Kenneth O'Keefe - Human Shield Action To Iraq

Human Shield Action To Iraq

In December 2002, O'Keefe started the human shield action to Iraq group. Intended to "make it politically impossible for them to bomb" Iraq by placing western civilians as "shields" at non-military locations, about 75 activists traveled over land from London to Bahgdad in two double-decker buses. Critics of the human shields argued that their mission would only protect Saddam Hussein. O'Keefe argued the "people of Iraq" would suffer the most from a war and publicly acknowledged Hussein as a "violent dictator". At its height about 300 human shields were in Baghdad, but due to challenges internally, with the Iraqi dictatorship and O'Keefe's deportation from Iraq, the numbers dwindled.

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