Benjamin Joffe-Walt, a recent Oberlin grad and participant in the Human Shields project, has returned home to Toronto and announced that he may visit Oberlin this weekend to speak about his involvement with the highest-profile anti-war group in the world today.
His previously scheduled trip to Oberlin was called into question as of Thursday night, however, due to concerns that American authorities would seek to prosecute him as a war criminal if he steps foot on American soil.
“I’ve heard a minimum 12 years in prison,” Joffe-Walt said, “and some senators have been talking about sending American Human Shields to Guantanamo. It puts me in a bit of a quandary about what I’m going to do.”
Joffe-Walt’s return to Oberlin would make him the first American participant in the Human Shields project to re-enter the United States.
His slide presentation, tentatively scheduled for 4:30 p.m. on Saturday in King 306, would be the first public speaking event by a Human Shields representative in America.
Besides a visit to Oberlin, Joffe-Walt had scheduled interviews with CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and another presentation at Oberlin High School.
Whether he returns to America or not, Joffe-Walt will speak on WOBC on Sunday, March 9, from 5 to 6 p.m.
The Human Shields project, headed by a former U.S. Marine who participated in Desert Storm, seeks to halt the looming American military campaign by placing Western citizens in civilian areas in Iraq.
Some members of the U.S. congress have appealed to the Bush administration to bring American participants in the Human Shields project to court.
“I strongly believe efforts to impede a potential military operation against Iraq should be strongly dealt with,” U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wrote Tuesday in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft. Simply traveling to Iraq is illegal for U.S. citizens.
What the U.S. government will actually do, however, is far from certain. A spokesman for the Department of Defense told the Review that Human Shields participants who return before the war will not face prosecution.
Joffe-Walt’s return to America was, in part, originally intended to help spread awareness about the group and their efforts to stop the war.
“If there were 500 Americans in Baghdad, it would be very difficult for George Bush to bomb it,” he said.
He is also attempting to convince celebrities to join the movement, such as Nelson Mandela and Madonna.
Joffe-Walt described Iraq — a country few Americans have set foot in since the Gulf War — as a suffering country, and the Iraqi people as saddled by the double burden of American sanctions and repression instilled by their own government.
“If you didn’t know anything about Iraq you would still walk through the country and it would be very evident that something is wrong, that something is very, very weird here,” he said.
“One in five kids in Iraq is malnourished. Everywhere you go in Iraq, kids who can speak English come up to you and say, ‘medicine, medicine,’ or ‘aspirin,’” Joffe-Walt continued. “Prescription drugs are not allowed into Iraq because of the sanctions.”
Since freedom of expression is essentially nonexistent in Iraq, Joffe-Walt explained, he could not directly ask Iraqi citizens what they thought about their government. But from speaking to Iraqi exiles, he decided that the truth is more complex than many in the West would believe.
“It seems like most Iraqis don’t support Saddam Hussein, but it seems like they think the American critique of him is completely illegitimate, and immoral,” Joffe-Walt said.
“They see most of what is flourishing in Iraq as a result of Saddam’s regime — and that means universal health care, good education, et cetera. That said, the method by which that happened involved intense repression. And what that means in material terms is high rates of torture, disappearance of activists, high rates of exiles, that sort of thing.”
“For example,” Joffe-Walt continued, “a journalist friend of mine was in a police department doing an interview. At one point they got up to go to the bathroom and accidentally walked into a torture chamber.”
Having been to Baghdad, Joffe-Walt said he gained a new appreciation of how the Western media oversimplifies the issues that surround the looming war.
“The international press in Baghdad lives in a bubble,” he said. “They have the only fancy hotel in Iraq. Everyone they want to interview, they bring there. So they’d bring us up to the roof and interview us for 30 seconds, asking some loaded question like ‘are you prepared to die?’ or, ‘don’t you think Saddam is an evil dictator?’ And I’m not going to go take the time to explain why I can’t answer that question.”
Joffe-Walt explained that he went to Iraq to help get a movement onto its feet, rather than produce immediate results.
“When I went to Iraq, I did not believe I was stopping a war,” he said, “but I did believe I was helping a movement in the world to think critically about it.
“My hope was to inspire ten other people to do it. My only real goal was to get enough media coverage about myself in my home town that ten other people would read about me and think, ‘that’s an important thing, I can do that too,’” he said.
“Spring break is coming up. If you asked an Oberlin student: if you had to go to Iraq, potentially fail a semester, but possibly have a very direct impact in stopping a war, would you do it? I think a lot of people would.”
In the meantime, Joffe-Walt expressed dismay at the reaction of those who would have him incarcerated.
“We’re living in a really scary time, when someone expressing their dissent at the violence of their own government is taken as unpatriotic, rather than a public exercise of democracy,” he said.