Jo Wilding Brings Reality of War to Small Town America
Corporate war profiteers amass fortunes while children in Iraq freeze and starve
By Brenda Norrell
U.N. Observer and International Report
“Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. "Ummi" (my mother) one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about 10 is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah.”
Report from Wilding in Fallujah.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. --- Jo Wilding performed as a clown to bring smiles to the faces of children and was shot at by occupation forces while rescuing wounded Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah. There were times when she arrived with a smile, medicine or transportation in time to save a child’s life. Other times she was too late.
Describing the death of a 2-month old girl from cold in a makeshift refugee camp in Iraq, Wilding said Halliburton, Bechtel and SSA Marine are amassing fortunes as contractors for reconstruction efforts, yet there was not enough money to keep a baby warm last winter.
“All of this money spent on the occupation and they could not supply enough money to keep a baby warm through the winter”, Wilding told a public gathering at a church community room in downtown Flagstaff.
Wilding said U.S. contractors are skimming off the money for rebuilding and very little of the work is being done, as raw sewage forms in pools and the wounded suffer without medicines.
In Fallujah, while she was rescuing the wounded left in the streets by occupation forces, Wilding found an old man, unarmed and shot in the back and killed by the U.S. military as he attempted to take wounded to the hospital.
In another city, U.S. soldiers shot and killed one another in a house raid, and then in an act of revenge over their error, they made Iraqi lay on the ground and shot them in the back.
The murder of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military was one of the topics of the presentation by Wilding in Flagstaff, as she neared the conclusion of a tour of the United States. Wilding, a 29-year-old activist and from Bristol, U.K, was joined by San Francisco based documentary maker David Martinez.
Martinez and Wilding said the U.S. military attack on the entire city of Fallujah violated international law. It was carried out in retaliation for the murder for four American men.
Martinez said the four men killed were described in the U.S. as “civilian contractors,” but they were in fact hired mercenaries working for the company Blackwater Security.
“They send them in to do the dirty work,” Martinez said.
Martinez’ film footage shows children in Fallujah shot by the military, a young man bleeding from the head and an elderly grandmother being carried.
Because the military continued to shoot at the ambulances in Fallujah, Wilding and Martinez were asked to intervene as foreign nationals and rescue the wounded in the back of a flatbed truck through “sniper alley.”
While rescuing wounded Iraqi, they yelled, “We are an international medical team,” and were able to rescue some of the wounded. Others died, including one woman in childbirth.
“We were the only non-Iraqis in the non-American held Fallujah,” Martinez said.
While attempting to rescue one woman giving birth in a home without running water or electricity, Wilding said the ambulance, already riddled with bullets, was shot at by the U.S. military. Wilding and friends never reached the woman.
Wilding asked the Pentagon for a response as to why the ambulance she was riding in was shot.
“The Pentagon said I was lying and it didn’t happen.”
No one knows how many died in Fallujah. “So many died at home,” Wilding said. One of the wounded in the streets was killed by a U.S. soldier.
“An American soldier came right up and slit his throat.”
“This brutality was widespread.”
When Wilding was negotiating for women and children to pass through the U.S. checkpoint at Fallujah to safety, one of the U.S. soldier’s said, “We want to keep them all in there so we can kill them all easily.”
During her stays in Iraq, Wilding performed as a volunteer clown with Circus2 Iraq to bring joy to the children. In one of the refugee camps, she asked the children what they wanted; what they wanted were blankets.
Unable to deliver all the water, food and blankets needed, she performed as a clown in the circus. “It would transform the people.”
After watching the circus, the Iraqi children, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, stopped drawing bombs and started drawing clowns. The circus was the ultimate icebreaker.
“They stopped having nightmares. It had the power to transform a place, transform a people.”
In one of the refugee camps, she was able to get medical attention for a little boy with a leg so badly burned that she could smell the rotting flesh. But when she later returned, she saw the camp was in mourning for another child. A two-month old baby girl who died from the cold.
Wilding said U.S. contractors are skimming money from their lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq, while children freeze, starve and die in need of simple antibiotics.
“This is the reason the people in Iraq are so angry,” Wilding said.
