Peace Activists’ ‘Human Buffer’ Plan Frustrated by Iraqi Army : War opposition: ‘Sure, we failed,’ an American says. ‘But what we didn’t fail to do was to go there and try.’

One week before allied bombers began bombing Baghdad, 38-year-old Kathleen Kelly left her husband a one-line message on the answering machine at their Chicago apartment: “Bye,” she said. “Gone to Iraq.”

Andrew Jones, 39, was a bit more thoughtful about it the day he left Boston en route to Baghdad--and beyond--on Jan. 7. He remembers it was snowing at Logan International Airport that day.

“I was so scared, I remember half-hoping the airport would be snowed in and the flight canceled,” he recalled here Friday.

But Polly Preston, a 67-year-old veteran both of World War II and of recent anti-war protests in Britain, never had any doubts about setting herself up as a voluntary human shield in the Persian Gulf War.

“When I heard what they were planning, I said, ‘Gosh!’ I put in my passport, and I said, ‘I’m going.’ ”

For 10 days, Preston, Jones and Kelly were among 73 other hard-core peace activists from 15 nations who lived on the knife’s edge of the battlefield--the Kuwaiti village of Arar, where they deliberately placed themselves between two of the largest and deadliest land armies ever assembled.

They called themselves the Gulf Peace Team when they moved into their camp in mid-January to form a “human buffer” to try to stop a war that already was beginning to look inevitable. Then, on Sunday, the Iraqi government evacuated them. And the following day, the camp was bombed.

On Friday, the activists all assembled at the Ammon Hotel here, most having driven through the night from Baghdad. In a free-wheeling press conference--their first major appearance since the war began--they searched for ways to explain that, contrary to appearances, their mission had not been an unqualified failure.

“Sure, we failed,” said Jones, a documentary film producer and journalism professor at Boston’s Northeastern University. “We went there to stop that war, and we failed to stop that war.

“But what we didn’t fail to do was to go there and try.”

Polly Preston came to a similar conclusion. “I don’t feel it was for nothing,” said the gray-haired activist, who was wearing a ceramic dove pendant and lapel pin declaring, “No Gulf War.”

“One has to believe that these little things do help. Little seeds grow. I have to believe it.”

Perhaps more than anything, though, Friday’s appearance of those who had chosen to live close to death for the first 10 days of the war showed the width of the gap between the peace movement and popular sentiment back home--a gap that was much narrower two decades ago during another American war on foreign shores.

“We understand that war hysteria may predominate in a lot of countries,” Kathleen Kelly conceded during her statement to the reporters, who were more interested in the accounts of life inside besieged Baghdad than in hearing the activists’ opinions on war and peace.

“But that’s a short-lived reality. When people become aware of the suffering, the needless destruction, the high costs of the war, I don’t think they’re going to look back on this war with appeal or applause. They’ll look back with remorse and regret.”

Later, in an informal interview, Kelly again conceded how out-of-step she is with a nation where opinion polls indicate that more than 60% of all Americans support the U.S. role in leading the war on Iraq. But this isn’t the first time for her, she added.

Just over a year ago, Kelly was released from the maximum-security prison in Lexington, Ky., where she served a one-year term for planting corn on nuclear missile silos in Kansas City.

“There are 150 missile sites surrounding Kansas City, and I sat on top of five of them,” she recalled with pride, adding that she now plans to join her veteran peace-activist husband, Karl Meyer, in touring the United States in their homemade “Peacemobile,” a 9-by-12-foot house built atop a flat-bed truck.

Speaking of the peace movement in general, she said, “We have to find actions that are meaningful--something more than sitting in a police lockup for seven hours.”

It was largely in that spirit that the men and women of the Gulf Peace Team, ranging in age from 18 to 78 and including apolitical intellectuals such as Andrew Jones, decided to join in the desert protest. Jones admits that the act almost bordered on madness.

“On the 17th, we saw the planes that bombed Baghdad fly over us on their way,” he recalled. “At first, there were so many planes. Flying in twos all the time. One night, it scared us to death. They went 100 feet, right over our heads.

“After a while we got used to it . . . but when I first got there, I was really scared. I didn’t go there to die. I went there to live. . . . But I figured if they can wage war, I can wage peace.”

