Hello ! Below is the sixth report of Andrea Schmidt, Iraq
Solidarity Project delegate, still in Baghdad.

Once a week, Andrea also gives interviews on
CKUT (90,3 fm), during the Off the Hour news program
(daily, 5-6pm). Every program can be downloaded in
mp3 format, including Andrea's most recent interview,
done live, last Friday, during the picket at the US
Consulate. For more info on this, see last part of this
message.

Hello !

below is the sixth report of Andrea Schmidt, Iraq
Solidarity Project delegate, still in Baghdad.

Once a week, Andrea also gives interviews on
CKUT (90,3 fm), during the Off the Hour news program
(daily, 5-6pm). Every program can be downloaded in
mp3 format, including Andrea's most recent interview,
done live, last Friday, during the picket at the US
Consulate. For more info on this, see last part of this
message.

In solidarity,

Raymond Legault
OCVC (Objection de conscience / Voices of Conscience)
and Iraq Solidarity Project

=============

Our Borders Are Blast Walls
by Andrea Schmidt (report # 6)

April 19 2004
Occupied Baghdad

As the US pursues its War of Terror in Iraq, the kidnappings of foreigners
by the muqawama (resistance fighters) has grabbed the media spotlight. In
response to the kidnappings, many international NGOs and humanitarian aid
organizations have moved their foreign staff to Amman. Foreign journalists
who haven’t already left the country are nearly paralyzed, reporting from
their seats in front of TV sets in hotel compounds ‘secured’ by blast
walls, armed guards and the right connections. This isn’t a huge change
for the staffs of some news channels ­ for security reasons, CNN hasn’t
let its foreign journalists out on the streets of Baghdad after 4 PM for
the past year of occupation. But for many reporters, both independent
and mainstream, the current immobility is insanely frustrating.

Those of us who came here as anti-war or anti-occupation activists intent
on bearing witness to the injustices perpetrated by occupation authorities
aren't managing a whole lot better. I haven't even really been out walking
on the streets of Baghdad for a week now, and have submitted, in spite of
my better sense of moral judgment, to being driven between 'safe' houses
where sympathetic Iraqi and international friends have extended their
hospitality.

The concrete blast walls that surround NGO, humanitarian aid
organizations, ministry buildings, political party headquarters, the CPA
and hotels frequented by foreigners in Iraq have always struck me as
obscene. They are obscene because of the way in which they demarcate the
lives that are considered worthy of 'protection' from those which are not,
in the context of this occupation in which one of the most common
complaints heard from ordinary Iraqis is the almost total lack of security
that for themselves and their families.

The blast walls are also obscene because of the hypocrisy of NGOs and
humanitarian organizations that they make manifest in concrete. They are
barriers that prevent Iraq’s ‘multitudes’ -- the poorest people, the
unemployed families whose women and children panhandle in the streets,
people without the mandatory identification or the right contacts ­ from
entering the very organizations and institutions that purport to be
present to ‘help’ them. The blast walls send a message: “We will help you,
but only at a distance, and only at a level of risk that WE choose and can
control.