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From
Independent Weekly (local newspaper) 12/3/03
More from Miami
B Y D A V E L I P P M A N
On the balmy mid-afternoon of Nov. 19 I was in Miami, sitting on a corner,
mostly minding my own business, enjoying a mango smoothie near a street
blockaded by police officers. I was there to cover the protests against the
misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, which should properly be
called the Free Exploitation of America Regime, or FEAR.
I had arrived in the area a day earlier to cover the feeder march of Root
Cause, a coalition of South Florida workers, primarily immigrants, who,
among other things, are pursuing a boycott of Taco Bell for not raising
wages in three generations. I'd parked my pickup, full of the sorts of
unidentifiable items associated with life on the road, in a parking deck a
block from my hotel, in anticipation of checking in several hours later when
the Chapel Hill contingent arrived. My smoothie idyll, which was unfolding
on the same corner as the parking deck, came to an abrupt end as I looked up
to see my truck jauntily careening down the street on two wheels, kindly
assisted by a tow truck.
Neatly and carefully depositing my cup in a trash can, I sauntered over
uncasually to query the officers on the scene. I now saw why they had
blocked the street--my truck was suspected of harboring a bomb. This
intelligence was received from no less an authority than the FB of I.
Over the next two days of efforts to retrieve my vehicle, the bomb story
was downgraded to suspicious package and finally to suspicious vehicle. I
had turned out not to be a bomb-carrying journalist after all. Imagine my
relief. My joy turned to despair, if not anger--OK, anger--when the car was
returned to me with both door windows smashed along with the padlocks on the
camper top and all my possessions thoroughly if not carefully mixed. My
files, so meticulously organized and placed in boxes, were, in a word,
defiled.
Since my computer had been in the truck all this time, I was unable to
file stories with my news service. This was minor suffering compared to that
of my colleagues who were shot with rubber bullets and fraudulently
arrested. Still, valuable lessons can be learned. If you plan to be in the
vicinity of a demonstration against a creeping fascist organization
masquerading as a democracy, get a normal-looking car. With no windows.
Better yet, leave trade policy, war and other such arcana to the experts.
They know what they're doing, along with what you're doing. Or might want to
be doing. After you find out what they're doing.
'She wanted to do
right'
B Y P A T R I C K O ' N E I L L
As he talked, Craig Corrie sometimes flashed an uneasy smile, the kind of
misplaced smile people often use as a defense mechanism when they're trying
to keep from crying. Craig and Cindy Corrie have done a lot of crying during
the last eight months.
On March 16, their youngest child, Rachel, 23, was killed in Rafah, Gaza,
as she stood in protest in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was preparing
to demolish the home of a Palestinian family. The bulldozer kept coming and
crushed Rachel.
After Rachel's death, Craig quit his insurance job in Charlotte, and he
and his wife have traveled around the country to speak about their daughter,
and to continue her work for a just peace in the Middle East. The Corries
were at United Church of Chapel Hill recently to speak at a conference
titled, "Bridging the Divide: Towards a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine."
In the immediate aftermath of Rachel's death, it was the Corries' third
child, son Chris, who kept things together enough to contact the U.S. State
Department and make arrangements to get Rachel's body returned to the U.S.
"The loss is overwhelming," Craig Corrie said. "Rachel's gone, so there's
nothing I can do to bring back Rachel. We had that loss, but luckily for us
and luckily for Rachel, her life was taken working on something very
important something important to her, now important to us.
"She was trying to save the home of a doctor, his wife and his three
children."
The Corries left Charlotte to move back to their home state of
Washington. In the days immediately following Rachel's death, the Corries
were overwhelmed with support and requests for interviews. "Somebody gave
out Cindy's AOL account," Craig said. "That'll only take a thousand e-mails,
so it was blown in the first hour or so. We got 7,000 e-mails right away."
In a press release, Amnesty International U.S.A. "condemned the killing
of Rachel Corrie and called for an independent investigation of her death."
The international human rights organization also renewed a call for a
suspension of U.S. transfers to Israel of military equipment, including the
U.S.-made bulldozers that "have been used to commit human rights abuses."
Amnesty International has consistently condemned violations by all
parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and called on all sides to take
action to end the killing and wounding of civilians.
Rachel Corrie was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a
nonviolent resistance group that works with Palestinians to resist Israeli
occupation. According to Amnesty International, the Israeli army has
demolished more than 3,000 Palestinian homes in the last two years, as well
as damaging large areas of agricultural land, public and private properties,
and water and electricity infrastructure in urban and rural areas.
The last eight months have been a blur for the Corries. Much of what they
have done has been "without a whole lot of forethought," says Craig Corrie.
"So far, we really haven't had much time to think about what to do." At the
conference, Cindy Corrie read aloud from an essay Rachel wrote about growing
up in Olympia, Wash., near the estuary at the mouth of Perry Creek, which
flows into Puget Sound. Rachel wrote about hiding in the rushes and being
completely invisible.
"This is where I came from; tunnels through rushes," Rachel wrote, " ...
in the middle of the estuary at the mouth of Perry Creek ... I came from
Perry Creek, and I would have liked to stay forever in the rushes but I
couldn't. I look at this place now, and I just want to do right by it."
Reading her daughter's writings now, Cindy Corrie says she sees
connections. "In all of her writing and in all of her work, everything that
I see tells me that when Rachel went to Palestine what she wanted to do was
to do right by the Palestinian people," Cindy said. "I know that she
believed by doing that she would also be doing right by all of us here in
the U.S. and by the Israeli people as well. She believed in connections and
bridging."
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