IRAQ: Protesters say they hope to force the US to exclude targets it bombed in 1991. Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports from Baghdad
Entering a makeshift dormitory that he intends to make his home for the next several weeks, Ube Evans, a stagehand from Britain, smiled triumphantly as he snared a cot near a window and a refrigerator. But it was only after he walked outside to gaze at his surroundings that he pronounced himself satisfied with the accommodation.
An enormous electricity generating plant, with four grimy smokestacks soaring into the sky, was no more than 50 yards away. "This is close enough," he said with a nod of contentment. "This is just perfect."
Evans and 14 other anti-war protesters from around the world have decided to hunker down in a conference room at the Baghdad South Power Plant with the hope that, if the Bush administration launches a war aimed at toppling President Saddam Hussein, their presence will dissuade the US military from bombing the facility.
The activists are among more than 200 foreigners, including some from the US, who have arrived here recently with encouragement from President Saddam's government to serve as "human shields" to protect power plants, water treatment facilities, hospitals and other installations critical to the civilian population.
Those who have volunteered to put their bodies on the line range from wide-eyed college students to limping retirees, Norwegians to South Africans, atheists to head scarf-wearing Muslims, all of whom say they passionately oppose a US military invasion of Iraq.
Many travelled aboard two double-decker buses from London that lumbered through continental Europe, Turkey and Syria before pulling up to their staging area here, a small Baghdad hotel bubbling with the guitar-strumming bonhomie of a hippie commune and the energy of a political campaign headquarters.
"We're putting the American government on notice," said Ken Nichols O'Keefe, a former marine who served in the 1991 Gulf War but has since renounced his US citizenship and co-ordinates the human-shield campaign. "If they bomb these sites, which have absolutely no military justification, it won't be collateral damage. It will be murder."
After Saddam's army captured Kuwait in August 1990, Iraqi soldiers rounded up more than 2,000 foreigners, many of them oil workers, and forced them to live for months in Iraqi military bases and industrial plants. They were released a month before the war began, after Saddam was subjected to intense international pressure.
Although anti-war activists have sought to act as shields in other conflicts, most recently in the West Bank during Israeli attacks, organisers here called the size and scope of this effort unprecedented. While they acknowledged that their presence probably would not lead the Bush administration to back down, they said they hoped to force the Pentagon to exclude a host of targets, including the Baghdad South Power Plant, which the US military bombed in 1991.
The presence of human shields has been eagerly promoted by Saddam's government, which views them as part of a strategy to improve its battlefield odds by attempting to force US commanders to alter their bombing plans around Baghdad.
Unlike journalists and official visitors, whose entry visas can take weeks to process, many activists received theirs in under 48 hours and in some cases immediately on arrival at the border. The government is paying to house them in several small tourist hotels and is setting up free international telephone lines and e-mail connections so they can promote their activities.
It has provided the activists with a list of sites where they can stay. The organisers spent the past week visiting sites and eliminating those deemed too close to military installations.
US military officials have insisted they have no plans to target civilian installations, but they have not specifically commented on whether they would bomb power plants. Even though the shields are volunteers this time, US officials have warned Iraqi officials that their support for placement of civilians around possible targets would be considered a war crime.
"Deploying human shields is not a military strategy," the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, said last week. "It's murder, a violation of the laws of armed conflict and a crime against humanity."
It is not entirely clear whether the Iraqi government will allow the shields to stay where they want to during a war. Some diplomats have speculated that the government could conclude that the volunteers are too much trouble and force them to leave the country.
The manager of the Baghdad South plant hinted that he might try to shepherd the shields into a bomb shelter. And some activists have expressed concern that they could be forcibly relocated to other sites of greater military or political value.
At the plant, which was hit by six bombs in 1991, the director, Mr Ihsan Obeidi, said he expected the presence of the shields to spare the facility from another airstrike. "These are good people who are helping innocent Iraqi people," he said.
Other workers seemed less optimistic. Mr Sabah Hassan, an engineer, said if bombs started falling he would not hesitate to flee. "I will go home," he said. "The foreign volunteers can stay."