Kathy Kelly
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Kathy Kelly (b. 1953[1]) of Chicago, Illinois is an American peace activist, pacifist, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness.
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[edit] Voices in the Wilderness
Voices in the Wilderness was founded in 1996 and has campaigned to end economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people. It has organized over seventy delegations to Iraq in deliberate violation of UN economic sanctions and US law.
In the summer of 2005, Voices in the Wilderness was disbanded. During the same time, a new organization, Voices for Creative Nonviolence was formed.
[edit] VitW history
1995 - A small group of friends who were active in protesting the Gulf War in 1991 met in Chicago and founded Voices in the Wilderness in December 1995. Their intention was to use nonviolent civil disobedience to provoke a confrontation with the powers behind the war against Iraq.
[edit] History
Kelly has taught in the Chicago area community colleges and high schools since 1974. From 1980–1986 she taught at St. Ignatius College Prep (Chicago, IL). She is active with the Catholic Worker movement and since becoming a pacifist has refused payment of all federal income tax for 25 years.
She helped coordinate the Voices in the Wilderness campaign. She is currently co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
[edit] Iraq Involvement
During the first two weeks of the Gulf War, she was part of a peace encampment on the Iraq-Saudi border called the Gulf Peace Team. Following evacuation to Amman, Jordan, (February 4, 1991), team members stayed in the region for the next six months to help coordinate medical relief convoys and study teams.
[edit] Activism
In 1988 she was sentenced to one year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites. Kelly served nine months of the sentence in a Lexington, KY maximum security prison.
Kelly helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Haiti (summer of 1994), Bosnia (December, 1992, August, 1993) and Iraq (Gulf Peace Team, 1991). In April of 2002, she was among the first internationals to visit the Jenin camp in the West Bank. In the spring of 2004, she served three months at Pekin federal prison for crossing the line as part of an ongoing effort to close an army military combat training school at Fort Benning, GA.
[edit] Education
- B.A. Loyola University at Chicago 1974
- Masters in Religious Education, Chicago Theological Seminary; part of a consortium of schools which included the Jesuit School of Theology at Chicago where Kelly took courses each quarter
[edit] Quotes
"Earlier this year (2003), US military troops crossed the border between Iraq and Kuwait, invading Iraq, bringing death and destruction, on the theory that Iraq posed a threat to US people because it harbored weapons of mass destruction. To date, no WMD have been found. At Fort Benning, we crossed the line into an open military base, exercising our right to assemble peaceably for the redress of grievance. We were fully aware that the combat training school has engaged in massively destructive acts in the past. Public relations spokespeople for the school claim that the training of Latin American soldiers has now been reformed, teaching soldiers from other countries to observe the same regard for human rights and civil law that US Military Police observe. As achingly sad testimonies come in about the way that US Military Police treat 'suspect' Iraqi people, our responsibility to dramatize our challenge to the US Army School of the Americas remains quite strong.”
"War is not our baby." SOA protest, 2006
[edit] Bibliography, editing, and contributions
- Iraq Under Siege (Seven Seas Press, 2000)
- War and Peace in the Gulf (Cornerstone Press, 2001)
- Live from Palestine (Edited by Nancy Stohlman and Laurieann Aladin, 2003)
- Other Lands Have Dreams: from Baghdad to Pekin prison (Counterpunch Press, 2005)