Martinez said when he first arrived in Iraq, especially in the south, he found the people tolerant of the occupation and encouraging the removal of Saddam Hussein because of his longstanding human rights abuses as a dictator. But, today in Iraq, the people want Americans to leave.
Wilding said thousands of U.S. soldiers are returning to the states with missing limbs and this fact is being kept secret from the American public.
In Iraq, there is another tragedy taking place, the loss of women and girls in society.
Sixty to eighty percent of the people of Iraq have lost their jobs. Women and girls have disappeared into their homes, afraid to go outside to school or work because of the murders, kidnappings and rapes.
Wilding said there were a few glimmers of hope, like in Fallujah when the people came together to support one another. Iraqi, too, found hope in the worldwide protests against the war.
Wilding said the protests, like the one in London where one million people marched against the war, have brought hope to Iraqis. Among those was one man at the bedside of his son who had been shot in the head and suffered, without medication or painkillers.
“People in Iraq saw the protests, knew people cared and they felt less alone.”
Wilding urged more protests, the ousting of President Bush and forgiveness of Iraq’s international debt so the nation can rebuild.
“We need to have a lot more outrage in the streets. People need to be out in the streets demonstrating.”
Wilding warned that whether George Bush or John Kerry is elected president, American soldiers will continue to be sent to Iraq. Regardless of who is elected president, she said measures are already in place to reinstate the U.S. draft, for both men and women, without exemptions for college.
Wilding and Martinez’ tour in the United States took them through cities on the West Coast and the Southwest, including a barbecue spot in Denver, a school in Taos, N.M. and the church community center in Flagstaff. Their last stop in the U.S. will be in California.
In Flagstaff, Wilding explained that she went to Iraq first to protest economic sanctions and returned during the bombing and invasion of Iraq to document the human rights abuses and civilian casualties.
“I was definitely always on the side of the people of Iraq.”
Brenda Norrell
http://bsnorrell.tripod.com
other links:
http://www.brendanorrell.blogspot.com
Brenda Norrell is a staff writer for Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com
and a Contributing Editor for the U.N. OBSERVER & International Report.
Jo wrote the following, from Canada:
May 29th
Country or Colony
“Welcome to Canada”, said the sign at the border. “Not quite as bad as the USA.”
OK, it didn't but the Canadians who looked after us in Vancouver said it ought to, given how much of their country's economy and foreign policy had become bound up with theirs next door. Though Canada has troops in Afghanistan, it declined to send any to Iraq but the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is pressing the federal government for closer economic integration with the US.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the US, forcing among other things large scale restructuring of Canada's social programmes, not unlike the “structural adjustment policies” foisted on indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank. It gave corporations the right to sue governments for anything which interfered with their profits, even for legislation to protect citizens from harmful chemicals or for public opposition to the building of a factory in a given area.
Negotiations continue over the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to tighten economic ties but there are also plans in process to co-operate with the US on the National Missile Defence system, to develop a North American identity document giving business people greater mobility, unite the two customs systems, increase US access to Canadian energy and water resources and align Canada more closely with the US on refugee and immigration rules, 'homeland security' and regulatory standards, for example on drugs and agricultural chemicals and hormones.
Perhaps it's not surprising that a coalition of groups fighting for indigenous and refugee rights has organised Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day, to coincide with the July 1st Canada Day celebrations. The oldest and the newest residents of the territory are resisting war, poverty, environmental degradation, exclusion of refugees, defending their lands.
It is a basic right, Harsha said, for refugees to stay in a safe country, not a matter of debate for the people of the receiving country over whether there is enough room, especially when that country's government and foreign policy make such sizeable contributions to the poverty, warfare, dictatorships and devastation which spawn the refugees in the first place.
She's been working for some time with the Native Youth Movement. In the interior of British Columbia there's been an ongoing blockade for the last two years, about thirty people defending their land. It's not just the big summit protests and the forest defence camps that are going on, Harsha said: native people have taken up arms several times in recent history to hang onto their land.
The event in Vancouver was a benefit both for Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day and for Spartacus Books, an independent radical bookshop which provided sofas and space to read the books that were on sale so that lack of money wouldn't limit people's access to information. Unfortunately it burnt down a while ago and because they always existed on a shoe string there was no insurance.
