Life and Death at the Daura Refinery

BAGHDAD (March 7th) -- The sun comes up sulfur yellow over the Daura refinery here in west Baghdad. The air quality is not too hot either. Fireballs that can be seen all the way downtown erupt from the stacks and the burn-off of toxic waste sears the eyes and smothers the lungs. Last night, three U.S. citizens plus a virtual international brigade of volunteers from South Africa, Great Britain, Slovinia, Cataluna, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan slept here under the roar and whistle of the stacks, waiting for George Bush to drop his bombs on this prime target that was severely blasted in the 1991 holocaust here, knocking a key fuel source off line for a full year.

On Sunday, March 2, the 100 or so Human Shields currently in Baghdad faxed the White House to inform Bush that we are now on site at the Daura refinery and at four other civilian infrastructure sites in Baghdad, all of them designated by the United Nations Development Program as human-directed installations, and to remind the U.S. president that by bombing this important facilities he would be endangering the lives of his own citizens as well as those of 34 other nations who have come to Iraq to interpose their bodies between the North American death machine and the people of this unfortunate land. We also sought to make it clear that aerial bombing of civilian sites is a violation of the Geneva convention and would make the U.S. Commander-in-Chief subject to international prosecution for war crimes. We are not hopeful that Bush will take our lives into account as his mad conflagration looms on the tarnished horizon but at least we tried to make it perfectly clear that murdering us will not go unpunished.

The Daura refinery is a little neighborhood unto itself. Muslim and Christian families live on either side of the guest house in which we are installed and sometimes invite us in for tea. Stray soccer balls occasionally bounce into the courtyard and laughing kids rush in to retrieve them. A wooly goat lives just across the street which is largely populated by refinery engineers. A child care center is a few hundred yards away with a primary school right next door. Each morning, I walk with the scrubbed, smiling children to class and they practice their English with me.

The other day, Faith, one of the U.S. volunteers, visited the school and the carefully tutored children were intoning the usual chant of "Down Down America!" when the teacher abruptly shushed them to insist that not all Americans were like Bush. I suppose this was a sort of tactical victory in seeking to unburden the name of the American people from the sins of their unelected president.

I write this article as six minders prowl through the guest house. To say that these burly men with Saddam mustacios and leather jackets are trying to control us in not an exaggeration. But as they told my friend Andre, an ebullient volunteer from Joâberg the other day, "You are very difficult to control."

At a mass meeting of all volunteers last Saturday in the ballroom of the ritzy Palestine Hotel, the chief of the minders, Dr. Al-Hasimi of the Peace and Solidarity Committee, ordered all potential Shields to immediately deploy to 60 government-selected sites or leave the country the next morning. The Human Shields, who have voluntarily set up camp at water treatment, food storage and power plants in addition to the refinery here, took umbrage at such ham-handed manipulation and once again, demanded that they be allowed to place their trainee corpses on line at hospitals, schools and archeological sites that the Iraqi government, in a supreme political blunder, has time and again denied them. The rebellion resulted in the overnight exodus of nearly 30 Shields who fled overland to Amman in protest at such coercion. Nonetheless, nearly 100 volunteers remained in Baghdad and utilized the moment to deploy to sites where they had already established a presence.