Focus on peace at Albany International Women's Day rally

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Kathy Kelly is a woman who puts her anger to work for peace.

Yelling into a bullhorn to be heard amid the busy traffic around Townsend Park Saturday, Kelly implored a gathering of peace activists to persevere.

"We will rise because there is really no other solution," said Kelly, an international peace activist since the early 1980s, author and three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. "Our anger can be used to bring about an end to war and its abuses."

Kelly addressed a diverse gathering in the park — including Veterans for Peace, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, Grannies for Peace, Citizens Action Committee and others — that was billed as an International Women's Day Rally.

She was in Iraq in 1991 protesting the start of the first Gulf War and told the crowd one of the reasons she is so angry.

"There was this woman with these beautiful children killed during a bunker-buster bomb attack," Kelly, 61, said. "She was crying and the children looked so beautiful but they hardly had a scratch on them. The bomb was so powerful it killed them by imploding their internal organs."

Kelly said her experiences in Iraq were "very dramatic and educational for me. I saw soldiers asked to give up their lives so I asked myself what can we risk for peace?"

Kelly, who lives in her native Chicago, has risked a lot.

She has gone to Iraq 26 times, Afghanistan nine times, been to Bosnia and Haiti and remained in combat zones during the early days of both U.S.-Iraq wars. She has been arrested more than 60 times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates inside U.S. prisons.

In 1988, Kelly served nine months in a federal maximum security prison after she and others trespassed at a nuclear missile silo facility near Kansas City to plant corn there.

Trudy Quaif of Delmar came to hear Kelly and brought along her 10-year-old protest sign "Freezing for Peace."

"We can't be spending all this money on war when we have so many things here at home that need improvements," said Quaif, who for the past 11 years has stood for an hour every Monday with her sign at the Delmar Four-Corners. "Predator drones and war is not making us safer. Every time one of our bombs kills an innocent civilian another terrorist is born and we become less safe."

Kelly is one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

After a series of speeches, participants gathered at the nearby Citizen Action Office for a strategy meeting to plan an upcoming march.

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http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Focus-on-peace-at-Albany-International-Women-s-5299886.php#photo-5995488