We had less trouble getting into Canada than the first time when the immigration officer decided we had to pull over, explain how we all knew each other and have the car searched. Having emptied the contents of all our bags out into the boot of the car the items they picked out were Jen's notebook and a leaflet about the protests in Cancun in September 2003 against the World Trade Organisation.
“Whose is this?” the officer asked, wielding the offending book like a smoking gun. As soon as Jen claimed it he removed the elastic band and flicked through. “Would you care to explain some of this information?” He pointed to the word 'Falluja', reading it aloud like it was the verbal equivalent of dirty underwear. David, Andy and I looked at the ceiling, the floor, our fingernails, hummed nonchalantly.
“I've never been to Iraq”, Jen said, perfectly truthfully, the only one of us who hadn't. Apparently the visas and stamps in all our passports had escaped either their attention or their concern.
“I don't doubt that”, the officer said. “And what is PDX?”
“The code for Portland airport”, Jen said.
“Are you aware that it's also an explosive?”
“What?” Our collective disbelief evidently convinced him that we weren't entering Canada to blow anything up, Falluja and PDX notwithstanding, and finally we were let in. This time we didn't wait to be asked, babbled excitedly about our Memorial Day weekend shopping trip and they waved us straight through, which was just as well because we were late leaving Olympia and barely had time for Vancouver's rush hour traffic.
The Leaky Heaven Circus performed earlier in the day, a mixture of performers and street-involved youth, meeting at a pre-advertised location to move to the secret street performance venue. It helps boost the kids' self esteem, gives them a focus other than drugs and alcohol and inspires some of them to move on. Sara said it went really well but there was a worry over one of the girls who had been drinking before the show.
“She was meant to be the base for some of the balances so I wanted to check with her that she thought she'd be OK and remind her if she didn't feel safe she could just say 'Down' and have them get off her. She said she'd be fine and she seemed OK and she was fine in the balances, but there was this bit where she was supposed to recite these beautiful lines from Kahlil Gibran and she forgot them so instead she said “Ooh, harder. I'm going to bite your ass.” It was all over before everyone could even work out if it was really happening and they were onto the next scene.
A young Ethiopian woman called Beth played records, singing into the microphone along with Erykah Badu in the Afro-Canadian café while Dave told us about his trip to Nicaragua in 1988 with his church youth group, the US's conflict zone of a couple of decades ago. If you got caught up in any conflict or if you were a native and a dissident, it was dangerous, he said, if you happened to live where the contras were, but they were marginalised and kept to rural areas so the youth group was fairly safe in the capital Managua.
We stayed with Fabienne, a Belgian music student and juggler extraordinaire with a marimba, a kind of huge xylophone, in her hallway. She and Rick and some other people bought land, a while back, on an island off Vancouver and grow more food than they've got people to feed. She speaks Chinese and used to spend a lot of time in a small town on a plateau where the population of about 3,000 were brutalised by the Chinese government. A minority, they were not allowed a school which taught in their own language and the kids were compelled to learn Chinese.
UNESCO stepped in to protect them and built an airport on the plateau, which draws three million people a year through the town. All its water sources are now polluted as an after effect of the tourism. She last went in 1999, despairing in the end that anything was ever going to improve.
“I wonder sometimes why I'm here studying music, practising scales when there's so much that needs doing in the world”, she said, but there's always plenty that needs doing where you are.
Jo Wilding http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
PLEASE READ:
For an example of the intelligence level of some of the pro-war people in the United States and their brutally obscene minds, contrasted with Jo Wilding who responds as a Lady, please visit Jo’s blog and note the entry for Saturday, June 12, 2004
“There's loads to write about the tour in the USA and all the people I've met, but not much time to get it all onto a computer. Meanwhile I thought I'd share this:” http://www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com
Please also see:
Iraq: More on the Refugees from Falluja, by Jo Wilding http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=1621&blz=1
IRAQ - SEND IN THE CLOWNS - WHEN A SMILE CAN BREAK A THOUSAND CHAINS, by Davey J.C. Garland
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1672&blz=1
For those who want to find out more of how you can support Circus2Iraq, then go to http://www.circus2iraq.org/ & http://www.circus2iraq.org/pics.asp for wonderful “be there” pictures.