When asked where he was during the Vietnam-era peace movement, the Richmond, Va., native said: “I was throwing rocks like everybody else. But I’m not into demonstrations anymore. This wasn’t a demonstration. This was action.”

It was also a statement of racial protest for Jones.

“For me, as a black American and African American, I think it’s a tragedy that more black men and women are going to get killed in percentage numbers larger than anyone else in yet another dubious war,” he said, citing official U.S. figures showing that the numbers of blacks are proportionately higher among the U.S. troops in the Gulf than they are among the U.S. civilian population.

“We should be disproportionately represented in the war for peace, as well,” he said. “I don’t think we can sit back any longer and let black men and women go and die.”

Despite the enormous personal risk involved in moving into an exposed camp, without bomb shelters or gas masks, in a war zone, the Gulf Peace Team got virtually no press coverage throughout its 10-day mission.

All of the activists interviewed said they listened almost constantly to the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp. news bulletins, and they were shocked by the fact that their presence in the heart of the war zone was not mentioned.

So for each of them, Friday’s press conference in the Ammon Hotel ballroom was a way to reach their countrymen back home.

Jumsei Terasawa, a Japanese Buddhist monk with shaven head and golden robes, chanted a short prayer for peace before he made his statement to the array of international network cameras in front of him.

Calling the U.N.-sanctioned multinational effort to drive Iraq from occupied Kuwait an “insane, criminal war,” Terasawa said: “The president of America has no right to wage the war of aggression. . . . Through this massive destruction, we can never build the future new world order.”

The tone of other activists, such as Australian John Lynch, was more impartial. “I feel sorry for the Iraqis getting killed. I feel sorry for the United Nations forces getting killed, and I feel sorry for the people at home worrying about us and feeling sorry for us. We didn’t stop the war, but we’ve taken big strides for world peace. . . . “

In fact, most of the activists took pains Friday to distance themselves from the politics of the war.

“All I’m saying is, let’s save some lives,” Jones declared in his statement to the cameras. “This madness must stop. The shooting must stop. The talking must start.”

Speaking informally after the press conference, Jones chose to focus on the human side of the war--particularly the Iraqi people, who, he said, are in no mood to surrender to the huge force now opposing them.

“I’m not saying they’re right or they’re wrong,” Jones said. “I’m just saying they’re determined. The Iraqi people think they’re going to die. They don’t trust the situation at all.

“I’m saying these are human beings, and I think the Iraqis are very pessimistic. They feel like they’re surrounded, and they’re making a stand.”

Others spoke at length about civilian morale in Baghdad, where the activists spent the past four days after they were evacuated from the Arar camp. They confirmed dozens of other eyewitness accounts reaching Jordan that civilian damage and death are minimal in Baghdad, although they condemned what of it they did see. And most said the bombing had subsided in Baghdad during the 24-hour period before they left Thursday morning.

Throughout her stay both at the camp and in the Iraqi capital, Polly Preston, for example, insisted she was not afraid. Preston, who served with the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, says the seeds of her own activism were sown during World War II while she was stationed at an allied bomber base.

“If you start worrying overnight what’s coming through the roof, you can’t live,” she said.

“I was more afraid seeing that road (from Baghdad to Jordan) than in all of the bombing of Baghdad.”

Referring to the civilian wreckage of trucks, buses and cars hit by allied bombing and strafing runs on the strategic highway, she added: “In the old days, there were machine guns that might miss you. But these days, they have missiles that lock on. And here we were, a moving target.”

Although the group’s members seemed unanimously committed to peace, it was clear that they chose different roads to achieve it.

At one point during the press conference, the activists began shouting among themselves. At issue was their evacuation from Arar by Iraqi authorities, with one faction insisting that all of the activists wanted to stay at the camp despite the war and another asserting that some wanted to leave.

In the end, at least six staged a sit-in protest against the Iraqis, who had to physically carry them from their tents to the buses that Baghdad had sent to evacuate them.

Jones was among those who refused to take part in the sit-in. “I disagreed,” he said. “It’s like going to somebody’s house for dinner. You don’t say you want to spend the night.

“We were their guests, and they said it was time to go. And maybe it’s better we did.”

Indeed, the night after they pulled out of the 30 tents that were their homes for 10 days, someone--no one knows which side--bombed the camp, erasing it from the face of the desert.