triple-threat” actress, activist and producer, this was not Evans’ first foray into politics. She was in Jerry Brown’s cabinet when he was California’s governor, and his campaign manager when he ran for president—offering us an 800-number and accepting no contribution over $100.

She produced the documentary, Stripped and Teased; Tales of Las Vegas Women, and the 2000 campaign’s Shadow Conventions, and is co-founder of activist groups Unreasonable Women, Bad Babes, Code Pink and the International Occupation Watch Center.

Evans is full of life, furiously curious and passionately engaged. Close friends marvel at her inexhaustible energy and constant forward motion. Allies know she gets the job done.

She once told me, “My spirituality creates my political activism. For me they’re the same thing. When I see a problem, I move into: ‘Let’s find a solution.’ When I see something that has to be done, I move into doing it. And what I do tends to be immediate. I want to touch lives. Spirit is practice; my practice is activism.”

Jodie’s bold red hair often tops a totally pink ensemble. Today it’s a Code Pink T-shirt, a pink scarf, a long, pink print cotton skirt from India and pink shoes. A beautiful woman, equally feminine and strong, Evans shares her experiences and opinions with an authentic immediacy and remains vulnerable to the horror and grief she chooses to confront.

Evans’ recent trip to Jordan and the Iraqi border marks the sixth Code Pink peace mission to Iraq.

WLT: What was the intent of your mission?

Jodie Evans: Code Pink has been to Iraq five times. We had been planning to go again with humanitarian aid for the children, but violence has continually escalated and our friends there felt it was no longer safe. First, we make them more likely targets if they’re in our company, and second, we are one of the international partners behind the Occupation Watch Center (occupationwatch.org), which Iraqis and Americans depend on for a daily update of accurate information.

Immediately after the [most recent] US election, our military carpet bombed Falluja, leaving over 200,000 Fallujan refugees in the streets of Baghdad with no safety net. We put out a call for $20,000 to help them and received that in the first 20 hours. We then asked for another $100,000, and by the time we went to Jordan, we’d received $650,000.

We sent the money into Iraq, to doctors we’ve been working with on a study of the medical situation (in concert with Operation Watch and CorpWatch). Some of our reporters were doing the investigation and Dahr Jamail, an independent American journalist in Baghdad, arranged for many of the doctors and others involved with distribution to come meet us in Jordan.

Our group included both American and Iraqi parents who’d lost sons and daughters in the fighting. We also brought Ben Branzel of MoveOn and Hany Khalil of United for Peace and Justice in order to reignite their commitment to ending the occupation.

On New Year’s Eve, we held a vigil outside UN headquarters asking for an end to the occupation of Iraq, and it was broken up by the Jordanian police. New Year’s Day we went to the border at the narrow place where Jordan and Iraq are connected. [Police] tailed us the whole time. Turned away at the border where we were interviewing Iraqi truck drivers, we stopped to visit with some Bedouin shepherds. When we told them we were on a peace mission, we were surprised to find that they knew all about what was happening in Iraq from watching Al Jazeera.

While we were talking to the Bedouins, I could feel that a couple of people had fallen off of our group. Behind me on a rock I found Rosa and Fernando Suarez de Solar, [parents of a fallen soldier]. Rosa was crying. We were at the closest place that she would get to where her son had died.

We all got into a circle to share our grief and concern. Iraqis shared their stories and American parents shared theirs, each seeing the humanity in the other. Sunnis and Shiites told their stories. One Shiite Iman started wailing when he heard the story of a Sunni whose house had been broken into. It was a powerful time.

As we walked across the desert back to the bus chanting “Give Peace a Chance,” we looked up the long straight road back to Amman and there in the sky was a spectacular rainbow. Ben told us that the first time a rainbow appears in the Bible is when God makes a covenant with Moses promising the end of violence. That story united all of us.

The practical purpose of your trip was to supply medicines and supplies to Fallujan refugees in Baghdad. I’ve read that many who’ve gone back to Falluja choose to return to the refugee camp saying Falluja is no longer their home.

There is no international humanitarian aid in Iraq, so the only help Fallujan Sunni refugees were getting was from some local Shiite groups in Baghdad. That fact exposes the stupid lie spread by the administration that these people are so rooted in tribal and religious hatred that civil war would inevitably follow our departure.

Yes, Shiites and Sunnis have differences, but we’ve blown them all out of proportion. One day a Sunni mosque is blown up, and the next day a Shiite one. I’ve marched with them as they both say, “You will not divide us. We have divisions, but we’re Iraqi first, we’re Muslim first.” Shiite Iman and businessmen have taken Falluja’s Sunni refugees into their homes.

Do you believe Iraq’s elections can be a move toward sanity

Healthy human nature always moves toward that hope. People who have been living in horror for almost two years now hope for anything to bring change. But there’s been an increase in violence. There are those who will never stop fighting till they free their country from the occupiers.

Do the insurgents have a political vision, and if they don’t, who does?

The Iraqi insurgents are simply about freedom from the occupiers. The biggest vision is that of the winning slate of Shiite clerics who want to create religious law.

And the Kurds want authority over their own area.

Although we used the Kurds to bomb the Sunnis, and we took power from the Sunnis and gave it to the Shiites, I don’t believe civil war is inevitable. But we are increasing the odds of it with our strategies.

Before the invasion, Omar Zaida, son of the former Iraqi ambassador to Japan and head of UNDP in Baghdad, told me, “Saddam used the threat of civil war to control us. Now the Americans use all of Saddam’s tricks: Keep a man hungry… Convince people that without your control they will kill each other…” Omar always doubted that a civil war would happen, “We’re too integrated. We’ve been through too many wars.” He also felt that even if civil war did happen, it wouldn’t last long. Women would stop a civil war. In their religion, even in war you cannot kill a woman, a child, an older person or a tree. Any civil war would take a very different form.

You’re saying that though insurgent suicide bombers do kill women and children, in a civil war thingswould be different?

A lot of the insurgency is a response to the disrespect and violence against the Iraqi people. It’s their neo-fundamentalist response to our neo-con fundamentalist invasion.

Iraq is broken and a lot of people say we must stay until we fix it. Throughout history, back to Napoleon, military strategists have believed it takes 10 soldiers to pacify one insurgent. [Estimates are that] there are 200,000 insurgents, so it would take an army of 2 million to pacify them. Wouldn’t it be a wiser strategy to take away what they’re fighting against?

…By turning over security to Iraqis or to some sort of international force?

Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda tell us 9/11 was first and foremost in retaliation for our bases in Saudi Arabia—we also need to pull our bases out. The UN will come in when we end the occupation, not only by our military, but also by our corporations.

To contribute to aid for the displaced and the suffering in Iraq, contact codepinkalert.org.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org) and is the founder of mcnally: message&media, a consulting company for strategic communications. He last wrote for WLT in Aug. ’04 on Jacob Needleman and the American soul.

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