Please also see some other selections from Jo Wilding's Diary in our War of the Shadows Section plus several entries in our International Law section
Corporate war profiteers amass fortunes while children in Iraq freeze and starve
By Brenda Norrell
U.N. Observer and International Report
“Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. "Ummi" (my mother) one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about 10 is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Fallujah.”
Report from Wilding in Fallujah.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. --- Jo Wilding performed as a clown to bring smiles to the faces of children and was shot at by occupation forces while rescuing wounded Iraqis in the streets of Fallujah. There were times when she arrived with a smile, medicine or transportation in time to save a child’s life. Other times she was too late.
Describing the death of a 2-month old girl from cold in a makeshift refugee camp in Iraq, Wilding said Halliburton, Bechtel and SSA Marine are amassing fortunes as contractors for reconstruction efforts, yet there was not enough money to keep a baby warm last winter.
“All of this money spent on the occupation and they could not supply enough money to keep a baby warm through the winter”, Wilding told a public gathering at a church community room in downtown Flagstaff.
Wilding said U.S. contractors are skimming off the money for rebuilding and very little of the work is being done, as raw sewage forms in pools and the wounded suffer without medicines.
In Fallujah, while she was rescuing the wounded left in the streets by occupation forces, Wilding found an old man, unarmed and shot in the back and killed by the U.S. military as he attempted to take wounded to the hospital.
In another city, U.S. soldiers shot and killed one another in a house raid, and then in an act of revenge over their error, they made Iraqi lay on the ground and shot them in the back.
The murder of Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military was one of the topics of the presentation by Wilding in Flagstaff, as she neared the conclusion of a tour of the United States. Wilding, a 29-year-old activist and from Bristol, U.K, was joined by San Francisco based documentary maker David Martinez.
Martinez and Wilding said the U.S. military attack on the entire city of Fallujah violated international law. It was carried out in retaliation for the murder for four American men.
Martinez said the four men killed were described in the U.S. as “civilian contractors,” but they were in fact hired mercenaries working for the company Blackwater Security.
“They send them in to do the dirty work,” Martinez said.
Martinez’ film footage shows children in Fallujah shot by the military, a young man bleeding from the head and an elderly grandmother being carried.
Because the military continued to shoot at the ambulances in Fallujah, Wilding and Martinez were asked to intervene as foreign nationals and rescue the wounded in the back of a flatbed truck through “sniper alley.”
While rescuing wounded Iraqi, they yelled, “We are an international medical team,” and were able to rescue some of the wounded. Others died, including one woman in childbirth.
“We were the only non-Iraqis in the non-American held Fallujah,” Martinez said.
While attempting to rescue one woman giving birth in a home without running water or electricity, Wilding said the ambulance, already riddled with bullets, was shot at by the U.S. military. Wilding and friends never reached the woman.
Wilding asked the Pentagon for a response as to why the ambulance she was riding in was shot.
“The Pentagon said I was lying and it didn’t happen.”
No one knows how many died in Fallujah. “So many died at home,” Wilding said. One of the wounded in the streets was killed by a U.S. soldier.
“An American soldier came right up and slit his throat.”
“This brutality was widespread.”
When Wilding was negotiating for women and children to pass through the U.S. checkpoint at Fallujah to safety, one of the U.S. soldier’s said, “We want to keep them all in there so we can kill them all easily.”
During her stays in Iraq, Wilding performed as a volunteer clown with Circus2 Iraq to bring joy to the children. In one of the refugee camps, she asked the children what they wanted; what they wanted were blankets.
Unable to deliver all the water, food and blankets needed, she performed as a clown in the circus. “It would transform the people.”
After watching the circus, the Iraqi children, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, stopped drawing bombs and started drawing clowns. The circus was the ultimate icebreaker.
“They stopped having nightmares. It had the power to transform a place, transform a people.”
In one of the refugee camps, she was able to get medical attention for a little boy with a leg so badly burned that she could smell the rotting flesh. But when she later returned, she saw the camp was in mourning for another child. A two-month old baby girl who died from the cold.
Wilding said U.S. contractors are skimming money from their lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq, while children freeze, starve and die in need of simple antibiotics.
“This is the reason the people in Iraq are so angry,” Wilding said.
Martinez said when he first arrived in Iraq, especially in the south, he found the people tolerant of the occupation and encouraging the removal of Saddam Hussein because of his longstanding human rights abuses as a dictator. But, today in Iraq, the people want Americans to leave.
