Rachel Corrie killed by Israeli Tank
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Slain activist left tranquil Olympia for violent Middle
East
seattlepi.nwsource.com
By PAUL QUEARY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Sunday, March 16, 2003 · Last updated 1:55 p.m. PT
OLYMPIA, Wash. -- In a matter of months, Rachel Corrie
went from the orderly peace movement of this small liberal
city to a deadly world of gunfire, bulldozers and violent
political conflict.
Corrie, 23, a student at The Evergreen State College in
Olympia, died Sunday in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah while
trying to stop a bulldozer from tearing down a Palestinian
physician's home. She fell in front of the machine, which
ran over her and then backed up, witnesses said.
Israeli military spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal called her
death an accident. State Department spokesman Lou
Fintor said the U.S. government had asked Israeli officials
for a full investigation.
In an e-mail earlier this month, Corrie described a Feb. 14
confrontation with another Israeli bulldozer in which she
referred to herself and other activists as "internationals."
"The internationals stood in the path of the bulldozer and
were physically pushed with the shovel backwards, taking
shelter in a house," Corrie wrote in the e-mail, distributed
in a March 3 news release by the International Solidarity
Movement.
"The bulldozer then proceeded on its course, demolishing
one side of the house with the internationals inside," she
wrote.
Just a few months before her death, Corrie had been
organizing events as an activist in Olympia's peace
movement and at Evergreen, a small campus know for its
devotion to liberal causes.
Through a local group called Olympians for Peace in the
Middle East, she joined the International Solidarity
Movement, a Palestinian-led group that uses nonviolent
methods to challenge Israeli occupation. Among their
methods is standing in front of the bulldozers Israel sends
into the area nearly every day to destroy buildings near the
Gaza-Egypt border.
Other protesters who were with Corrie in Gaza on Sunday
said she was wearing a bright colored jacket when the
bulldozer hit her.
"Rachel was alone in front of the house as we were trying to
get them to stop," said Greg Schnabel, 28, of Chicago. "She
waved for the bulldozer to stop and waved. She fell down
and the bulldozer kept going. We yelled, 'Stop, stop,' and
the bulldozer didn't stop at all."
A tearful Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, described his
daughter Sunday as "dedicated to everybody."
"We've tried to bring up our children to have a sense of
community, a sense of community that everybody in the
world belonged to," he said from his home in Charlotte,
N.C. "Rachel believed that - with her life, now."
Corrie was already a committed peace activist when she
arrived at Evergreen, said Larry Mosqueda, one of Corrie's
professors and a fellow activist.
"She was concerned about human rights and dignity," he
said. "That's why she was there."
Clashes of ideas are commonplace in Olympia. Peace
activists waved signs on the city's streets long before a war
with Iraq loomed, and Evergreen's students are well-known
for their compassion for the plight of the oppressed in
faraway lands.
But most never hear the sound of live gunfire, or smell
plaster dust from a demolished house, as Corrie did before
she died Sunday.
The move from organizer to front-line opposition in a war
zone was a switch for Corrie, whom friends said was not
usually inclined to the overt acts of civil disobedience that
characterized such events as the World Trade Organization
protests in Seattle in 1999.
"As long as I've known her she's always been very energetic
and very focused about social justice," said Phan Nguyen,
28, a friend and fellow activist who has made several similar
trips to the West Bank. "It seemed natural that she would
do something like this."
In her e-mailed dispatch from Rafah, Corrie painted a
picture of the perilous life of a human shield, recounting a
Feb. 14 confrontation with the Israelis.
"We can only imagine what it is like for Palestinians living
here, most of them already once-or-twice refugees already,
for whom this is not a nightmare," Corrie wrote, "but a
continuous reality from which international privilege
cannot protect them, and from which they have no
economic means to escape."
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On the Net:
International Solidarity Movement:
palsolidarity.org
Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace:
omjp.org
Evergreen State College: evergreen.edu |
