‘Human shields’ head for Iraq
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See the article in its original context from January 2003.
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"The potential for white Western body parts flying around with the Iraqi ones should make them think again about this imperialist oil war," organizer Ken Nichols, a former US marine in the 1991 Gulf War, told Reuters. His "We the People" organization will be sending off a first group of 50 human shields from the London mayor's City Hall building Saturday, part of a series of departures organizers say will involve hundreds, possibly thousands, of volunteers.
Nichols' planned human shield convoys are one of several such efforts around the world to mobilize activists in Iraq as a deterrent against military strikes on Baghdad.
In Bucharest, more than 100 Romanian diehard communists said Tuesday they would travel by bus to Iraq to act as human shields in case of a US attack.
Members of the tiny Romanian Workers Party, which took the mantle of ousted dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's defunct Communist party in 1995, said they would set off next month to support "the cause of the people."
The new human shield plans revive memories of the 1991 Gulf War when President Saddam Hussein forcibly held thousands of Western hostages after his invasion of Kuwait. Many were put near sensitive sites in a bid to stop attacks that proved futile, although there are not thought to have been any casualties among the Western hostages. Baghdad also used Iraqis, alongside some foreign volunteers, as shields in 1998 against US-British bombing.