Wilding said thousands of U.S. soldiers are returning to the states with missing limbs and this fact is being kept secret from the American public.
In Iraq, there is another tragedy taking place, the loss of women and girls in society.
Sixty to eighty percent of the people of Iraq have lost their jobs. Women and girls have disappeared into their homes, afraid to go outside to school or work because of the murders, kidnappings and rapes.
Wilding said there were a few glimmers of hope, like in Fallujah when the people came together to support one another. Iraqi, too, found hope in the worldwide protests against the war.
Wilding said the protests, like the one in London where one million people marched against the war, have brought hope to Iraqis. Among those was one man at the bedside of his son who had been shot in the head and suffered, without medication or painkillers.
“People in Iraq saw the protests, knew people cared and they felt less alone.”
Wilding urged more protests, the ousting of President Bush and forgiveness of Iraq’s international debt so the nation can rebuild.
“We need to have a lot more outrage in the streets. People need to be out in the streets demonstrating.”
Wilding warned that whether George Bush or John Kerry is elected president, American soldiers will continue to be sent to Iraq. Regardless of who is elected president, she said measures are already in place to reinstate the U.S. draft, for both men and women, without exemptions for college.
Wilding and Martinez’ tour in the United States took them through cities on the West Coast and the Southwest, including a barbecue spot in Denver, a school in Taos, N.M. and the church community center in Flagstaff. Their last stop in the U.S. will be in California.
In Flagstaff, Wilding explained that she went to Iraq first to protest economic sanctions and returned during the bombing and invasion of Iraq to document the human rights abuses and civilian casualties.
“I was definitely always on the side of the people of Iraq.”
Brenda Norrell
http://bsnorrell.tripod.com
other links:
http://www.brendanorrell.blogspot.com
Brenda Norrell is a staff writer for Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com
and a Contributing Editor for the U.N. OBSERVER & International Report.
Jo wrote the following, from Canada:
May 29th
Country or Colony
“Welcome to Canada”, said the sign at the border. “Not quite as bad as the USA.”
OK, it didn't but the Canadians who looked after us in Vancouver said it ought to, given how much of their country's economy and foreign policy had become bound up with theirs next door. Though Canada has troops in Afghanistan, it declined to send any to Iraq but the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is pressing the federal government for closer economic integration with the US.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the US, forcing among other things large scale restructuring of Canada's social programmes, not unlike the “structural adjustment policies” foisted on indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank. It gave corporations the right to sue governments for anything which interfered with their profits, even for legislation to protect citizens from harmful chemicals or for public opposition to the building of a factory in a given area.
Negotiations continue over the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to tighten economic ties but there are also plans in process to co-operate with the US on the National Missile Defence system, to develop a North American identity document giving business people greater mobility, unite the two customs systems, increase US access to Canadian energy and water resources and align Canada more closely with the US on refugee and immigration rules, 'homeland security' and regulatory standards, for example on drugs and agricultural chemicals and hormones.
Perhaps it's not surprising that a coalition of groups fighting for indigenous and refugee rights has organised Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day, to coincide with the July 1st Canada Day celebrations. The oldest and the newest residents of the territory are resisting war, poverty, environmental degradation, exclusion of refugees, defending their lands.
It is a basic right, Harsha said, for refugees to stay in a safe country, not a matter of debate for the people of the receiving country over whether there is enough room, especially when that country's government and foreign policy make such sizeable contributions to the poverty, warfare, dictatorships and devastation which spawn the refugees in the first place.
She's been working for some time with the Native Youth Movement. In the interior of British Columbia there's been an ongoing blockade for the last two years, about thirty people defending their land. It's not just the big summit protests and the forest defence camps that are going on, Harsha said: native people have taken up arms several times in recent history to hang onto their land.
The event in Vancouver was a benefit both for Land, Freedom and Decolonisation Day and for Spartacus Books, an independent radical bookshop which provided sofas and space to read the books that were on sale so that lack of money wouldn't limit people's access to information. Unfortunately it burnt down a while ago and because they always existed on a shoe string there was no insurance.
