BAGHDAD: He first wants to “speak with the Iraqis who know the terrain”, says 40-year-old Ignacio Cano from Spain. “And of course also get a little sleep”.
Cano and 16 other activists of the international movement Human Shields have taken up positions in the “7 April” sewage treatment plant north of Baghdad.
These people from Spain, Italy, Morocco, Finland and Swed-en were the first to arrive in Iraq in the campaign to protect the country’s civil infrastructure, water and electricity plants and other key facilities from possible bombing.
They stumbled upon meagre quarters in a recreation room in the plant’s administrative building, set up 17 simple cots, a long table, a couple of chairs, a small television and the obligatory picture of President Saddam Hussein.
They plan to spend 12-hour shifts until the bombs start falling, protecting with their lives a facility that secures the drinking water for two million Baghdad residents and whose destruction they would consider a war crime.
“I am here”, said Dr. Marino Andolina, “to protect this installation. Without clean water many people will die”.
His message to US President George W. Bush is clear: “We are here to raise the price of a war for him.”
According to the 57-year-old doctor from the northern Italian town of Trieste, dead Iraqis and dead Arabs play no role for the American and British war strategists.
But if citizens from the “first world” are endangered, the “warmongers” might stop.
This is the calculation of the apparently fast growing movement devised a few months ago by former British marine Ken O’Keefe.
The composition of the first “crew” of Human Shields refutes the accusation that this is just a group of young hotheads. The sparse presence of young people among them are made up for by a couple of honoured veterans of all the student, peace and green movements of the second half of the 20th century.
The majority however are middle-aged representatives of the bourgeoisie.
Ignacio Cano teaches social psychology at the University of Cadiz, and others in the group are high school teachers, theologians and civil servants.
Do these people really want to die? Naturally it is a game of chance with danger, and no one really wants to look in the cards to see what will happen when fighting begins in earnest.—dpa