Kathy Kelly

The Right to Seek Safety

Through a WhatsApp message from Portugal, my friend Eunice Neves asked to share a moment with me. She was with an Afghan couple, Frishta and Mohammad, and their baby son,…

To End All Wars, Close All Bases

A Gazan Ph.D. candidate studying in India, Mohammad Abunahel steadily refines and updates a map on the World BEYOND War website, dedicating a portion of every day to continue researching…

Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood

Those who have an insatiable appetite for war seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind. The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped…

Decry the Merchants of Death

Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts. Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of…

 No Starvation for Oil

As President Joe Biden embarks on his trip to the Middle East, those of us back home must acknowledge that a “sensitive” trip would visit the victims rather than the…

 ‘Thank You for Hearing Our Afghan Pain’

People in the United States must recognize the suffering their country continues inflicting in Afghanistan. During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts…

Abandoning Yemen?

Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group…

To Counter Terror, Abolish War

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the U.S. Mission…

Art Against Drones

At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City,  visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated…

Hunting in Yemen

“It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen. April 10,…

Blood for Oil

Amid the ongoing horror, it’s important to find ways to atone for war crimes —including reparations. Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I…

Reversal

With survival at stake, can weapon makers change course? Today, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, should be a day for quiet introspection. I recall a summer…

Battleground States 

The time for manufacturing of weapons of war has passed as a viable industry for our nation, despite the way some of our political leadership clings to economies of the…

Our Disaster

Why the United States bears responsibility for Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. An entire generation of Yemeni children has suffered the traumas of war, many of them orphaned, maimed, malnourished, or displaced.…

Beating Swords to Plowshares

“Nuclear weapons will not go away by themselves” says Plowshares activist Steve Kelly, SJ. Inscribed on a wall across from the United Nations in New York City are ancient words…

Trident Is the Crime

  On October 24, following a three-day trial in Brunswick, GA, seven Catholic Workers who acted to disarm a nuclear submarine base were convicted on three felony counts and one…

Death, Misery and Bloodshed in Yemen

“Strike with Creativity” proclaims Raytheon. Writing about his visit to the world’s largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon’s stall:…

The Wounds of War in Afghanistan

Recovering from a broken hip, peace activist Kathy Kelly reflects on her experiences with people disabled and traumatized by war. Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains…

A Morning in Afghanistan

Amidst political posturing, aerial terrorism and street bombings, Afghan citizens pursue their daily work toward peace. On a very warm September morning in Kabul, several dozen men, women, and children…

Remnants of War

Intense fighting and hideous attacks battered Afghans throughout their country last week as negotiators in Qatar weighed the benefits and costs of  a peace agreement that might stop the bloodshed.…

 Judging U.S. War Crimes

Chelsea Manning, who bravely exposed atrocities committed by the U.S. military, is again imprisoned in a U.S. jail. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2019, she was incarcerated in the…

 Can We Divest from Weapons Dealers?

Impoverished people living in numerous countries today would stand a far better chance of survival, and risk far less trauma, if weapon manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics,…

A Shift: Repudiating War on Yemen

The horror of the Yemen War is changing minds at last Twenty years ago, a small delegation organized by Voices in the Wilderness lived in Baghdad while U.S. cruise missiles…

Seeing Yemen from Jeju

Several days ago, I joined an unusual skype call originated by young South Korean founders of “The Hope School.” Located on Jeju Island, the school aims to build a supportive…

God Only Knows

“If they would just confirm to us that my brother is alive, if they would just let us see him, that’s all we want. But we can’t get anyone to…

On Purpose, In Kabul

Writing this week for the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman called a U.S. Government report on the war in Afghanistan “a chronicle of futility.” "The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction" report…

Hungering for Nuclear Disarmament

In the state of Georgia’s Glynn County Detention Center, four activists await trial stemming from their nonviolent action, on April 4, 2018, at the Naval Submarine Base, Kings Bay. In…

A Mile in Their Shoes

  One of several murals being created by Kabul's "ArtLords" painters to welcome the Helmand to Kabul peace walkers. This past Friday in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, Hazara girls joined young…

Digging Deeper

Here in Kabul in early June, outside the home of several Afghan Peace Volunteers, a large drilling machine is parked on what was once a lovely garden. To this now muddy…

Scourging Yemen

  On May 10, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia informed the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres that Saudi Air Defenses intercepted two Houthi ballistic missiles launched…

A Treacherous Crossing

  On January 23rd an overcrowded smuggling boat capsized off the coast of Aden in Southern Yemen. Smugglers packed 152 passengers from Somalia and Ethiopia in the boat and then,…

41 Hearts Beating in Guantanamo

  January 11, 2018 marked the 16th year that Guantanamo prison has exclusively imprisoned Muslim men, subjecting many of them to torture and arbitrary detention. About thirty people gathered in…

Remaining Peaceful Was Their Choice

  People living now in Yemen’s third largest city, Ta’iz, have endured unimaginable circumstances for the past three years. Civilians fear to go outside lest they be shot by a…

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