We had less trouble getting into Canada than the first time when the immigration officer decided we had to pull over, explain how we all knew each other and have the car searched. Having emptied the contents of all our bags out into the boot of the car the items they picked out were Jen's notebook and a leaflet about the protests in Cancun in September 2003 against the World Trade Organisation.
“Whose is this?” the officer asked, wielding the offending book like a smoking gun. As soon as Jen claimed it he removed the elastic band and flicked through. “Would you care to explain some of this information?” He pointed to the word 'Falluja', reading it aloud like it was the verbal equivalent of dirty underwear. David, Andy and I looked at the ceiling, the floor, our fingernails, hummed nonchalantly.
“I've never been to Iraq”, Jen said, perfectly truthfully, the only one of us who hadn't. Apparently the visas and stamps in all our passports had escaped either their attention or their concern.
“I don't doubt that”, the officer said. “And what is PDX?”
“The code for Portland airport”, Jen said.
“Are you aware that it's also an explosive?”
“What?” Our collective disbelief evidently convinced him that we weren't entering Canada to blow anything up, Falluja and PDX notwithstanding, and finally we were let in. This time we didn't wait to be asked, babbled excitedly about our Memorial Day weekend shopping trip and they waved us straight through, which was just as well because we were late leaving Olympia and barely had time for Vancouver's rush hour traffic.
The Leaky Heaven Circus performed earlier in the day, a mixture of performers and street-involved youth, meeting at a pre-advertised location to move to the secret street performance venue. It helps boost the kids' self esteem, gives them a focus other than drugs and alcohol and inspires some of them to move on. Sara said it went really well but there was a worry over one of the girls who had been drinking before the show.
“She was meant to be the base for some of the balances so I wanted to check with her that she thought she'd be OK and remind her if she didn't feel safe she could just say 'Down' and have them get off her. She said she'd be fine and she seemed OK and she was fine in the balances, but there was this bit where she was supposed to recite these beautiful lines from Kahlil Gibran and she forgot them so instead she said “Ooh, harder. I'm going to bite your ass.” It was all over before everyone could even work out if it was really happening and they were onto the next scene.
A young Ethiopian woman called Beth played records, singing into the microphone along with Erykah Badu in the Afro-Canadian café while Dave told us about his trip to Nicaragua in 1988 with his church youth group, the US's conflict zone of a couple of decades ago. If you got caught up in any conflict or if you were a native and a dissident, it was dangerous, he said, if you happened to live where the contras were, but they were marginalised and kept to rural areas so the youth group was fairly safe in the capital Managua.
We stayed with Fabienne, a Belgian music student and juggler extraordinaire with a marimba, a kind of huge xylophone, in her hallway. She and Rick and some other people bought land, a while back, on an island off Vancouver and grow more food than they've got people to feed. She speaks Chinese and used to spend a lot of time in a small town on a plateau where the population of about 3,000 were brutalised by the Chinese government. A minority, they were not allowed a school which taught in their own language and the kids were compelled to learn Chinese.
UNESCO stepped in to protect them and built an airport on the plateau, which draws three million people a year through the town. All its water sources are now polluted as an after effect of the tourism. She last went in 1999, despairing in the end that anything was ever going to improve.
“I wonder sometimes why I'm here studying music, practising scales when there's so much that needs doing in the world”, she said, but there's always plenty that needs doing where you are.
Jo Wilding http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk
PLEASE READ:
For an example of the intelligence level of some of the pro-war people in the United States and their brutally obscene minds, contrasted with Jo Wilding who responds as a Lady, please visit Jo’s blog and note the entry for Saturday, June 12, 2004
“There's loads to write about the tour in the USA and all the people I've met, but not much time to get it all onto a computer. Meanwhile I thought I'd share this:” http://www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com
Please also see:
Iraq: More on the Refugees from Falluja, by Jo Wilding http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=1621&blz=1
IRAQ - SEND IN THE CLOWNS - WHEN A SMILE CAN BREAK A THOUSAND CHAINS, by Davey J.C. Garland
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1672&blz=1
For those who want to find out more of how you can support Circus2Iraq, then go to http://www.circus2iraq.org/ & http://www.circus2iraq.org/pics.asp for wonderful “be there” pictures.
Please also see some other selections from Jo Wilding's Diary in our War of the Shadows Section plus several entries in our International Law section